10 Box Office Hits That Everybody Expected To Be Huge Flops

4. The Passion Of The Christ

If Mel Gibson's infamous anti-Semitic rant is anything to go by, the problems he encountered whilst trying to get The Passion Of The Christ funded were largely due to the dominance of the Jews in Hollywood. A more likely explanation for the studio's reluctance to invest in the film is that a film shot with Aramaic dialogue is a hard sell. Having pumped around $10 million of his own money into the project, it was understandable that industry insiders and pundits were expecting The Passion Of The Christ to flop. But Mel Gibson did a shrewd thing - in addition to putting a review embargo on the film, he also screened it to Pope John Paul II, thus guaranteeing a religious stamp of approval before the film came out. $611 million later and Gibson surely felt completely vindicated - even if the critics largely slammed the film as little more than an exercise in theological torture porn.