Five Recent Big-Budget Films That Bombed As Badly As Josh Trank's 'Fantastic Four'

So, you might have heard about Fantastic Four.

If you haven't, well… it's pretty grim. The 20th Century Fox-licensed attempt at rebooting the cinematic incarnations of Marvel Comics' First Family following their original go-around 10 years ago has, to put it mildly, received a pasting online following its opening weekend, during which it grossed a meagre $US26.2 million (about $35.4 million) at the box office, against a budget of $US200 million including both production and marketing/distribution costs, and amid a torrent of critical abuse — including a now-deleted tweet from the film's director, Josh Trank, that insinuated that his vision had been mangled by the studio — that slagged off everything from the narrative holes to The Thing not having a dick when clearly what the masses want is literally a face full of rock-hard wang blasted 12 feet high at them in a cinema.

Final worldwide grossing figures obviously aren't yet in for the film, but it's already well on track to rate pretty highly on the list of films destined for eternal ridicule. Honestly, though, we probably shouldn't have been surprised it all turned out this way for the space-faring family Richards; after all, we're only five years into this decade and already it's yielded more than half of the titles making up the top 10 box office bombs of all time, and a tonne more even just in the top 25. So the cast and crew of Fantastic Four can at least take some solace in the fact that they're far from the only people to have failed so spectacularly. They're not even the only people to have done so in the past two years…

The Lone Ranger (2013)

Over the course of the 10 years from birthing Captain Jack Sparrow up to his controversial role as Tonto, The Lone Ranger's stoic Native American sidekick, Johnny Depp appeared in nineteen different mainstream movies, including two further turns as Cap'n Jack, an extremely questionable performance as Willy Wonka, a marginally less questionable display as the Mad Hatter, and Rango, which was actually awesome and hugely underrated.

Suffice to say, by the time he went all The Crow meets Deadwood on Tonto's character alongside impossibly handsome Winklevoss-twin stand-in Armie Hammer to dish out some old-fashioned justice to a bunch of forgettable bandits, people were sick to fucking death of Johnny Depp.

The fact that the film - rightly or wrongly - gathered a considerable amount negative momentum in the press ahead of and immediately after its release didn't help its chances, and by the time curtains were parting, the film was dead in the water, losing somewhere in the realm of $US95 million to $US120 million once all was said and done.

John Carter (2012)

Of all the worst bombs that cinema has seen, there are only a handful that feel as tragic as the fate destined for John Carter, a clumsy and incomprehensible attempt to launch a franchise of films based on a book series written 98 years ago now that not even the presence of Bryan Cranston or Willem Dafoe could save (two strikes, Dafoe; never forget Speed 2).

Ostensibly, it had a few elements that should have worked — Civil War soldier gets mysteriously transported to Mars and ends up in...another civil war — and it was directed by the guy who directed Finding Nemo and WALL-E (Andrew Stanton), plus David Schwimmer was there, which is always nice to see him getting work — but ultimately it proved too ordinary or obscure a prospect for mass audiences and so the starry-eyed ambitions of John Carter and the franchise that could have been evaporated along with $US121 million.

r.i.p.d. (2013)

One of the best arguments that comic-book movie fatigue syndrome is starting to show, this graphic novel adaptation flick featuring Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds as a pair of dead cops who just can NOT let go of being cops and spend their well-earned rest time in the afterlife chasing down souls that won't move on to wherever they're supposed to go, which is probably hell, which is probably why they're not in that big a rush to get there in the first place.

Watch Ghostbusters, then Men In Black, and you'll have watched two far superior movies to this piece of trash, which unsurprisingly managed to lose somewhere between $US90 million to $US115 million in the process of sucking the will to live of everyone who sat through it, leaving them empty shells who wouldn't bother telling their friends about how bad the film was anyway because life is meaningless and we're all just freefalling towards the inevitable heat death of the universe so what does it even matter

green lantern (2011)

God...dammit. I don't mean to rag on Ryan Reynolds specifically but just... goddammit. Goddamn this film. It's a total mess, and it's unnecessarily infuriating because it really didn't need to be. It's a story about SPACE COPS. How do you even fuck that up? Oh, right. Exactly like this.

Also, whoever cleared the decision to make Reynold's entire suit animated and full of those weird muscular fibre things needs to take a long, hard look at themselves and re-evaluate every decision they have ever made, because that alone is evidence enough that they are not very good at making wise choices, which shows like a motherfucker the longer this stupid thing goes on. Goodbye, 90 million dollars.

47 ronin (2013)

I'll be honest - I never saw this movie. But when Keanu Reeves popped up in this apparent approximation of a fantasy-action romp only without any romping and just a tonne of sadness, I wasn't really paying attention to what Keanu Reeves was doing. Nobody was. Nobody really has since The Matrix, when we were all really interested to see what he would do next, which turned out to really disappointingly be more The Matrix movies and accidentally becoming a meme or two.

However, I'm obligated to mention it because - and if you've actually put yourself through it, I'm guessing you'll understand why - it holds the rather ignominous distinction of being recognised as the biggest box-office flop of all time, failing utterly spectacularly to recoup its significant $US225 million budget: the studio walked away $US149 million poorer for having put in the effort.

So, y'know. Chin up, Trank & company. Things could be much, much worse.