10 Famous Films That Failed To Turn A Profit Thanks To Hollywood Accounting

When it was released back in 1994, Forrest Gump ranked as the fourth highest grossing film in history with a global box office tally of $677.9 million against a production budget of $55 million. But when Paramount totted up all its expenses it turned out the movie was purportedly $62 million in the red with the studio citing star Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis’ huge salaries, promotion costs and distribution fees as the reason it’d yet to turn a profit.

This meant that Winston Groom, the writer whose book Forrest Gump was based on, got mightily shortchanged. Although he did receive a few hundred thousand dollars for his trouble, he didn’t see any of the 3% net profits he was entitled to because – according to Paramount – the movie’s net profits were non-existent.

Paramount’s scheming backfired though when Groom wrote a sequel called Gump and Co. and initially refused to sell them the rights based after the supposed commercial flop that was Forrest Gump stating, “I cannot, in good conscience, allow money to be wasted on a failure.” Which is basically a polite way of saying ‘f*ck you’.

Groom eventually caved and sold the sequel rights to Paramount for an undisclosed seven figure sum but he still got the last laugh as the sequel’s been rotting in development hell since the early noughties.