10 Movies That Ruined Their Studios

Directed by Peter Israelson, comedy sports drama Side Out came along in 1990, when the excesses of the '80s were slowing down and sports movies were broadly dividing into two categories: family fun-capades (The Mighty Ducks, Cool Runnings) and hard-hitting dramas (Any Given Sunday). Side Out, a film about a beach volleyball competition – which feels like writer David Thoreau saw the volleyball scene in Top Gun and thought “there’s a movie!” – had all but missed its niche.

Producing the thing was former Walt Disney executives James L. Stewart and Rich Irvine’s Aurora Productions, which had enjoyed one initial success with 1982's The Secret of NIMH, before struggling to make ends meet on subsequent productions. It seems obvious now, but a $6 million budget for a beach volleyball film was probably not the way to go, especially as the production shelled out for professional players like Randy Stoklos and Sinjin Smith, without the foresight to see that very few moviegoers would know who these people were.

Side Out took only $450k and was the last film Aurora Productions ever made. Although a monumental loss, this wasn’t the be-all and end-all flop, but it was the flop that broke the camel’s back – or, the Aurora’s back. Do production companies have backs?