20 Biggest Summer Box Office Bombs Of All Time

Budget: $160 million (marketing: $90 million)

Box office: $181.7 million

Loss: $68.3 million

Another director who hasn’t been seen since helming a big-budget blunder is Wolfgang Petersen. The German filmmaker had shepherded the likes of Outbreak and Troy to box office success and taken on the elements and won in The Perfect Storm, so who better to oversee a big budget remake of 1970s kitsch classic The Poseidon Adventure? Were someone to ask Petersen that question today, one suspects the answer would be: "anyone else."

A disaster film that justifies the term, Poseidon was ostensibly greenlit on the basis that Titanic – another seafaring adventure with cinematic precedent – performed rather well off the back of its exorbitant budget thank you very much.

A worldwide gross of over $180 million would be good enough for most films to turn a tidy profit, but most films don’t cost $160 million before a penny’s spent on marketing. In direct contrast with Gigli, at least Poseidon’s budget is all on the screen, and it’s not a terrible movie by any means. Let’s just take the easy route and blame Josh Lucas who, off the back of Hulk and Stealth, signed up for Poseidon and, in a delicious twist of irony, promptly saw his leading-man credentials go belly up.