From The Flash to Megalopolis: Hollywood's costliest flops

A movie can gross $300 million worldwide and still lose money. That math explains most of the box office bombs of the 2020s. Studios split ticket revenue with exhibitors, roughly half domestically and on less favorable terms overseas, and they spend heavily on marketing on top of the production budget. The rule of thumb that results is unforgiving. A theatrical release generally needs to earn roughly two to two and a half times its production cost before it clears break-even. Films that miss that threshold by a wide margin end up as write-downs on a corporate earnings report.

That threshold has become harder to clear this decade. Production budgets on superhero and legacy-franchise titles climbed past $200 million, and in a few cases approached $300 million. Streaming trained audiences to wait a few weeks rather than buy a ticket. The mid-budget theatrical film, the kind that once absorbed risk across a studio slate, largely migrated to subscription services. What remains in theaters is a smaller number of much more expensive bets, which means a single miss carries consequences that used to be spread across several releases.

The 10 films here are drawn from widely reported production budgets and worldwide grosses, and they fall into three rough categories. Some are franchise entries that collapsed after years of audience goodwill, including The Flash and Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Others are original gambles that never found a crowd, like Amsterdam and Francis Ford $F Coppola's self-financed Megalopolis. A third group performed respectably by ordinary standards and still lost money because the spending was so aggressive, with Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves as the clearest example.

What links them is scale. These are not small independent films that failed to secure distribution. Nearly all cost upward of $100 million to produce, and several cost far more. Each came up short by a margin large enough to reshape how its studio planned the years that followed. They appear below in roughly chronological order, and together they trace the same pressures: franchise fatigue, post-pandemic moviegoing habits, and blockbuster budgets that kept climbing.

Walt Disney $DIS Animation Studios spent a reported $180 million on Strange World, which grossed roughly $73.7 million worldwide after opening in November 2022. Disney later took a write-down on the film reported at around $150 million, among the largest single-title losses in the studio's animation history.

The release landed over the Thanksgiving corridor, a window Disney has owned for years, and took in about $18.6 million domestically across its first five days. That figure fits a mid-budget original, not a tentpole, and the run never recovered. Competing holiday titles arrived with characters audiences already knew. Strange World did not.

Don Hall, a co-director on Big Hero 6 and Raya and the Last Dragon, built the story around the Clade family — three generations of explorers who descend into a surreal subterranean ecosystem. The visual design borrowed from pulp adventure serials. The film featured a gay teenage lead, Ethan Clade, voiced by Jaboukie Young-White. Reviews came in mixed rather than hostile, which points to the real problem: awareness, not reception.

Disney ran a comparatively quiet campaign for a release at that budget tier, and consumer interest stayed low heading into opening weekend. An original animated concept arrives with no prior characters, no source novel, no theme park attraction and no sequel history behind it. Everything has to be sold from scratch. That sale never happened at scale.

Timing made the loss harder to absorb. Pixar's Lightyear had underperformed theatrically five months earlier, and the two results together sharpened an internal argument at Disney about greenlighting original animated features at blockbuster budgets. The slate that followed leaned on established properties, with sequels to Moana, Zootopia, Frozen and Toy Story moving toward the front of the release calendar.

Strange World reached Disney+ about a month after its theatrical debut, by which point the financial damage was already fixed. The film remains a reference point in arguments about how much a studio can spend on an unfamiliar premise, and it ranks among the clearest box office flops of the post-pandemic period for a major animation house working at full budget.

The Flash grossed roughly $271 million worldwide against a production budget reported at about $200 million, leaving Warner Bros. well short of break-even once marketing and theater splits were counted. The June 2023 release became one of the studio's costliest theatrical losses of the decade.

Few modern blockbusters had a longer runway. A standalone Flash film spent close to a decade in development, cycling through several directors and release dates before Andy Muschietti finished it. The completed movie used a time-travel premise to bring back Michael Keaton as Batman, which the marketing campaign leaned on heavily, and early reviews ran warmer than those for most recent DC titles.

None of that translated into sustained ticket sales. Pre-release tracking pointed to a considerably larger opening weekend than the film delivered, and the gap between projection and result became its own story in trade coverage. The second-weekend drop ranked among the steepest for any major studio tentpole released that year, a sign that favorable notices were not producing repeat viewing or word of mouth.

Ezra Miller's legal troubles generated months of negative coverage before release, and box office analysts cited that as a factor in audience hesitation. Warner Bros. never pointed to a single cause, and the outcome fit a broader pattern of cooling interest in superhero releases across 2023.

Timing compounded the damage. Warner Bros. Discovery was restructuring its comic book film operation at the time, installing James Gunn and Peter Safran atop a newly formed DC Studios with plans for a continuity reset. That left The Flash as both a holdover from the previous regime and an early read on audience appetite for the brand heading into the relaunch.

Warner Bros. Discovery recorded a write-down tied to the film, and no sequel followed. The Flash instead served as an endpoint for the continuity it belonged to, closing out a version of the character that had run across the previous DC film series.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny carried a production budget reported at roughly $295 million, among the highest ever committed to a single film, and grossed about $384 million worldwide after its June 2023 release. The shortfall left Disney $DIS and Lucasfilm with a loss running well past $100 million.

The arithmetic is what makes the result so stark. A worldwide gross approaching $400 million looks like a hit in isolation. Set it against a negative cost near $300 million, plus a marketing campaign that on a release this size typically runs about half the production budget, and the picture inverts. The film needed to clear somewhere in the range of $600 million to $700 million before it made money.

James Mangold directed, taking over from Steven Spielberg, who stayed on as an executive producer. It was Harrison Ford $F's fifth and final turn as the archaeologist, a send-off built around an aging hero confronting his own obsolescence. Reviews landed in mixed-to-positive territory. Critics praised the emotional close to Ford's run and faulted the runtime and the heavy CGI de-aging used to render a younger Ford in the 1944-set opening. That digital work helped push the budget to where it ended up.

The box office shape told the rest of the story. The film front-loaded, posting a modest opening by tentpole standards and then falling away quickly — a pattern that points to thin repeat business and weaker word of mouth than a franchise capstone needs. Summer competition did not help, with Pixar's Elemental in the market and a crowded June slate pulling at the same family and four-quadrant audiences.

The franchise had also been dormant for a long stretch. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull arrived in 2008, 15 years earlier, by which point much of the original audience had aged out of regular moviegoing and younger viewers carried no particular attachment to the character. The result fed Disney's later push to cap spending on legacy properties, and the film now serves as a standard reference in arguments that nostalgia alone cannot carry a $300 million production.

The Marvels opened to roughly $46 million domestically in November 2023, the smallest debut in Marvel Cinematic Universe history, and finished with about $206 million worldwide against a production budget reported between $220 million and $274 million. No other MCU release has grossed less.

The contrast with its predecessor explains why the result landed so hard at Disney $DIS. Captain Marvel passed $1 billion worldwide in 2019 on a far smaller budget. The sequel, directed by Nia DaCosta and pairing Brie Larson with Teyonah Parris and Iman Vellani, came in near a fifth of that total while costing considerably more to produce.

Part of the shortfall was structural. The story assumed familiarity with two Disney+ series, Ms. Marvel and Secret Invasion, neither of which drew the viewership that converts a streaming subscriber into a ticket buyer. Monica Rambeau's arc reached back further still, to WandaVision. Earlier Marvel films worked as self-contained entries in which the serialized connections were a bonus. Here they functioned as a gate, narrowing the audience that could follow the plot without preparation.

Release timing added to the problem. The SAG-AFTRA strike kept the cast off talk shows and red carpets through most of the promotional window and ended only days before opening. At 105 minutes, the shortest runtime in the franchise, the film gave exhibitors a quick turnaround, but it could not hold screens once the second weekend fell off sharply.

Volume was the other factor. Disney had pushed out an unusual amount of Marvel film and television across the two preceding years, and Kevin Feige later acknowledged that the pace had stretched the studio's focus. Marvel slowed its theatrical schedule and cut back its Disney+ slate in the months that followed.

The loss mattered, and so did the precedent it set. The Marvels showed that the Marvel name alone no longer guaranteed a large opening weekend, a conclusion that changed how Disney scheduled and budgeted the superhero films that came after it.

Argylle cost a reported $200 million to produce and grossed roughly $96 million worldwide after its February 2024 release. That left it less than halfway to the figure a film of that size needs before marketing spending enters the math. Its domestic opening weekend came in around $18 million.

Matthew Vaughn directed the spy comedy, after the Kingsman films established him as a maker of stylized, tongue-in-cheek action. Bryce Dallas Howard played a reclusive novelist and Sam Rockwell $ROK the operative who pulls her into a real conspiracy that mirrors her books. Henry Cavill appeared as the fictional superspy of the title, and Dua Lipa turned up in the opening set piece. Apple $AAPL Original Films financed the project, and Universal handled theatrical distribution.

Pre-release attention centered on a marketing campaign built around a tie-in novel credited to a pseudonymous author, Elly Conway — the same name given to Howard's character. The puzzle drew speculation about who had actually written the book. It also asked casual moviegoers to follow an elaborate metafictional setup before they understood what the film itself was. The campaign spent more of its energy on the authorship riddle than on the premise.

Reviews ran mixed to negative, with critics faulting an overstuffed plot and a tone that kept switching between broad comedy and action spectacle. Word of mouth did not lift the opening, and the film dropped off quickly in its second and third weekends.

Because Apple paid for the film outright, the damage landed on a company whose core business dwarfs its entertainment arm. A loss of that size on a traditional studio's books would have surfaced as a write-down. The cushion changed who absorbed the shortfall, not what the result signaled. An original spy caper with recognizable faces, a genre director with a track record and a nine-figure budget could not fill theaters, underlining how narrow the path had become for non-franchise action films in wide release.

Borderlands grossed about $32.9 million worldwide against a production budget reported at around $115 million before reshoots pushed the total cost higher. Lionsgate released it in August 2024, and it recovered a fraction of what it cost — one of the decade's widest gaps between spending and return.

The adaptation of Gearbox Software's shooter series spent years in development before Eli Roth directed it. The cast included Cate Blanchett as Lilith, Kevin Hart as Roland, Jamie Lee Curtis as Tannis and Jack Black as the voice of the robot Claptrap. Additional photography was reported to have been handled by Tim Miller rather than Roth, who had moved on to another project. That arrangement signaled trouble long before release and added to a final cost Lionsgate never broke out publicly.

Opening weekend brought roughly $8.2 million domestically. For a film with that cast and a game franchise with a large, established player base behind it, the debut fell far below the floor Lionsgate would have modeled.

Reviews were close to uniformly negative. Critics described a plot that never cohered and a tone scrubbed of the crude, chaotic humor the games are built on. The PG-13 rating sat awkwardly against source material defined by profanity and gore, and much of the existing fan base treated that softening as a reason to stay home.

Lionsgate had positioned the project as the start of a franchise, with several games' worth of characters and planets available to mine for sequels. Those plans ended with the opening weekend. The film cleared out of theaters quickly and reached digital rental within weeks of its debut.

The result complicated a running argument about video game adaptations. Paramount $PARA's Sonic the Hedgehog films and Universal's The Super Mario Bros. Movie had already shown the category could work at blockbuster scale, which made Borderlands hard to file under genre risk. The narrower explanation is specific to this film: it discarded what the property's audience valued, and the broader crowd it was shaped to attract never materialized.

Francis Ford $F Coppola put roughly $120 million of his own money into Megalopolis and recovered almost none of it. Released in September 2024, the film grossed about $14 million worldwide, a shortfall that ranks among the largest personal financial losses a filmmaker has taken on a single project.

Coppola raised much of the money by selling part of his California wine business, a step reported repeatedly during the film's long path to the screen. He had been circling the project since the 1980s, and what finally emerged was a science fiction allegory set in a city called New Rome, with Adam Driver as an architect trying to rebuild it. The supporting cast included Giancarlo Esposito, Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza and Jon Voight.

The film premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024 and divided critics sharply. Some praised its visual ambition and its refusal of conventional narrative shape. Others found it unwieldy. That split generated heavy coverage without converting into ticket sales. The domestic opening weekend came in under $4 million across a wide release, a figure closer to a specialty title than to a film playing in thousands of theaters.

Lionsgate handled distribution rather than financing, which capped the studio's exposure but left it selling an unclassifiable film to a mainstream audience. The rollout drew its own scrutiny in August 2024, when Lionsgate pulled a trailer that attributed invented negative quotes to real critics and apologized for it.

Because no studio capital was at risk, Megalopolis never surfaced as a write-down on a corporate earnings report, which separates it from nearly every other large loss of the decade. It works instead as a case study in what happens when a director holds complete creative control and removes the budget and scope checks a studio would normally impose. The money came from one person, and so did the loss.

Joker: Folie à Deux cost roughly $200 million to produce and grossed about $206 million worldwide after its October 2024 release, leaving Warner Bros. with a substantial loss once marketing was counted. The 2019 original had cleared $1 billion on a far smaller budget.

The distance between those two results defines the film's place on this list. Joker was a contained character study made for a fraction of what the sequel cost, and it became one of the highest-grossing R-rated releases ever. Warner Bros. responded by giving director Todd Phillips several times the money. The assumption was that the audience for the first film would return in comparable numbers.

Phillips delivered a musical courtroom drama. Joaquin Phoenix returned as Arthur Fleck, awaiting trial and held at Arkham, with Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel, the film's version of Harley Quinn. Long stretches of the running time are given over to song sequences staged inside Fleck's head. The change in form was deliberate. It was also a sharp break from the grounded crime drama that had drawn crowds three years earlier.

The domestic opening weekend landed near $40 million — low for a sequel to a billion-dollar film. Receipts dropped steeply from there. Audience reaction was poor for a major studio release fronted by two stars of that profile, and the word of mouth that sustains a long theatrical run never materialized.

The result became a reference point in the industry debate over what to do with a one-off hit. Turning a modestly budgeted success into a tentpole sequel asks the follow-up to find a much bigger audience than the original. Folie à Deux moved the other way by switching genre and narrowing its appeal. Combined with The Flash, the outcome capped a punishing stretch for Warner Bros. Discovery's DC theatrical slate. It also fed a wider reassessment of how much a studio should spend chasing a previous film's numbers.

Amsterdam took in roughly $17 million worldwide against a production budget reported at about $80 million, one of the most lopsided gaps between cost and return of the decade. Its domestic opening weekend landed under $7 million, far below what a cast of that size would normally deliver.

David O. Russell directed the film, which 20th Century Studios released in October 2022 with one of the deepest ensembles of the year. Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington led, supported by Robert De Niro, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock, Michael Shannon and Taylor Swift. The period mystery, set largely in the 1930s and loosely inspired by the alleged Business Plot against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, blended screwball comedy with political conspiracy across a runtime of more than two hours.

Reviews were largely negative, and much of the criticism targeted the unfocused plotting and slack pacing rather than the performances. Receipts dropped sharply after the opening frame instead of holding on word of mouth, the trajectory that separates a slow starter from an outright flop. The theatrical run was effectively finished within weeks.

The campaign leaned on the cast list without explaining what the movie was. A tonal hybrid set 90 years in the past is difficult to compress into a 30-second spot, and the trailers never settled on whether audiences were being offered a farce, a murder mystery or a historical drama. Russell had not released a feature since Joy in 2015, a seven-year gap, and his earlier successes — Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle — had opened with strong reviews and awards traction carrying them. Amsterdam had neither.

For Disney $DIS, the loss arrived during a stretch already crowded with costly misses. The film also showed how little a marquee cast now moves ticket buyers on its own. The star-driven original drama once filled theaters on the names above the title, and at $80 million that model now needs awards momentum or franchise scaffolding to cover itself.