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Event Horizon lost money in 1997 and has been defended ever since, usually for the wrong reasons. The film that survived is a haunted house with a gravity drive for a cellar.
Dredd lost money in 2012 and has been winning arguments ever since. The film that failed and the film that lasted are the same film, and the reason is one tower block.
John Carpenter's The Thing earned back its budget and was savaged anyway. The record says the film was not the problem. The poster, the tagline and the weekend it opened were.
James Gunn's Superman was carrying a whole rebuilt DC on its back and still had to be a movie for two hours. It managed both, and the strain shows in exactly one place.
Edgar Wright's Stephen King adaptation took $69 million worldwide on a $110 million budget. The film was fine. The price tag assumed a star Paramount had never actually tested.
Barry Levinson's mob drama had a Goodfellas screenwriter, a great cinematographer, and Robert De Niro playing both leads. It grossed 9.6 million dollars. Here is why.
Eli Roth's Borderlands cost a reported $110 million and grossed about $33 million worldwide. The film is bad. The thing that made it a disaster happened in the edit room, three years before release.
Madame Web is a genuinely bad film. It is more interesting as the public death certificate of Sony's plan to build a Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man in it.
The 2024 global theatrical year closed near $30 billion, below the pre-pandemic benchmark and below public targets. The shape of the shortfall is more informative than the headline.