8 Horror Movies So Awful They Were Pulled From The Cinema
2. A Cure For Wellness (2016)
Back in 2016, psychiatric facility horror A Cure For Wellness trod familiar ground and, for a brief moment, seemed a promising new entry in the niche subgenre. Unfortunately – for star Dane DeHaan more than anyone else, whose talent has gone unsung thanks to the middling performance of all his biggest blockbusters – the film tripped and stumbled straight off the starting blocks, and failed to make an impact with audiences worldwide.
DeHaan plays Lockhart, a stockbroker who travels to the Swiss Alps in hope of retrieving his company's CEO (Harry Groener) from a mysterious wellness centre. But the miraculous treatments are not what they seem, and Lockhart's sanity is questioned and tested as the facility's secrets and past are unravelled. Beneath it all lies a sinister plot in which the patients are actually cogs in the staff's machine, sacrificed in order to produce a lifespan-enhancing elixir.
As Gore Verbinski films go, A Cure For Wellness isn't actually that bad, ranking high in the director's oeuvre alongside Pirates Of The Caribbean (2001) and... well, Pirates Of The Caribbean. But audiences hated it and, after a dismal opening weekend in the US (a box office take of $4,356,941 overall), it was pulled from 2,600 cinemas, representing the second greatest theatre drop on record, behind that year's Live By Night.