4. Tentpole Movies Are "Too Big To Fail"
John Carter. Of Mars, but you weren't to say that, because the advertising big wigs told you not to. Remember this? Where him off Battleship had a sidekick that looked like a Pitt-bull cross bred with a tumour? The biggest box office flop is where someone who was persuaded by the previous entry on this list derives a sense of hope. I used the phrase "too big to fail" deliberately as it is the phrase people used about Enron way back when. The company was so huge, had so many employees, had so much invested, that it simply could not go down. This is the same logic which says that one could throw a brick at a 30-deck strong house of cards without making a dent in it. You see, film studios are actually quite savvy in this regard, and try and reduce the risk in any project. This is why we have A-list actors, blockbuster directors and Oscar-winning screenwriters being hired for big franchise pictures with $200+ budgets. So why, then, does a studio invest $250 million in an untested live action director's bloated sci-fi epic with an unknown lead, a generic title and a screenplay filled with references to Tharks and Therns? That director being Andrew Stanton, who was quoted as saying: "The thing I had to explain to Disney was, 'You're asking a guy who's only known how to do it this way to suddenly do it with one reshoot.' I said, 'I'm not gonna get it right the first time, I'll tell you that right now.'" Is it surprising, given his laid back attitude to directing such a mammoth production, that the film struggled to break even, taking $282 million on a $250m budget? The example of John Carter is worth remembering at a time when World War Z, Brad Pitt's zombie epic, is wallowing in bad press as reports come in that the film's budget has escalated to $400 million and has been plagued by script issues and production problems. Because soon it will come out, and people won't be saying it is "too big to fail"; they'll be saying "the bigger they are, the harder they fall."