Bullevard
lucky numbers
box office flops
Or, if you will, Unlucky Numbers: movies that wrote cheques their audiences could not cash
2,000
30
Length of shoot: 18 days. Production costs: $2 million. Box office takings: $30. The independent US thriller Zyzzyx Road, starring Katherine Heigl of Knocked Up and Grey’s Anatomy, drew precisely six cinemagoers to the Highland Park Village Theater in Dallas in February 2006. Union rules led to a release; hiring the theatre cost $1,000.
Crystals and...
Katherine Heigl’s road to hell
120,000 Matthew McConaughey in Sahara
...Tars Tarkas from John Carter
34
With 1,800 costumes, including a wedding dress studded with 120,000 Swarovski crystals, and over 2,000 visual effects, sci-fi epic John Carter (2012) cost $250 million to make: the fourth most expensive cinema production ever. A worldwide box office take of $282m seems good, but with at least $100m spent on promotion, the Red Planet movie is still in the red.
20.4
6
In 2011, animated sci-fi movie Mars Needs Moms gave Disney the greatest financial headache in its history. On its opening weekend, it pulled in just $7 million, against the $150m it cost to make (it eventually scraped $39m worldwide). A large part of the cost was the six-week motion-capture process lead actor Seth Green had to endure.
For the 2005 adventure Sahara – a film that would go on to lose $78 million or $105m, depending on which side of a subsequent court case you favour – 10 writers were used, at a cost of almost $4m. About $240,000 was needed to placate local officials on location shoots in Morocco. A 46-second sequence of a plane crash, costing $2m, was cut from the final film.
Millions up in smoke: Cutthroat Island
Crash landing: Mars Needs Moms
On the morning of March 6, 1836, 200 Texans fought in vain against 1,800 Mexicans at the Alamo Mission, in a battle lasting six hours. To recreate it on film for The Alamo (2004), took over a month of filming on the biggest set in US cinematic history: some 20.4 hectares, about 30 soccer pitches. The $107 million movie brought in $26m at the worldwide box office. the red bulletin
words: ulrich corazza. photography: corbis (3), picturedesk.com (3), getty images
Flown in for the shoot, in Malta and Thailand, of Cutthroat Island (1995): horses from Austria, carpenters from England, stuntmen from Poland. Also on the bill: 2,000 costumes, 309 firearms, 620 swords, 250 daggers and 100 axes. Oh, and over $1 million for two full-size replica pirate ships. Final budget: $98m. Recouped at the US cinemas: $10m.
2
Dennis Quaid in The Alamo