10 Major Blockbusters You Knew Were Doomed Before Release

4. Mars Needs Moms (2011)

Mars Needs Moms became the biggest box office bomb in history when it was released in March 2011 and tanked spectacularly, resulting in one of the biggest embarrassments in the history of Walt Disney Pictures. A movie about aliens kidnapping a child's mother was always going to be a tough sell to family audiences, and negative word-of-mouth seemed to have Mars Needs Moms doomed long before it hit theaters. Robert Zemeckis' decade-long obsession with performance capture was admirable, if a little misguided. As one of the most talented filmmakers of his generation it would have been much better to see the director tackle more live-action projects than direct and produce a number of features that could never truly escape the uncanny valley. The marketing for Mars Needs Moms often made it out to be visually spectacular, but also made it look a little creepy when it came to the human characters, while trailers made the movie to look like a generic family comedy full of light-hearted pop music and poor attempts at humor. Audiences stayed away from the movie in droves, and it could only muster a $6.9m domestic debut despite playing in over 3100 theaters, which was nothing short of a disaster but not exactly a shock. With a budget of $150m, Mars Needs Moms earned a catastrophic $39m worldwide that resulted in a huge financial loss and marked the death-knell for ImageMovers Digital.