10 Major Blockbusters You Knew Were Doomed Before Release

2. John Carter (2012)

An adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough's seminal sci-fi had been in the works for years, with names including Robert Rodriguez and Jon Favreau attached at various points before the rights returned to Disney with Finding Nemo and Wall-E director Andrew Stanton set to make his live-action debut. Unfortunately, despite being an entertainingly old-fashioned adventure armed with cutting-edge CGI, John Carter became one of the biggest bombs in box office history. As soon as the movie entered production, many were predicting that the project would be a financial disaster. An unproven live-action director handed a $250m budget to make an epic sci-fi based on a story first written in 1917 that required incredibly complex effects work was a huge gamble. During production, and possibly in response to the financial catastrophe Mars Needs Moms, allusions to the red planet were dropped from the title in favor of the painfully generic 'John Carter', with rumours that the movie needed to earn at least $600m simply to break even placing crushing expectations on the project. John Carter could only open in second place at the domestic box office with just over $30m, and closed with just $73m in the States. Overseas, the movie did much better and earned $211m (almost 75% of the total gross) but the worldwide takings of $284.1m saw a financial write-down of over $100m and Disney publicly acknowledge the hit they had taken with the project. A visually stunning, massively ambitious project that will no doubt increase its cult following over the years, the sad fact remains that John Carter was always likely to be a box office bomb.