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| - A Box Office Bomb, or a flop, is a movie for which production and marketing cost greatly exceeds its gross revenue. It doesn't mean, however, that it merely made studios lose money - gross revenue doesn't equal studio profit . It means it lost a truly spectacular amount of money. On the other hand, most but not all box office bombs cost their studios money: gross revenue often doesn't include revenue from DVDs and whatnot (justified because the revenue from theaters is much easier to count), or (often) revenue from the world outside America; justified, because other countries don't actually exist. (Well, this can be justified since a movie has to be succesful in your home turf first rather than overseas)
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| abstract
| - A Box Office Bomb, or a flop, is a movie for which production and marketing cost greatly exceeds its gross revenue. It doesn't mean, however, that it merely made studios lose money - gross revenue doesn't equal studio profit . It means it lost a truly spectacular amount of money. On the other hand, most but not all box office bombs cost their studios money: gross revenue often doesn't include revenue from DVDs and whatnot (justified because the revenue from theaters is much easier to count), or (often) revenue from the world outside America; justified, because other countries don't actually exist. (Well, this can be justified since a movie has to be succesful in your home turf first rather than overseas) This is not to be confused with Hollywood Accounting, where the movie is not actually a flop but the real revenue is hidden either for tax evasion or as part of a Springtime for Hitler scheme. Commonly cited possible reasons for box office failures:
* Bad word-of-mouth: The movie just happened to be simply so bad that people avoided it. Those who enjoy cheesy fun usually buy it on VHS / DVD, or simply pirate it later.
* Competition: This is particularly often in effect with summer blockbusters. People have a limited amount of brainless action they would watch, and if there's a lot of that available, some titles may be neglected. They also tend to be high-budget, and as such if the movie flops, it costs a lot. There is, however, often a principle similar to Award Snub in nature: several good movies (with similar target audiences) are released simultaneously, thus one of them performs truly spectacularly, another one flops, but both are considered great in hindsight (the hit ET the Extraterrestrial and the flop Blade Runner, for example).
* Poor marketing: Many a bomb became so despite (or due to) being an excellent movie in general. Incorrect or misleading information about them (or just plain lack of marketing) makes audiences rely exclusively on word-of-mouth, which is generally not enough for a movie to successfully perform. The internet has made this situation a bit better, but not that much. These movies almost always achieve cult status and can later become profitable on DVD.
* Other circumstances: Sometimes movies flop due to something that's not directly related to the movie itself or the movie industry as a whole. Funny Aneurysm Moments and Too Soon, for example, tend to hit disaster movies' sales very hard when bad timing happens (the attacks of September 11th, 2001 in New York City and Arlington, Virginia, for example, killed a lot of those even though they were obviously filmed prior to the catastrophe). Note that the figures provided here for budgets and box office returns don't usually tell the whole story. A studio usually only sees about half of a film's box office take, with the rest going to theaters and (often) the actors, director, etc. involved with the production. The budgetary figures provided by the studios, meanwhile, only cover the production costs; distribution and marketing, especially for summer blockbusters, also eat up substantial amounts of studio money. Unless noted otherwise, it's safe to assume that a film on this list cost a lot more than the studio said it did. Plus, remember to take inflation into account when looking at films made decades in the past; Cleopatra's $44 million budget in the early '60s would be equivalent to $310 million in 2010 dollars. Finally, an independent film or studio is less able to absorb huge losses than a major studio, so the threshold for a bomb is lower for them. The lower figures (both budget and box-office) for older films and indie films can be deceptive. Flops tend to become Franchise Killers, Genre Killers, and Creator Killers, or "spawn" a Stillborn Franchise. Critical Dissonance is often at full force here, with critics liking it. Vindicated By Video often helps (especially with Better on DVD thrown in), as does Vindicated by Cable.
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