This list is more of a conversation starter. As a few commenters noted, Hansel and Gretel didn’t have a monstrous budget and is a pretty decent flick.
Their list is missing the very worst ones, as I see it (in near agreement with IMDb and RT).
(1) Cats is rated 2.8 at IMDb (19% at RT) and had a total budget (production plus marketing) of about $200 million. Battlefield Earth and the Rollerball remake have lower scores and/or worse reviews, but I subjectively moved Cats to #1. I don’t think there’s any case to leave it out of the bottom three.
(2) or (3) The remake of Rollerball had a larger budget than Hansel and Gretel (much larger adjusted for inflation), and is rated 3.1 at IMDb, 3% at Rotten Tomatoes. Any critic who gave that a good review should never be allowed to write another review. It has no redeeming elements.
(2) or (3) Battlefield Earth is rated 2.5 at IMDb, 3% at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s a toss-up with Rollerball for the #2 spot. If I absolutely have to choose, I think Rollerball is worse, despite slightly better numbers.
(4) Catwoman is rated 2.8 at IMDb, 8% at Rotten Tomatoes. A solid candidate for #4.
(5) Knight of Cups has mediocre scores at IMDb (5.6) and RT (46%), but gets my subjective vote for #5. It is a worse movie than anything on the Linkiest list. I would rather watch The Lone Ranger or Green Lantern any day.
As one commenter noted, no list of this type is complete without Heaven’s Gate. While it’s not a terrible film, it was so expensive, and its box office was so paltry, that it wiped out a major studio.
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Will anyone be able to make a decent film about Green Lantern? I’ve always found him to be one of the stranger creations of DC. On the one hand he wields almost unlimited cosmic power, capable of defeating Superman himself. On the other hand, what if his nemesis is dressed and face-painted entirely in yellow? Then he’s just some guy wandering around with a cheesy ring and a Coleman lantern. This has actually happened in the comics. Batman and Robin once battled the ol’ Lantern while they were painted yellow in a yellow room. Robin bullied Lantern, taunted him, took his ring away, and would have beaten him to death had Batman not intervened.
So GL can either defeat Superman or get his ass kicked by Robin. It all depends on the spectrum.
“In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might
Beware my power, Green Lantern’s light.
I crush the plans of each evil fellow
Unless, of course, he’s wearing yellow.”
James Gunn just posted a close up of Green Lantern’s ring hand on his social media.
Doubt that was random.
This shows you how subjective it all is.
Hansel and Gretl was cool as hell. Owned it since the day it hit home video. Saw it opening day. It takes the barest bones of the fairy tale and turns it into a blood soaked action horror movie with the fabled pair at Blade-like monster killers slicing and shooting their way through Europe. It’s hilarious and doesn’t take itself seriously for a second.
RIPD gets a lot of heat it doesn’t deserve. It was just made before we knew how to make comic book movies and by a studio who didn’t want to pay summer blockbuster money for a summer blockbuster. So the FX are terrible. The tone is kind of all over the place.
But at the heart? It sticks to the cliffs notes of the comic. Bridges has way too much fun. The biggest mistake is doing what Green Lantern did and trying to make Ryan Reynolds the straight action hero instead of the comic center of the film. He’s a bad fit.
But is it a terrible movie? Hardly.. Dozens of worse big budget movies come out every year.
The Lone Ranger belongs at the top, well, except for Cats. (They’re trying to say these other two movies are WORSE than Lone Ranger and Cats???)
The story behind Lone Ranger is likely taught in film schools. The original idea was badass. R-rated action horror with the Ranger and Tonto facing an army of werewolves/skinwalkers. Hence, the silver bullets.
Studio balked AFTER signing the director and everyone else. At the budget, first, then the concept. A bunch of last minute rewrites later and a bizarrely demanding Johnny Depp (yep, he insisted on that look, and a few other weird things about Tonto that bogged down the production) and you’ve got a massively overbudget disaster that makes no sense, has the Ranger as a wimpy lawyer from back east that constantly requires Tonto to rescue him because he’s scared of everything, has THREE villains, and is all told by a hundred year old Tonto posing in a museum to amuse white people in the early 20th century.
You can’t explain a single thing about it other than “this is what happens when studios try to make movies without the involvement of the creative people they hire to make movies.”
I don’t doubt The Lone Ranger sucked compared to original, but as a standalone story it was pretty fun/enjoyable (coming from someone who isn’t a fan of the westerns but enjoys the aesthetics). Johnny Depp was also great in his role. Its biggest issue is probably that it’s based on older movies, its massive budget that basically ensured it’d be a flop, and that most audiences aren’t really into such movies to begin with. The fact that I liked it speaks for itself, as I dislike most of mainstream stuff.
I thought Hansel was decent, too. RIPD sucked ass, wannabe Men in Black that shouldn’t have been made.
Cats has had less of a budget compared to RIPD/Lone Ranger.
“Johnny Depp wears a dead bird on his head for an hour and a half” may not be enough to carry a movie by itself, but it’s a promising start. Never seen, so I will give it a Not Known To Suck rating for now. Not giving that much slack to Cats, which I’ll file sight unseen under Sucks Like An Electrolux.
Those are fightin’ words in my (former) part of the country, Nature Mom. I’m from Ohio, and there we say “That sucks like a Hoover.” (Their factory used to be in North Canton, OH.)
Possible hate-speech against Herbert Hoover, though he did suck some.
That shocked me too. Seemed fine to me. 50 million dollar budget isn’t that big budget, but it’s not tiny. Don’t see how anyone would put this on 10 worst of anything.
I have never heard of RIPD before today. I thought it was some movie that was so well known that people referred to it by its initials, but the initials ARE the name. Boy, that one disappeared without a trace.
It reminds me of Michael Caine saying that he had never seen Jaw 3, which he had appeared in. He had been told it was an awful movie. He had, however, seen the house it had paid for, and it was fantastic.
I wouldn’t have placed Hansel and Gretel on my list. I think Knight of Cups (a glaring omission) had a higher budget (more than $100 million), and is a MUCH worse movie.
And the omission of the execrable Cats is unforgiveable.
I liked Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, a but of a hoot and a naked lady,
what’s not to like.
Green Lantern was one of my favorite comics as a kid. But even then, I thought the yellow thing was kind of lame.
Having the color yellow be the Green Lantern’s kryptonite was pretty stupid, and more recent Green Lantern writers have endeavored to retcon that weakness. Some of those retcons have been that power rings are weak against yellow because yellow is the color of fear. According to this premise, fear is the opposite of will, and will is what powers green power rings. There was also a retcon that said the fear villain Parallax had been imprisoned in the main lantern battery on OA, and Parallax is what caused the rings to be vulnerable to fear/yellow. I watched a YouTube video this morning that spent nearly 30 minutes investigating whether Jon Stewart’s ring was vulnerable to yellow in the DC Animated Universe (the shows and films that shared continuity with Batman The Animated Series, Superman The Animated Series, and Justice League/Justice League Unlimited.
Lol, well, I give them props for trying. But they really do need to ditch the yellow thing completely and come up with something else. Admittedly, I don’t have any ideas about what, but that’s why they get the big bucks.
The emotional colour spectrum was that something else.
They dropped that hint at the end of the Green Lantern movie when Sinestro obtained a Yellow Power ring. The rings are “vulnerable” to its opposing colour but that can be overcome by the wielder’s skill and the appropriate emotion. Sinestro is dangerous to other Green Lanterns because he’s a very skilled at using the various power rings.
There’s been worse vulnerabilities. Alan Scott’s ring was vulnerable to wood.
Always what made marvel unique. Marvel is darker and at least tries to have elements of science fiction while DC is pure fantasy. If they can figure out a scientific backstory for the green lantern cosmic power other than “harnessed willpower”, they may be onto something.
Didn’t “John Carter of Mars” used to make this kind of list? And “The Conqueror”, that mess where John Wayne played Genghis Khan? (It’s also the movie shot on some radioactive locations.) Oh, and “Ishtar” was another favorite in this category, wasn’t it?
Was there a time pararmeter in this article that I overlooked? None of these movies is older than 2010. I guess they wanted movies young people had heard of.
Worst casting, maybe?
The produces a tough decision.
John Wayne as Genghis Khan?
Mickey Rourke as Francis of Assisi?
Kevin Coster as Robin Hood?
Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker?
Tony Curtis in The Black Shield of Falworth?
I think I’m still goin’ with The Mick.
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Other topic: Yes, they obviously ignored all of movie history to dump on some recent films they didn’t like. I assume you are correct to assume that the target market is young people.
John Carter of Mars is an -excellent- movie.
More studio interference.
Rather than market it as what it was, and make a big deal of the literary connection, Disney (this was during their stupid years) forbade even TALKING about Mars and marketed it as simply John Carter.
Why?
Mars Needs Moms had just flopped, and they deduced it was because people didn’t like Mars not that the movie sucked.
I wish I was making that up.
So nobody went to see the Mars movie that was named after a random guy they’d never heard of. But the movie is very good, as the books were very good, but nobody watched the thing.
There have been 3 Green Lantern animated movies. I haven’t seen any of them but they appear to be decent movies if going by IMDB ratings. If you can make a decent animated movie, its not much of a stretch to make a good live action movie if you’re willing to throw money at it.
One animated movie I have seen is Justice League: The New Frontier. It largely takes place before the first official JL team up where they fight Starro. Whilst not a GL movie, Hal (voiced by David Boreanaz) is featured more prominently than the rest.
The comic (DC: The New Frontier) its adapted from is one of my favourite comics. Absolutely worth getting.
Guess time heals all wounds ie Heaven’s Gate 😮 or maybe no one remembers it. 😛 I remember Isabelle Huppert. 😍 carry on …
Definitely a major candidate. You could make an argument to place it #1 – it was bad, and so expensive that it broke an entire studio.
If you want a list with more historical perspective, check out James Robert Parish’s Fiasco: A History of Hollywood’s Iconic Flops (2007). These were the films he singled out, in chronological order:
-Cleopatra
-The Chase
-Paint Your Wagon
-The Wild Party
-Popeye
-The Cotton Club
-Shanghai Surprise
-Ishtar
-Last Action Hero
-Cutthroat Island
-Showgirls
-Waterworld
-The Postman
-Battlefield Earth
-Town & Country
Ebert gave The Chase 2.5 stars….
You are thinking of the 1994 “The Chase”, with Charlie Sheen and Kristy Swanson, FIgaro. I think the list is referring to the 1966 “The Chase” with a whole bunch of people like Robert Redford, Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Angie Dickinson, Miriam Hopkins, and Robert Duvall. It probably had a much bigger budget, anyway, allowing for inflation. And from the bits and pieces of it I have seen on TV, it looks pretty overwrought. It was written by Horton Foote and Lillian Hellman, and directed by Arthur Penn.
“Paint Your Wagon” may have flopped as a movie, but the single of “Wand’rin’ Star” by Lee Marvin spent three weeks at #1 on the UK pop charts, preventing the Beatles’ “Let It Be” from topping the charts. Thus proving my theory: British people are tone deaf.
I really like Paint Your Wagon, especially Lee Marvin. Like Richard Harris, he couldn’t sing worth beans, but managed to deliver a song in other ways. In that movie, Lee’s growling version of “Wanderin’ Star,” an octave lower than expected, was right in character.
I guess this is a list of big budget movies that failed at the box office, because a few of these are not really bad movies, at least IMO. “The Cotton Club” was OK by me. And I enjoyed “The Last Action Hero”. Maybe it didn’t make any money, but boy, have I seen a lot of worse movies. Like “Popeye”, for instance. The virtues of that one eluded me completley.
A movie with Ian McKellen can’t be all bad…
Popeye was AWFUL, except for the casting, which was near-perfect.
I like Robert Altman, but almost anyone else would have been a better choice for a director.
It’s too bad Ed Wood died so young. His take on Popeye would have been monumental.
Bela Lugosi as “Bluuuuuu-to”.