Mars Needs Moms, Gigli and Heaven's Gate: The Real Reasons Hollywood's Biggest Box Office Bombs Bombed

One box office bomb put an entire movie studio out of business. Another killed a cinematic universe before it even began. And one that had Mars in the title failed so badly that the studio removed the word from the title of another film, causing that one to bomb too. Hollywood history is littered with movies that were supposed to be massive hits and instead lost studios tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, with damage that went way beyond money.

Mars Needs Moms turned Robert Zemeckis's performance capture dream into a $150 million disaster

For most of his career Robert Zemeckis was one of the most successful live action directors in Hollywood, making Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump while pushing visual effects forward. By the early 2000s he became obsessed with performance capture technology, testing it in 2004 with The Polar Express. After that film hit, he went all in, directing Beowulf and A Christmas Carol and partnering with Disney to build an entire studio, Image Movers Digital, devoted to performance capture CGI movies.

There were two enormous problems. The animation did not look very good, and these films were incredibly expensive to make. Mars Needs Moms cost the same as blockbusters like Batman and Spider-Man, except those franchises had massive name recognition while Mars Needs Moms was an adaptation of a relatively obscure children's book. Putting the word Moms in the title also turned away young boys, the very audience most likely to want a movie about spaceships and aliens.

As I put it, "when you're a young boy, there's nothing less cool than, well, your mom, no matter how cool she probably actually is." On top of that, the film was filled with creepy looking Martians, dark and ugly visuals, and digital humans with stiff faces and lifeless eyes that dropped straight into the uncanny valley. The result was a $6 million opening weekend against a $150 million production budget. Zemeckis only produced the film, but his production company folded soon after, and he canceled his planned motion capture films and returned to live action.

Disney panicked and stripped Mars from John Carter's title, and that killed it too

At the exact same time Mars Needs Moms was crashing, Disney was preparing another expensive sci-fi movie called John Carter of Mars. Looking at what happened to Mars Needs Moms, along with other films that had Mars in the title and underperformed, Disney became convinced that the word Mars itself was the problem. So they renamed the film to simply John Carter.

The trouble was that John Carter told audiences absolutely nothing about what the movie was actually about. If you didn't already know it was based on hugely influential sci-fi novels, the title told audiences nothing about what the film actually was and could have belonged to almost any kind of movie. Disney had become so worried about reminding audiences of one bomb that it removed one of the only words in the title that explained its next movie. John Carter bombed too, and any sequel plans were canceled.

Universal's Dark Universe and Fox's Marvel universe collapsed by putting the cart before the horse

After The Avengers made over a billion dollars in 2012, every studio wanted its own interconnected universe. The problem was that studios were announcing cinematic universes before audiences had even seen the first film. Universal, who had actually run the first interconnected universe back in the 1940s with their movie monsters, decided to get the gang back together. Before The Mummy, the first film in their Dark Universe, was even released, they put out a publicity photo of Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe, Sofia Boutella, Johnny Depp and Javier Bardem standing together as the stars of this new universe, with Depp set to play the Invisible Man and Bardem set to play Frankenstein's Monster.

There was just one thing Universal forgot to do first: make sure people actually liked The Mummy. When they didn't and it bombed, the entire Dark Universe bombed with it. Fox made the exact same mistake once they realized they owned Marvel characters like the X-Men, Deadpool and Fantastic Four. They released their own publicity photo of the planned cast, including Channing Tatum's Gambit, who was finally going to get a solo film. Then Fantastic Four came out and Fox scrapped the entire plan.

That is the fundamental problem with most of these cinematic universes: putting the cart before the horse. When Marvel made Iron Man, they obviously had aspirations about a larger universe, since Nick Fury shows up after the credits to tell Tony Stark about the Avengers Initiative. But there were not concrete plans yet. The focus was on making a great movie first, and only after audiences loved it did Marvel use the sequel to build out the universe, adding Nick Fury and Shield, introducing Black Widow, showing Captain America's shield and teasing Thor's hammer.

Universal and Fox tried to skip that first step. Before audiences had decided they liked the new Fantastic Four or Tom Cruise's version of The Mummy, studios were already telling them about all the other movies they were going to make. Marvel never released a publicity photo before Iron Man came out featuring Downey, Norton, Evans and Hemsworth, because those roles weren't even cast yet. Studios were creating the universe first and assuming successful movies would follow, and of course they didn't.

Gigli's Bennifer overexposure sank Ben Affleck, Jennifer Lopez and director Martin Brest's career

When Gigli went into production, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were two of the biggest stars in Hollywood. While making the film they started dating, got engaged, and became the most famous celebrity couple on the planet, earning the nickname Bennifer. That seemed like it should make the movie an easy hit, and the studio thought so too, forcing director Martin Brest to reshoot and recut the film to feature more Bennifer and more romance.

Audiences did not want that. Bennifer became so overexposed that by the time Gigli came out, people were sick of them. The film cost $75 million to make but only grossed $7 million at the box office. Because the movie and their relationship had become so intertwined, when Gigli bombed, so did Bennifer, and the couple postponed their wedding before breaking up a few months later.

The movie became so toxic that when Affleck and Lopez appeared together again in Jersey Girl the following year, the marketing team tried to hide the fact that Lopez was even in it, fearing audiences would think they were getting Gigli again. It didn't matter, since Jersey Girl bombed too. Lopez's career recovered, but Affleck's took such a hit that he basically had to reinvent himself as a director. Martin Brest, who had previously made Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run and Scent of a Woman, never directed another movie after Gigli.

Taylor Kitsch took the blame for John Carter and Battleship even though neither bomb was his fault

In 2012, Hollywood decided Taylor Kitsch was going to be its next big movie star. After breaking out as Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights, he was cast as the lead in two supposed blockbusters within about two months of each other, Disney's John Carter and Universal's Battleship. Hollywood bet about half a billion dollars on Kitsch in that short span, and both movies bombed badly.

Neither failure was really his fault. John Carter had a terrible title and marketing campaign, and Battleship was a movie based on a board game that for some reason featured aliens, despite there being no aliens in the actual game. The films killed his career as a leading man, but he has gone on to have a respectable career as a character actor, turning in a strong performance in Waco.

Heaven's Gate's runaway budget destroyed United Artists and ended Hollywood's director driven era

In 1979, Michael Cimino was on top of the world after The Deer Hunter won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director, so United Artists gave him free rein to make his next film, a Western called Heaven's Gate. Things spiraled almost immediately. By the sixth day of shooting the film was already five days behind schedule, and two weeks into production Cimino had shot hours of footage but approved less than three minutes of it. For one scene where Kris Kristofferson lashes a bullwhip, Cimino made him do 52 takes even though the moment lasts only a few seconds in the finished film.

For another scene, the production built an entire Western street, and when Cimino decided the road needed to be six feet wider, he refused the cheaper option of moving one side back six feet. Instead he had the crew tear down both sides, move each back three feet, and reassemble everything. At other times the cast and crew simply sat around because Cimino didn't like how the clouds looked. Actor John Hurt waited so long with nothing to do that he left the production, made The Elephant Man with David Lynch, and then came back to finish Heaven's Gate as if he had never left.

These decisions blew the budget from around $12 million to $44 million. Cimino's first cut ran over five hours long, and after the studio threatened to fire him he cut it to just under four hours. A brief theatrical release followed where everyone who saw it hated it, so the film was pulled and recut again down to closer to two hours before being re-released. It bombed anyway, so badly and so painfully to make that Transamerica decided to get out of the movie business altogether, selling United Artists to MGM the following year.

Heaven's Gate did not just take down Cimino and United Artists. It also helped bring Hollywood's director driven era to an end. Throughout the 1970s studios had handed filmmakers like Coppola, Scorsese and Spielberg enormous creative freedom, but Heaven's Gate became the cautionary tale of what could happen when a director had too much control, and studios took that control back in the 1980s.

So the next time you hear that a movie bombed at the box office, remember there's a lot more at stake than just money. It can kill a career, wipe out a franchise, sink a studio, and change the kind of movies Hollywood makes next.