8. Raise the Titanic (ITC Entertainment)
There's a certain irony in the fact that a film about raising the Titanic is what effectively sunk ITC Entertainment, the British production company behind it. Lew Grade, the controller of ITC at the time, reported that he did not enjoy his time working to get the film made, as costs quickly soared due to the complexities of building and operating the scale model of the Titanic. The film was ripped to shreds by everyone from the novel's author, Clive Cussler, to its own leading man, Richard Jordan. But what killed ITC was the fact that it was also a box office bomb, recouping merely $20 million of its $2 million budget, ruining ITC's reputation in the process, and causing Grade to retire from film production altogether, joking that it would have been cheaper to "lower the Atlantic". ITC sold the distribution rights of their films to Universal, and that's all she wrote.