10 Movies Doomed From The Start

A bloated budget, as the past year's blockbusters can so brutally attest, can kill your film regardless of its actual quality. There comes a point where it doesn't matter how good or bad it is, if the cost of breaking even is just too high, then that's the end of it. 

Also being bad doesn't help. Enter Mars Needs Moms, and its budget of $150 million.

Now, in 2011, making that money back would be an uphill battle all on its own. Maybe if the film was more than the forgettable puff of nothing that it was, it could've cleared it. The budget for Disney's Tangled just a year prior was almost twice the budget for Mars Needs Moms at $260 Million, and it cleared that handily. 

But that's a Disney Princess movie, so comparing Mars Needs Moms to it feels unfair. This was a completely new idea, playing with Zemekis' favorite toy: full mocap animation. And that one-two punch was likely what truly did this movie in. By 2011, audiences were thoroughly sick of this style of animation from Zemekis, it was too expensive, and the animation quality was just not evolving fast enough for their liking. 

Mars Needs Moms simply had too many fires to put out during production, and not enough creativity and charm to make up the difference upon release.