20 Biggest Summer Box Office Bombs Of All Time

Budget: $115 million (marketing: $42 million)

Box office: $77.6 million

Loss: $79.4 million

The first time John Woo and Nicolas Cage teamed up the result was Face/Off, a movie that was both undeniably stupid and undeniably, stupidly good fun. Second time out… not so lucky.

Where Face/Off took close to $250 million against its $80 million budget in 1997, Windtalkers fell a long way short of generating a profit on its release in 2002. The cheesy World War II flick saw Nic Cage play a Marine assigned to protect a Navajo ‘Windtalker’ deployed to the frontline to communicate in a language indecipherable to the Japanese.

A cliché-ridden script hampers all concerned and even Woo’s trademark kinetic flair is MIA in a film that induced an apathetic response from both critics and audiences. A pronounced marketing push couldn’t save Windtalkers from a limp cinematic run that barely salvaged two thirds of the film’s budget.