10 Infamous Sci-Fi Movie Disasters That Cost Obscene Money
It probably would have been more cost-effective just going into space for real.
Suspension of disbelief is one of the main reasons why sci-fi has always been one of the most popular genres in the movie industry. Not everybody likes to kick back and relax to a powerful and emotional drama, and being transported to faraway planets and advanced civilizations is one of the easiest way to switch of your brain and enjoy a movie.
When good sci-fi is done right it can result in some of the greatest movies ever made, but on the flip-side of that coin if bad sci-fi is made terribly, it can give us some of the worst. The stakes always seem to be higher with the genre given the increased costs that come with bringing futuristic worlds to life, meaning that when a sci-fi movie bombs it will often bomb a lot harder than your standard action or thriller fare.
Plenty of great entries in the genre have failed to gain much traction with audiences, but there are also more than a few terrible ones that fully deserved to sink without a trace, whether they wasted a great concept and cast or were just flat-out painful to sit through.
10. Ender's Game
Ender's Game was hoping to launch a new family-friendly sci-fi franchise, but in the end the movie's $125m take at the box office wasn't even enough to cover the budget.
Despite an ensemble cast loaded with both rising young stars and veteran character actors, that even included a welcome return to the genre for Harrison Ford, there just wasn't much of an audience for the futuristic adventure. Of course, it didn't help that there were widespread calls to boycott the movie given original author Orson Scott Card's personal beliefs, but even though reviews were generally solid Ender's Game still sank without a trace.
Sci-fi might be one of cinema's most popular genres, but it's also one of the trickiest to get right, and there just wasn't anything about Ender's Game that made it stand out among the pack of similarly-themed projects that were either set in outer space or based on a popular book series.