Box office bomb

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Cleopatra is the biggest box-office bomb of all time. Factoring inflation, its enormous budget caused it to lose $106 million upon initial release.

The phrase box office bomb refers to a film for which the production and marketing costs greatly exceeded the revenue retained by the movie studio. ^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6] This should not be confused with instances when official figures show large losses, yet the movie is a financial success; see Hollywood accounting.

A film's financial success is often measured by its gross revenue. Studios expect that a film's "domestic" (which the American film industry defines as the United States and Canada) box office gross revenue will exceed production costs. This does not make the film profitable: typically, the exhibiting theater keeps 45% of the gross, with the remainder paid to the studio as the rental fee. However, if a film has a higher domestic gross than its production and marketing costs, it will almost certainly turn a profit once the overseas gross is included.

If a film recoups production and marketing costs, then it can be considered a success; otherwise, if it fails to do so by a significant margin, it is referred to as a box office bomb, even though international distribution, sales to television syndication, and home video releases often mean some films considered flops in North America eventually make a profit for their studios. For example, Head, a 1968 film featuring The Monkees, was a flop which became profitable for the studio years later when its cult film status led to its sale to Rhino Entertainment and its re-release in various video formats. The popularity (and profitability) of DVD sales has increased this trend significantly, leading many to doubt the significance of domestic grosses as a predictor of a film's overall success.

Different genres of film are subject to different standards of success. For example, action movies typically have higher production and promotion costs than love stories. Typically, the most notorious flops are summer blockbusters, which often entail huge costs to produce and face a highly competitive market. Advertising costs are not included in a movie's production costs, and can make a bomb's failure all the more crushing for the studio.

Waterworld and Ishtar are considered Hollywood's two most infamous "bombs".

In extreme cases, a single film's poor performance can push a studio into bankruptcy or equivalent financial ruin, as happened with United Artists (Heaven's Gate), Carolco Pictures (Cutthroat Island), The Ladd Company (The Right Stuff), Film Threat (My Big Fat Independent Movie)^[7], (Twice Upon a Time), Gold Circle Films (Slither)^[8]^[9]^[10], Square's Square Pictures (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within) and ITC Entertainment (Raise the Titanic!). Some have changed a company's agenda, such as Walt Disney Pictures's decision to make only 3-D animation which stemmed from the failure of Treasure Planet.

During the 1980s the performance of a film on its opening weekend became crucial to its perception with a film suffering a poor opening weekend often being dropped by cinemas. With the growth of the Internet during the 1990s, chat rooms and websites such as Ain't It Cool News enable negative word of mouth to spread rapidly.

Most flops are not career-ending for the film's main cast and crew. Duck Soup, for example, a critical and box-office flop in 1933, got the Marx Brothers fired from Paramount Pictures, yet two years later, with help from Irving Thalberg, they starred in the successful A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup has since become one of the most highly regarded of the Marx Brothers' films. Ishtar was a notorious flop but both its stars Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman revived their careers.

Recently, the independent movie Zyzzyx Road made just $30 at the box office. The film, starring Tom Sizemore and Katherine Heigl and with a budget of $2 million, may owe its tiny revenue to its limited box office release: just six days in one Texan theater^[11] where, according to director Leo Grillo, it sold 6 tickets, 2 of which were to cast members^[12]. Previously a British film, Offending Angels, became notorious because it took, depending on the sources, £89 ^[13] or £79 ^[14] at the box office. It had a £70k budget but was panned by critics including the BBC, "truly awful pile of garbage"^[15], and Total Film, "Irredeemable"^[16].