20 Recent Box Office Bombs EVERYONE Saw Coming
These box office flops surprised precisely nobody.
The film industry is in quite the precarious place right now, as distributors struggle to figure out what commercial success means in both the age of streaming and the post-pandemic era.
It's harder than it's ever been to get audiences out to the cinema these days, what with shortened theatrical windows and the sheer number of other things competing for our attention.
As such the modern box office is a wildly unpredictable beast, where films can hit or flop counter to most sensible expectations. But it's also fair to say that sometimes the writing is on the wall that a film just isn't going to land.
Sometimes it's painfully clear that a movie is going to flop commercially, whether because the marketing is poor, the early reviews are bad, the budget is too big, or there just isn't much online interest at all.
And so, just about nobody was surprised when these 20 recent films tanked at the box office.
Some will at least be vindicated by time as audiences come around to them on streaming, but considering what was spent on some of these flicks, the studios can't be happy about their theatrical performance...
20. Mercy
Let's kick this list off with perhaps the most blatant "Eff you, it's January" release in quite a few years - the Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson-starring sci-fi thriller Mercy.
The first trailer for this high-concept romp screamed "epic flop" in every fibre of its being, at once looking wildly expensive and deeply cheap as it left Pratt confined to a chair for most of its runtime, and straining for relevance with its AI-centric plot, all while looking like a blatant Minority Report knock-off.
On top of this, director Timur Bekmambetov hasn't made a commercially successful Hollywood film since 2008's Wanted, and with this one rocking a ridiculous $60 million budget, the maths just didn't work out in its favour.
Amid highly negative reviews from most critics and severe storms in North America causing hundreds of cinemas to close on its opening weekend, Mercy has only scraped past the $50 million mark globally, ensuring it'll be one of 2026's most high-profile duds.