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15 Worst Movies That Cost More Than 100 Million Dollars

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Nazarii Verbitskiy

TV Shows & Movies - August 25th 2026, 23:55 GMT+2

15. The Little Mermaid (2023) — Approx. $310 Million Net

Trade reports initially placed *The Little Mermaid* near $250 million, but later filings showed Disney’s net production spend climbing to roughly $310 million. The money produced a technically elaborate ocean that somehow feels smaller, murkier and less alive than the hand-drawn one. Halle Bailey sings beautifully and gives Ariel an earnest spark, yet the photorealistic animals cannot match her expression, the 135-minute runtime pads an 83-minute classic, and “The Scuttlebutt” sounds imported from another musical. Bailey keeps the remake afloat, but she should never have needed to swim this hard. | © Walt Disney Pictures

Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker — 14. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) — Approx. $490 Million Net

Palpatine returned; a convincing explanation did not. *The Rise of Skywalker* tears through Sith daggers, secret bloodlines, fake deaths and planet-killing Star Destroyers as if speed might stop viewers from asking how any of it connects. Its frantic course correction spends so much energy contradicting *The Last Jedi* that the sequel trilogy ends less like one story than an argument conducted with lightsabers. Daisy Ridley and Adam Driver still locate genuine emotion inside the scavenger hunt, but even they cannot make Rey Palpatine feel like a revelation rather than a rewrite purchased at extraordinary expense. | © Lucasfilm Ltd.

13. Snow White (2025) — Approx. $272 Million Net

Disney’s *Snow White* is caught between reverence and embarrassment: too altered for viewers who wanted the animated classic, yet too beholden to it to justify another remake. Rachel Zegler supplies the warmth, voice and old-fashioned movie-star glow the production desperately needs. Around her, however, sit plastic-looking environments, forgettable new songs and seven digital dwarfs whose faces land deep in the uncanny valley. The result cost more net than it eventually earned worldwide, an extraordinary sum for a fairy tale that frequently resembles actors performing beside unfinished video-game characters. | © Walt Disney Pictures

The Last Airbender 2010 1 — 12. The Last Airbender (2010) — Approx. $150 Million

The animated *Avatar* made elemental martial arts feel fast, joyful and inseparable from its characters. *The Last Airbender* drains all three qualities, compressing an entire season into a procession of exposition where names are mispronounced, jokes vanish and every conversation sounds like a prophecy being read from a cue card. Even bending looks exhausting: squads perform elaborate choreography so one modest rock can drift across the screen. The sets and costumes reveal where the $150 million went, but not why anyone thought a beloved adventure about friendship should resemble a solemn school pageant filmed through gray glass. | © Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies

11. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) — Approx. $352 Million Net

Harrison Ford gives *Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny* a bruised, melancholy center that the movie around him rarely earns. A lengthy de-aged prologue, digital chases and a 154-minute runtime turn the famously nimble adventure series into a very expensive endurance test. James Mangold finds flashes of pulp pleasure, particularly once the Archimedes device finally does something outrageous, but much of the journey feels assembled from franchise-approved parts rather than discovered in a forgotten tomb. The strangest artifact here is a production that cost roughly $352 million net and still looks oddly weightless. | © Lucasfilm Ltd.

Thor Love And Thunder — 10. Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) — Approx. $250 Million

*Thor: Ragnarok* used silliness to loosen a stiff superhero; *Thor: Love and Thunder* keeps shaking until nearly every serious moment falls out. Jane Foster is dying from cancer, Gorr is grieving a murdered daughter, and Christian Bale appears ready to make both stories hurt—then come the screaming goats, jealous weapons and another gag before the sadness can settle. Taika Waititi’s colorful direction occasionally sparks, while Natalie Portman gives Jane welcome bite, but the film treats emotional sincerity like an awkward guest it must immediately distract from. Marvel spent around $250 million making tonal whiplash look this glossy. | © Marvel Studios

9. Justice League (2017) — Approx. $300 Million

You can see the emergency surgery all over *Justice League*. Zack Snyder’s operatic gloom collides with Joss Whedon’s brighter reshoots, leaving Batman to alternate between apocalyptic warnings and jokes that seem delivered by a different man in the same costume. Steppenwolf is a gray digital placeholder, Cyborg’s story was reduced, and Henry Cavill’s computer-erased mustache became the most memorable visual effect in a $300 million production. The heroes finally share a screen, but the movie never develops a shared personality; it plays like two competing studio notes somehow received theatrical distribution. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

8. Jupiter Ascending (2015) — Approx. $176–210 Million

Only *Jupiter Ascending* would spend up to $210 million revealing that bees recognize royalty—and somehow make the intergalactic inheritance paperwork harder to follow than that. Mila Kunis plays an Earth cleaner who discovers she owns the planet, Channing Tatum is a genetically engineered wolf soldier wearing gravity boots, and Eddie Redmayne delivers every line somewhere between a whisper and a fire alarm. The Wachowskis fill the screen with personal, gloriously impractical ideas, which is more than most blockbusters attempt. Unfortunately, those ideas arrive in a plot so overstuffed that camp delight and genuine boredom keep taking turns. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

Cropped the electric state — 7. The Electric State (2025) — Approx. $320 Million

Simon Stålenhag’s illustrated novel turned abandoned robots and empty highways into a quiet nightmare about technology, grief and American decline. Netflix’s *The Electric State* looked at that melancholy and apparently decided it needed Chris Pratt, mascot robots and enough generic banter to fill an algorithm. The effects are polished and Millie Bobby Brown commits to the family drama, yet the film explains away nearly every haunting image before marching toward a familiar digital battle. Spending $320 million to transform one of modern science fiction’s most distinctive worlds into an ordinary streaming adventure is almost impressively backwards. | © Netflix

Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice — 6. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) — Approx. $263 Million

Putting Batman and Superman in the same live-action movie should have been the easiest event sale in comic-book history. *Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice* instead buries their ideological conflict beneath prophetic dreams, Doomsday, Justice League email attachments, a jar labeled “Granny’s Peach Tea” and enough solemnity to make daylight feel inappropriate. The Ultimate Edition restores useful connective tissue, but no extra footage can make the “Martha” resolution sound natural or transform Jesse Eisenberg’s twitchy Lex Luthor into the mastermind the plot requires. Zack Snyder delivers striking images; the $263 million film simply mistakes them for a functioning drama. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

Cropped Transformers The Last Knight — 5. Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) — Approx. $217–260 Million

*Transformers: The Last Knight* argues that giant alien robots influenced King Arthur, fought Nazis and concealed an ancient staff while Earth itself was secretly Unicron. That sentence is still cleaner than the movie. Michael Bay attacks the material with enormous explosions, aggressive close-ups and aspect ratios that change so often the black bars appear to be editing the film themselves. Anthony Hopkins enjoys the nonsense, but everyone else is trapped inside a 149-minute mythology dump designed to launch sequels that never arrived. Between $217 million and $260 million bought plenty of spectacle and not one readable storyline. | © Paramount Pictures

Cropped Green Lantern — 4. Green Lantern (2011) — Approx. $200 Million

A Green Lantern ring can create anything its wearer imagines, which makes the dullness of *Green Lantern* feel almost philosophical. The movie has an entire corps of alien heroes, a fearless test pilot and Mark Strong perfectly cast as Sinestro, then devotes most of its energy to exposition, a strained romance and Parallax as a brown cloud with anger issues. Ryan Reynolds’ natural sarcasm occasionally escapes the screenplay, but even he looks defeated by the fully digital suit. Warner Bros. spent around $200 million building a universe and produced a punchline Reynolds would spend years making for free. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

Cropped Pearl Harbor — 3. Pearl Harbor (2001) — Approx. $140 Million

Michael Bay can stage destruction with frightening clarity, and the central attack in *Pearl Harbor* remains a formidable piece of large-scale filmmaking. The trouble is the other two hours, where Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale are marooned inside a love triangle that treats history as expensive background decoration. At 183 minutes, the movie chases *Titanic*’s romantic sweep without its characters, dialogue or patience, then rushes into the Doolittle Raid because one enormous climax was apparently insufficient. Its $140 million is visible; recognizable human behavior is considerably harder to locate. | © Touchstone Pictures

2. Suicide Squad (2016) — Approx. $175 Million

*Suicide Squad* introduces its characters, introduces them again, gives each one a pop song and still forgets to build a team. Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn and Will Smith’s Deadshot have enough charisma to survive the chopped-up editing, but the movie around them lurches between David Ayer’s grimy crime aesthetic and the trailer-ready comedy Warner Bros. wanted after *Batman v Superman*. Enchantress eventually performs a sky-beam dance while disposable monsters wait to be punched. The $175 million production made a fortune and won an Oscar for makeup, proving financial success and coherence are not legally required to coexist. | © Warner Bros. Pictures

Cropped Tom Cruise The Mummy 2017 — 1. The Mummy (2017) — Approx. $125–195 Million

Universal announced its Dark Universe before *The Mummy* had given audiences a reason to want one. Tom Cruise runs, crashes a plane and performs with customary commitment, while Sofia Boutella’s title monster is pushed aside so Russell Crowe can explain the franchise that future films were supposed to deliver. Horror, comedy and globe-trotting action compete for control, leaving none of them enough room to become fun. The movie earned a respectable $410 million worldwide, yet its costs and marketing still produced heavy losses; director Alex Kurtzman later called it the greatest personal and professional failure of his life. | © Universal Pictures

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A $100 million budget can buy movie stars, digital cities and enough explosions to make any trailer look irresistible. What it cannot buy, apparently, is a coherent script, a compelling character or someone willing to tell the director “no.” These movies turned nine-figure investments into some of Hollywood’s most expensive creative disasters—occasionally bombing in spectacular fashion, and occasionally making money despite themselves. Every dollar is visible except the one that should have been spent making the movie good.

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A $100 million budget can buy movie stars, digital cities and enough explosions to make any trailer look irresistible. What it cannot buy, apparently, is a coherent script, a compelling character or someone willing to tell the director “no.” These movies turned nine-figure investments into some of Hollywood’s most expensive creative disasters—occasionally bombing in spectacular fashion, and occasionally making money despite themselves. Every dollar is visible except the one that should have been spent making the movie good.