10 Recent Box Office Bombs EVERYONE Saw Coming
These recent 2024 and 2025 movies were all destined to flop at the box office.
Hollywood has certainly been in one hell of a precarious state for the last few years, with the pandemic putting a seemingly irreversible dent in box office receipts, and audiences becoming used to just waiting to stream most films at home.
As such, it's harder than ever for movies to break out and enjoy massive success theatrically, especially if they're not part of an established IP. And even then, it's never a sure thing.
While films sometimes end up flopping unexpectedly, box office bombs can more often be seen coming a mile off, as the pre-release sentiment suggests the studio is about to take a huge bath totalling dozens of millions of dollars.
And that's absolutely true of these 10 movies, each of which marked themselves as a commercial flop months - perhaps even years - before they finally landed in cinemas.
Maybe it's the contentious source material, alienating premise, the studio's poor marketing, or the general lack of audience interest in the weeks leading up to release, but it wasn't remotely surprising that all of these movies tanked commercially, no matter how good some of them actually were...
10. Better Man
There are few business decisions in recent Hollywood history more unhinged than scraping together $110 million to fund a Robbie Williams biopic where he's depicted as an anthropomorphic chimpanzee via cutting-edge, ultimately Oscar-nominated VFX.
Given that Williams isn't remotely well-known in the U.S. and biopics have generally struggled commercially in recent years, it goes without saying that producing a mega-budget dramatisation of his life, and one with such a bizarre, mainstream-alienating conceit, was doomed to flop.
For though Better Man received rave reviews from many prominent critics, it ended up grossing just $20.3 million globally - not even 20% of its budget.
That's a disastrous figure any way you slice it, and yet it was wholly predictable given the combination of tricky concept and massive production spend.
At the very least, Better Man will have a long shelf life as a cult curio that's held up as one of the boldest and most creative musician biopics ever made, but don't expect anyone to take a wild swing on a biopic like this any time soon.