10 Movies That Massively Over-Performed At The Box Office
4. American Sniper
It may not be Clint Eastwood's best movie from either side of the camera by any means, but American Sniper is by far the screen legend's most lucrative effort. And by quite some distance. Prior to the release of the 2015 biographical effort, the biggest financial success of Eastwood's career was the $270m-grossing Gran Torino. American Sniper earned over double that amount.
Bolstered by Bradley Cooper's magnetic central performance and the worst fake baby in the history of cinema, the movie manages the deft blend of character study and intense war picture without descending into the trap of 'hoo-rah' hagiography that blights many similar entries in the genre and earned six Academy Award nominations as a result, including Best Picture and Best Actor .
Typically, not many Oscar-baiting prestige movies tend to make a massive dent at the box office, but American Sniper opened to a mammoth $89.3m in the United States and beat out the blockbuster competition to become the biggest movie of the year domestically. As well as becoming the highest-grossing war movie in history, American Sniper's global tally of $547.4m was almost as much as the $620.4m earned by the rest of the year's Best Picture nominees combined.