10 Movies That Should Never Have Bombed At The Box Office (But Totally Did)
8. Ali
For decades now, the biographical genre has usually done gangbusters at the box office. The recent examples of Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman demonstrate how much bank a biopic can make. So, it makes it incredibly surprising to see that a movie that starred one of the world's biggest box office stars playing one of the greatest boxers of all-time wound up being a box office bomb.
Ali reportedly had a budget exceeding $110 million, but only ended up grossing approximately $87 million worldwide. A devastatingly low gross considering the talent involved. Just to demonstrate how poor that was in 2001, A Beautiful Mind, another biographical drama released in the same year, wound up grossing over $300 million worldwide.
It's tough to point to where the disconnect was to stop audiences from coming to see Ali, an Oscar nominated movie directed by Michael Mann. Maybe it was the 2 hour 37 minute run time or maybe people just wanted Will Smith to do an action movie, either way it'll probably go down as one of life's mysteries.