8 Lessons Studios Must Learn To Avoid Making Box-Office Duds

4. Good Movies Are More Likely To Succeed

Wonder Woman
Warner Bros.

As obvious as that may sound to say, studios don't always seem to get the message. A lot of the time, they think that big stars like Dwayne Johnson, or impressive spectacle like Transformers, will save them. It won't.

Using 2017 as a case study, there's often a direct relationship between box-office flops and bad movies in that they tend to be one and the same.

Baywatch and King Arthur, two of the year's biggest flops, both scored less than 30% on Rotten Tomatoes. Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets also scored poorly, with a rotten 50%, as did Will Ferrel's The House, with an abysmal 17%. Both of them flopped, too.

On the other hand, the success stories all earned it. Wonder Woman - the DC Cinematic Universe's top domestic earner, by a mile - scored 92%. It: Chapter One is sitting pretty at 85%, and Get Out surprised everyone with a staggering 99%.

There are exceptions of course - Blade Runner 2049 flopped but scored 89%, and critics ripped Pirates 5 to shreds but it still made nearly $800 million worldwide - but on the whole, if studios focused on making the best movie possible instead of crapping something out and hoping for the best, their returns would probably be better.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!