Every movie can’t be a winner. No matter the talent involved or how killer the concept, there will always be winners and losers in Hollywood so long as movies’ worth (either in whole or in part) are tied to their earnings at the box office. And given the astronomical sums that go into making films of any size (let alone franchise-starting tentpole films that look to prop up an entire studio’s budget for the coming year), a couple big blunders can sink an entire movie-making enterprise.
2018 has been no different in this regard: possessing its fair share of stinkers that have assuredly cost some headless studio head his job over how little these movies took in against how enormous their budgets had swollen to. Robin Hood (2018), for instance, opened to a measly $14 million against a nearly $100 million budget; looking to capitalize on the public domain ubiquity of the character and the political zeitgeist of the Trump era, it seemed a pretty safe bet (at least on paper) to have lost its studio so much money. Before that was The Happytime Murders (2018), the raunchy Muppet-esque Melissa McCarthy vehicle that made back just over half (globally) what it cost to make. Even something like A Wrinkle in Time (2018), the Ava DuVernay sci-fi adventure, which pulled in $103 million against a $100 million budget, couldn’t cover the marketing and distribution costs of the film.
2018 has a new sultan of stink, however, as the same weekend that saw the record-breaking box office take for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) saw the non-starter debut of Mortal Engines. This young adult centric, sci-fi / fantasy adventure, which hoped to open to door for a franchise cash cow similar to The Hunger Games (2012), certainly held loft aspirations for funding studio Universal. Advertised as the next surefire hit for producer Peter Jackson, based on an incredibly popular series of books and exuding money in every frame of its trailer, it certainly had the makings for the next great young adult fantasy film.
But, after the dust had settled on its opening weekend, the film could only manage to draw in a pathetic $7.5 million. It opened in 5th place at the box office, behind Ralph Breaks the Internet‘s (2018) fourth week of release (#4), The Grinch’s (2018) sixth week of release (#3) and the debut of Clint Eastwood’s The Mule (2018) (#1) and Sony’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (#1). Despite it’s expansive ad campaign and promising prospects, the film could barely do better than Creed II (2018) a full month after it hit theaters and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) nearly two months after its premiere.
Needless to say, this is a monumental disappointment for Universal, who dumped $100 million or more into the film’s production and more than that besides in promoting it. Coupled with its atrocious ratings and nonexistent word-of-mouth, to say nothing for its incoming end-of-the-year competition, this vehicular fantasy flick will undoubtedly be pulled from theaters in a matter of days: if not by this weekend, than surely before the one after that. Between its production, promotion and distribution, the film stands to lose Universal upwards of $150 million, and that’s money that the studio simply can’t afford to lose.
Unless your name is Disney, it’s been pretty lean pickings at the box office in recent years. After all, it’s hard to compete with the combined might of Disney, Pixar, Marvel and LucasFilm, which collectively comprise the lion’s share of each year’s annual revenue. Even though Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) raked in more than $400 million dollars earlier this year, that was a substantial diminishment for Jurassic World’s (2015) $650+ million dollar gross only three years before. And although The Grinch and Halloween (2018) have both earned the studio a healthy profit in the meantime, Green Book (2018), which was poised to be a generational smash hit over Thanksgiving, drastically underperformed for the studio thanks to backlash over its questionable racial politics. As it stands, Mortal Engines’ losses will end up eating into most of the profits from those successful movies, leaving Universal without much to show for itself after a long year of mostly-hit movies.
At this advanced stage of the year, it is almost a certainty that Mortal Engines will wind up being the biggest cinematic flop of 2018: the biggest non-starter, the biggest money-sink. It’s a shame to think that such a promising blockbuster prospect ended up falling this hard right out of the gate, but that’s the problem with only making movies look good, as opposed to actually being any good. More often than not, the cream rises to the top, and the best movies end up earning their funders a healthy profit. Maybe this is something that Universal should take to heart in 2019.
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