9 Movies That Bombed Twice
6. The Thing (1982 & 2011)
Considering the cultural importance of John Carpenter’s The Thing, it did not make the numbers you would expect during its theatrical release. The tale of paranoid Antarctic outpost workers fighting back against a constantly morphing alien force only returned $19m over it’s $15m budget.
The Thing was not an abject failure in cinemas but considering the high hopes the team had, plus the studio injecting its highest budget for a creature-based horror film at the time, it fell very short. It didn’t help that the movie released around the same time as supernatural horror Poltergeist, which earned a much higher return against its smaller budget.
Over time, The Thing was celebrated for its successes on home video and eventually a follow-up was put in production.
The 2011 film of the same name is a strange beast in that it acts in parts as the perfect prequel to the 1982 classic but also outright copy and pastes certain parts of the original in ways that can only be described as a remake. Either way, The Thing sought to adapt the original concepts and avoid the same pitfalls.
Its international box office of $31m fell shy of the $38m budget that was exacerbated by replacing practical effects that had been filmed with CGI in post-production and reshoots for an entirely new ending. Despite its best efforts, 2011’s The Thing could not transform into a redemption arc for the 1982 original.