4 Movies That Failed So Hard They Made Studios Go Bankrupt
Sometimes even a good movie can be the downfall of the studio that made it.
Box office failures are common in the film industry, but not always critical for movie studios.
Usually, after the flop studios make what is guaranteed to be a commercial success and restore the financial balance.
However, some movies cost studios so much that they simply destroy its creator.
Cleopatra, 1963
The 1963 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor is now considered a classic, but at the time of its premiere it nearly ruined Fox studio.
Cleopatra's budget was originally planned to be no more than two million, but eventually grew to 44 million, making it one of the most expensive movies in history.
The producers wanted to see only Elizabeth Taylor in the lead role, but the actress said she would not shoot for less than a million dollars, and the producers agreed to her condition.
The movie kept changing directors, and there was no script as such, so the shooting took a long time.
In addition, Elizabeth Taylor dropped out of the project for eight months due to a serious illness.
Cleopatra won four Oscars out of nine nominations, and Fox had to sell 300 acres of land it owned to pay off the loans.
The Fall of the Roman Empire, 1964
The owners of Samuel Bronston Productions seem to have learned nothing from the box-office failure of Cleopatra, because a year later they released their own historical epic, having invested almost $20 million in its production.
Most of the money went not only to pay the actors like Sophia Loren and Christopher Plummer, but also to rebuild the Roman Forum with an area of 92 thousand square meters – at that time the largest outdoor set in Hollywood.
The lease turned out to be a complete failure: having collected less than $5 million, the studio declared bankruptcy.
The Golden Compass, 2007
New Line Cinema was not known as being risky one.
The studio released Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings with a budget of $200 million, and perhaps because of that, lost a sense of caution when started filming the Golden Compass.
The cost of the first, and only installment was $180 million.
As a result, the movie grossed $70 million on the US market and $260 million on the international market, but this did not save the studio because the rights to the foreign screenings were sold to other companies.
The studio eventually went bankrupt and was taken over by Warners Bros. In spite of all this, the movie even won an Academy Award for the best visual effects.
Cutthroat Island, 1995
The movie was such an epic failure that it entered the Guinness Book of Records as the biggest box office failure in Hollywood: with a gigantic budget of nearly $100 million, the adventure movie about pirates of the Caribbean grossed $10 million.
After that, Carolco Pictures, the studio that brought us Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Total Recall, ceased to exist, and the great pirate movies were forgotten for a decade.