Box Office Flops That Didn’t Deserve to Fail

Moviegoers are a fickle sort. Don’t deny it! Even some truly brilliant movies fail to make bank at the box office, and there are plenty of reasons why. Often, it’s thanks to poor marketing, being released at the wrong time, or simply overestimating demand.

Regardless, I think it’s fun to go back and watch movies that didn’t do so well on release. I’ve rounded up four movies which, while maybe not to everyone’s tastes, certainly didn’t deserve their poor showings.

Flushed Away

• Initial Budget: $149 million (before marketing)
• Worldwide Box Office Gross: $178 million

Flushed Away gets a bit of a bad rep for being ‘the Aardman movie that didn’t use plasticine’. And, granted, it spelled the end of the Aardman-DreamWorks experiment. But, look beyond the fallout, and you’ve got a super-creative family flick that won’t leave you bored.

Rammed full of quotable gags and gloriously over-the-top voice performances (I’m looking at you, Sir Ian McKellen), sheltered rat Roddy finds himself literally flushed away into the sewers of London. He’s soon thrust into a devious plot where amphibians threaten the very rodent community - all while considering whether he’ll ever return home.

Missing Link

• Initial Budget: Around $100 million (before marketing)
• Worldwide Box Office Gross: $26.5 million

Missing Link is one of stop-motion-masters Laika’s most entertaining adventure stories, focusing on the exploits of a lonely sasquatch who recruits a pair of explorers to find his long-lost family. Sadly, it went under the radar on release.

Laika famously produces painstakingly gorgeous animations, taking years between releases to individually manipulate characters and sets one frame at a time. Missing Link balances these practical visuals with a compelling story and characters, and jokes that are given breathing space.

Speed Racer

• Initial Budget: $120 million (before marketing)
• Worldwide Box Office Gross: $93.9 million

Speed Racer serves up a high-octane, eye-poppingly frantic story of a young, prospective racing champion taking on the world (and a villain or two along the way). It’s certainly nothing too special from a story perspective, but visually, it has to be seen to be believed.

Heavy on the CG but delivered in such a cartoony, memorable way that it’s become a cult classic, Speed Racer just couldn’t entice enough people to come out and support it. It deserves watching at least once, but whether you repeat that experience is down to you!

The Marvels

• Initial Budget: Between $307 and $374 million
• Worldwide Box Office Gross: $206.1 million

Where did the once-mighty Marvel Cinematic Universe go wrong? Without even the pandemic to blame, The Marvels - an adventure bringing together Monica Rambeau, Kamala Khan, and Carol Danvers - is officially a record-breaking flop.

The movie arrived at a time when superhero fatigue was really setting in - following Thor: Love and Thunder and Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, two of the biggest critical letdowns the franchise has suffered.

That said, The Marvels is a perfectly serviceable movie that really doesn’t deserve to languish alongside the worst ticket performances of all time.