10 Reasons The Dark Tower Bombed

9. The Atrocious Marketing Campaign

Though not every highly-anticipated blockbuster needs a litany of trailers dropping 9 months before release, it was a bizarre decision not to release the first official trailer until just three months ahead of the film hitting cinemas.

It didn't leave a huge amount of time to mount a marketing campaign, and while Sony and Columbia absolutely could've spent money on a "marketing blitz" in the weeks before its release, the film's advertising presence was oddly muted around release day, such that many online didn't even realise it was out.

And if all that wasn't bad enough, Variety's aforementioned report stated that co-financiers Sony and MRC both had to sign off on every aspect of the film's marketing, an unconventional agreement which one source referred to as a case of "too many cooks in the kitchen".

How a movie is marketed is typically more important to studios than the actual quality of the movie itself, and they totally dropped the ball here.