20 Recent Box Office Flops Everyone Saw Coming

Wes Anderson is in an immensely enviable position for any filmmaker, considering that his movies are financed by billionaire Steven Rales and his production company Indian Paintbrush, ensuring that Anderson seemingly never has to worry about his features underperforming commercially, as they often do.

But Anderson's latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, was perhaps the surest box office flop of his career, and it didn't really come down to anything other than the film's title.

Even the most bizarre Wes Anderson film prior to this had a title that was interesting or amusing, but considering that a great many moviegoers have no idea what a Phoenician is, and might even struggle to say it to a cinema ticket teller, it put the movie on the back foot before anyone had even seen it. Then there's the sentiment among some that Anderson's style is beginning to feel a bit stale, even self-parodying, at this point in his career, and so the novelty factor of his distinctive filmmaking style isn't quite what it once was.

With that in mind, The Phoenician Scheme barely cracked $40 million on a $30 million budget, making it Anderson's lowest-grossing release since 2007's The Darjeeling Limited.

All it'll take for Anderson to bounce back is a banger like The Grand Budapest Hotel, but even if that doesn't materialise, he's seemingly got a blank check to keep making whatever he wants. Good for him.