10 Major Blockbusters You Knew Were Doomed Before Release

8. Stealth (2005)

A high-concept blockbuster about a fighter jet powered by artificial intelligence that gains increased self-awareness when it gets struck by lightning sounds inherently stupid. Which is because it is. A lazy mash-up of Top Gun and 2001 directed by journeyman hack Rob Cohen, Stealth unsurprisingly tanked at the box office. Jessica Biel, Josh Lucas and Jamie Foxx play the cardboard cut-out lead characters that can be boiled down to 'cocky hotshot', 'tomboy' and 'laid-back cool guy' archetypes, with Foxx taking the tried-and-tested route of winning an Academy Award and then immediately starring in an awful studio movie. It was almost a guarantee that this movie would bomb upon viewing the first trailer, which treated the laughable concept with po-faced seriousness and awful dialogue. To the surprise of almost nobody, Stealth flopped hard and could only open in fourth place at the domestic box office with a paltry $13.2m. Backed by overwhelmingly negative reviews, audiences stayed away from the movie and it earned just $76.9m against the $135m production budget, resulting in one of the biggest box office disasters in history that ended up costing Columbia Pictures almost $100m.