10 Movies That Ruined Their Studios

It should go without saying that the film industry is built on hard cash. Pretty much every film that hits cinemas is a product and an investment, designed to produce returns for financiers. But sometimes the studios making these films put too many of their eggs in one basket and come a cropper. 

There is no surefire way of predicting what audiences, critics, or distributors will go for, after all, and every movie is to some extent a gamble. Even with an ironclad script, big-name stars, and an auteur director, major movies can fail spectacularly. And doubly so when they don't have any of these.

Over the years, studios have ploughed cash into films on a bad bet and suffered the dire consequences. Just look at where the supposedly revolutionary animations of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Titan AE ended up, at the hundreds of crappy features Nicolas Cage had to make to stay solvent after Bangkok Dangerous, or at how many production companies Francis Ford Coppola has sunk.

Massive budgets, iffy subject matter, and vanity projects gone wild: these are 10 movies that ruined their studios. 

Boasting the honours of being the first photorealistic CG feature film and also the most expensive video game adaptation (at the time), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within follows Aki Ross and Doctor Sid (Ming Na-Wen and Donald Sutherland) in their attempt to free a post-apocalyptic Earth from deadly alien creatures, the Phantoms, while battling warmonger General Hein (James Woods). And though this ought to have been big news, not nearly enough people went to see it to justify the $137 million price tag.

The Spirits Within took only $85 million at the box office, making it a catastrophe for its financiers and studios. But of the two studios that backed the project – Columbia and Square - one of them was a major player in the market, not easily sunk by a single movie, and the other, uhh, wasn’t. No prizes for guessing which.

Unfortunately, Square Pictures was not merely a film studio but the filmmaking arm of the video game developer for the Final Fantasy series. It reported unsustainable losses and closed its doors the year of The Spirits Within’s release. Square went on to be partially revived in 2003, when a merger created Square Enix, but the original studio, and the man behind it – Hironobu Sakaguchi – were gone.