10 Signs An Upcoming Film Is Going To Bomb HARD

If all else fails, trust the handy CinemaScore - a graded rating calculated by surveying paying customers who see the movie on its opening weekend.

Usually a day or two before the weekend's box office figures are revealed, the CinemaScore will be announced, and while an "A+" rating practically guarantees a film's box office success, once you start getting into "C" and below, the outlook gets decidedly bleaker.

Those few films with the dubious distinction of an "F" rating are basically dead-on-arrival where box office is concerned, with some more notable examples being Steven Soderbergh's 2002 Solaris remake, the Lindsay Lohan thriller I Know Who Killed Me, The Box, Killing Them Softly, and mother!

These ratings aren't an indictment of a film's actual quality at all, but simply that they've failed to connect with mainstream audiences, and typically suggest that the movie has probably been mis-marketed to audiences.

Though the CinemaScore isn't quite an exact science, it is nevertheless an extremely reliable predictor for a film's commercial prospects, and for those keeping tabs on a movie just as it's being released, will normally forecast a bomb in the making.