Joaquin Phoenix’s emperor seems more comfortable ordering artillery strikes than holding a conversation with his wife. That tension gives Napoleon flashes of wicked comedy, but Ridley Scott’s historical epic rushes between military campaigns without making its central figure particularly revealing. The battles justify the big screen; the fragmented storytelling makes the blockbuster-sized investment considerably harder to defend. | © Apple Studios
Reuniting Johnny Depp with director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer looked like Disney’s recipe for another Pirates of the Caribbean. Instead, The Lone Ranger delivered an awkward blend of slapstick, brutality, and sprawling Western spectacle. Its spectacular train finale deserved a tighter movie around it, while Disney’s projected $160–190 million loss made another adventure with this duo a very expensive fantasy. | © Walt Disney Pictures
Universal was already selling an entire Dark Universe when The Mummy still needed to sell itself. Tom Cruise runs through collapsing buildings while Russell Crowe’s Dr. Jekyll pauses the adventure to explain the monster-management business. Sofia Boutella’s villain gets squeezed between star vehicle and franchise setup, leaving a horror reboot short on scares and a costly launch without the promised follow-through. | © Universal Pictures
Ang Lee pushed digital filmmaking forward with Gemini Man, only to hitch the experiment to a routine assassin-on-the-run thriller. Will Smith’s younger opponent is a painstakingly constructed digital character, and the 120-frame-per-second photography makes every movement unusually crisp. Yet technical achievement rarely becomes emotional suspense here. The spectacle keeps asking you to inspect the younger Smith when you should be worrying about the older one. | © Paramount Pictures
London chasing down smaller towns on enormous wheels is an opening image worth the ticket. Sustaining that invention proves tougher for Mortal Engines, whose spectacular machinery houses a surprisingly familiar young-adult adventure. Peter Jackson produced and co-wrote rather than directed, with Christian Rivers behind the camera. Despite that pedigree, its worldwide earnings couldn’t match even its reported $100 million production budget. | © Universal Pictures
Beneath the towering holograms and immaculate cyberpunk surfaces, Ghost in the Shell has a disappointingly conventional identity-crisis thriller running its systems. Scarlett Johansson’s casting sparked a whitewashing controversy before release, while the adaptation softened the philosophical unease that made its source material compelling. Around $170 million worldwide wasn’t enough for a production whose reported $110 million budget came before the marketing bill. | © Paramount Pictures
Oprah Winfrey towers over the landscape, Reese Witherspoon transforms into a flying creature, and somehow the adventure still struggles to take off. A Wrinkle in Time surrounds Storm Reid’s appealing heroine with elaborate imagery but keeps stopping to explain its lessons. Madeleine L’Engle’s difficult source material needed a confident dramatic through line; Disney’s expensive adaptation too often substitutes encouragement for momentum. | © Walt Disney Pictures
Space capitalism, genetic dynasties, and Channing Tatum in gravity-defying boots: Jupiter Ascending certainly doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas. The Wachowskis give Mila Kunis an entire cosmic inheritance, then bury her beneath explanations of how it works. There’s pleasure in the extravagance, especially Eddie Redmayne’s gloriously unstable delivery, but the crowded mythology makes this would-be blockbuster feel strangely difficult to enter. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Saving the universe as Iron Man apparently qualified Robert Downey Jr. to remove an obstruction from a dragon’s backside. Dolittle makes that unfortunate career transition literal, burying its star beneath a wavering Welsh accent and frantic animal chatter. A reported $175 million production budget demanded an enormous family hit, but the expensive menagerie never finds the charm needed to justify the investment. | © Universal Pictures
Watch Speed Racer as a live-action cartoon and its wild editing suddenly makes perfect sense. The Wachowskis turn racing into an explosion of impossible angles, saturated colors, and wholehearted family melodrama. That commitment has earned devoted fans, but its initial theatrical run brought in roughly $94 million against a reported $120 million budget. The affection arrived too late to help the original balance sheet. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Excalibur gets the Guy Ritchie treatment in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, complete with street hustlers, rapid-fire bargaining, and a king raised in a brothel. Charlie Hunnam handles the swagger better than the surrounding fantasy handles its mythology. The reported $175 million production cost was an especially ambitious wager: worldwide ticket sales finished around $149 million, leaving this kingdom spectacularly overextended. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
A revered Japanese revenge story becomes a monster-filled fantasy vehicle for Keanu Reeves in 47 Ronin. The lavish costumes and imposing sets suggest an epic, but the solemn pacing leaves remarkably little room for excitement. Universal had already taken a write-down before the U.S. opening. For all its dragons and swordplay, the production’s most decisive defeat had happened in the accounts department. | © Universal Pictures
After Diana’s terrific first solo outing, Wonder Woman 1984 spends an exhausting amount of time sorting out magical wishes. Pedro Pascal’s desperation gives the villain some spark, but the romance introduces troubling questions the film barely acknowledges. Pandemic closures and a simultaneous U.S. HBO Max release severely constrained its theatrical business; the sprawling story also squandered much of the goodwill surrounding the sequel. | © Warner Bros. Pictures
Edgar Rice Burroughs helped establish the planetary-adventure playbook, leaving John Carter in the awkward position of looking derivative while adapting a pioneer. Andrew Stanton delivers more charm and creature-filled spectacle than its reputation suggests, but the enormous price tag required an immediate phenomenon. Instead, Disney announced an expected $200 million operating loss, making the financial disaster better known than the adventure itself. | © Walt Disney Pictures
Sending cinemas updated visual effects after opening is an extraordinary way to reassure nobody. Cats reached theaters with human-feline hybrids so distracting that its songs and celebrated cast became secondary attractions. Tom Hooper’s adaptation struggles to make theatrical artifice work in a digitally rendered world, where every twitch invites uncomfortable inspection. A worldwide gross below its $100 million production budget completed the indignity. | © Universal Pictures
The trailers were everywhere, the stars worked the interview circuit, and sequels already sounded inevitable. Then came the ticket sales. These 15 overhyped movies arrived with blockbuster expectations and left studios explaining what went wrong. From franchise gambles to would-be sensations, they proved how little a massive marketing campaign matters when audiences aren’t buying.
