April 2026's Biggest Box Office Bombs (6 Flops in a Row!)

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]Guys, I'm going in.

[00:00:05]What are you watching?

[00:00:06]Want to see.

[00:00:09]If we don't play this right, we're going to have a massacre in there.

[00:00:16]This movie started as a $70 million production back in 2021. The Saudis were backing it. Anthony Mackie and Ben Kingsley were starring, and Rupert Wyatt was directing. Wyatt made Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and that one was great and made almost half a billion at the box office. So, on paper, this looked like a real movie. Instead, it became the biggest box office bomb of 2026.

[00:00:41]Wyatt walked off in April 2023. He'd been fighting with the producers for months over what kind of movie this was supposed to be. The tone, the pacing, how long it should run. They brought in Kelly Dixon, the editor from Wakanda Forever, to rebuild the whole thing from what Wyatt had shot. She added new dialogue, reshaped the structure, basically made a different film.

[00:01:03]I'm actually surprised Wyatt decided to keep his director credit after all that.

[00:01:08]Probably regrets it now.

[00:01:11]By the time they sorted out the mess, the budget had ballooned from $70 million to $150 million. Then, it sat in development hell for years. Vertical finally picked it up, and I hope they got it cheap because they released it right as there's an actual war happening in the Middle East. So, of course, it cratered.

[00:01:28]Opening weekend, it made just $472,000 on over 1,000 screens. That's $187 per theater. IMDb score came in at 1.9, which is worse than Cats. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 26%.

[00:01:45]International box office is just $29,660 on a $150 million budget. Total worldwide gross came to $695,000.

[00:01:56]The losses here are comparable to John Carter, and that's the biggest box office bomb in history.

[00:02:02]Everyone involved knew the timing was just the worst. You don't release a movie about desert warfare when people are watching actual desert warfare on the news. But even knowing that going in, nobody expected numbers this catastrophic.

[00:02:19]So, question. Why would anyone remake a movie from 1978 with zero star power and subpar actors?

[00:02:27]Legendary shot this back in 2023.

[00:02:30]It's a reimagining of that cult horror film, the one that got banned in multiple countries because nobody could tell if the deaths were real. Barbie Ferreira and Dacre Montgomery are the leads, and neither of them is exactly a box office draw.

[00:02:45]Ferreira plays a content moderator for something like a TikTok platform, and she discovers what looks like reenactments of murders from the original. She has to figure out if it's fake or actually happening in real time.

[00:02:58]They did reshoots, got positive test screenings, and then Legendary did something weird. They buried their own movie, pulled it from festivals, stopped mentioning it on social media. If you go to their website right now, >> [music] >> Faces of Death isn't listed anywhere.

[00:03:13]They completely erased it. Wouldn't even acknowledge it existed.

[00:03:18]IFC grabbed it after it had been sitting on a shelf for years. They probably got it for almost nothing, and they had a plan. Lean into controversy, make it an event. The marketing was provocative enough that YouTube pulled the teaser, and theaters banned the posters for being too graphic. They gave it their widest release ever, 1,600 screens. The red band trailer got 27 million views, which is more than any IFC film has ever gotten.

[00:03:46]27 million views on the trailer. $2 million opening weekend. After 2 weeks, IFC started scaling down screens. $7.4 million budget, $2.6 million total gross.

[00:04:00]Rotten Tomatoes called it fiercely transgressive and self-aware. Words like that don't sell tickets. [music] All that viral marketing, all those YouTube views, none of it translated. It's an okay movie. Not great, but interesting enough to watch. And I'm sure it'll do good on Shudder eventually, like most of IFC's horror movies do these days. But in theaters, this thing was dead on arrival. And apparently, Legendary saw that coming, which is why they ran away from their own movie.

[00:04:34]Anne Hathaway is having her best year ever. Devil Wears Prada 2 is out right now and crushing it. Nolan's Odyssey comes in July, and that's probably going to make a billion. Two massive hits in 1 year. She's the hottest she's been in a decade.

[00:04:50]And then there's this thing. $20 million budget, $2.4 million at the box office.

[00:04:58]The movie is basically Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel in a barn arguing for most of the runtime. There's a few concert scenes in there, but mostly it's just them. Hathaway plays a pop star who shows up at Coel's costume studio. They used to work together before some bitter falling out, and now they just talk for 2 hours. It's rated R for some reason, even though nothing really happens that would justify it. I don't know what they spent $20 million on. Maybe Hathaway's salary, since she's such a hot property right now.

[00:05:29]They shot this in May 2023, and it took 3 years to reach screens. Test audiences called it bewildering. Someone described it as a movie about nothing. David Lowery, the director, said that it was the hardest thing he'd ever done.

[00:05:44]A24 had this thing sitting in the can for years. When they finally released it, they scheduled it against the Michael Jackson biopic. Same target audience. Next weekend, Devil Wears Prada 2 comes out. Same audience again.

[00:05:59]Felt like they looked at this movie, decided it was unsellable, and just dumped it. A horror that's not really a horror. A musical that's not really a musical. Just a weird, slow film with minimal cast and nice visuals that nobody knew how to market. Got 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, so obviously people just didn't get it, too.

[00:06:20]20 million in, 2.4 million back.

[00:06:24]Hathaway's got two hits and one pretty obvious flop this year.

[00:06:31]There's a Norwegian movie from 2021 called The Trip, about a married couple who each secretly planned to kill the other. It's a solid little thriller, did well in Norway, but barely anyone in America saw it. IFC decided to remake it shot-for-shot with Jason Segel and Samara Weaving.

[00:06:50]And you have to ask, who was this for?

[00:06:53]The original didn't have fans here demanding an American version. It's not like when they remade The Ring, where the Japanese film was already a phenomenon and people were asking for more. This was remaking something most Americans had never heard of existed.

[00:07:08]They put it on 1,500 screens, and it opened at number eight with about a million and a half dollars.

[00:07:15]Part of that was the release date. They went up against Michael, which wasn't smart. But the bigger problem was there was just no reason for anyone to show up. Segel's never opened a movie outside ensemble comedy. Weaving's biggest hit as a lead was Ready or Not, which opened to 8 million on a 6 million budget.

[00:07:34]$25 million budget, 2 million at the box office. That's 8.6% of of they spent, nowhere near the 62 million you'd need to break even. It had the lowest per screen average of any wide release that weekend. Amazon had the international streaming rights, so there wasn't even a theatrical release outside North America to try to make up the difference.

[00:07:56]I think this one probably does fine once it hits streaming. It's a fun premise, it's well-made, it's the kind of thing people will watch at home on a Friday night. It just had no business being in theaters.

[00:08:11]Universal was trying to repeat what happened with those modestly budgeted romantic comedies that worked over the past couple years.

[00:08:20]The Materialists last year, It Ends With Us before that. Although It Ends With Us had a popular book behind it and all that Blake Lively controversy driving attention. You, Me, and Tuscany didn't have any of that. It's a pretty generic rom-com about a free-spirited cook who squats in an empty Tuscan villa and falls for the homeowner's cousin. The kind of movie they used to make all the time, but in 2026, people watch stuff like this at home.

[00:08:46]Universal knew that going in. Producer Will Packer actually said it out loud.

[00:08:51]Studios view releasing rom-coms theatrically as a dicey proposition since the growth of streaming. They weren't blind to the risk, they just hoped it would work anyway.

[00:09:02]It didn't. The movie opened on April 10th directly against the second weekend of the Super Mario Galaxy movie and the second weekend of the drama with Zendaya and Pattinson. A romantic comedy with modest marketing trying to compete with that had no chance. It finished fourth, 66% on Rotten Tomatoes, 53 on Metacritic. Watchable, but nothing special.

[00:09:25]18 million budget means you need 40 to 45 million to break even. The movie made 22, dropped over 50% the second weekend, basically dead by week four. They didn't even bother pushing it internationally.

[00:09:39]Just 3 million of that 22 came from outside North America.

[00:09:44]And apparently studios were also using this one as a test case for original rom-com screenplays. Writer-director Nina Lee posted that executives were holding greenlight decisions on her scripts until they saw how this performed. So now that's one more data point telling studios not to bother with theatrical rom-coms.

[00:10:06]Bob Odenkirk plays a substitute sheriff who takes a job in a quiet Midwestern town and stumbles into something ugly when a bank robbery goes wrong. It's an R-rated neo-western, >> [music] >> pretty violent. Premiered at Toronto Film Festival, got good reviews, and Magnolia Pictures picked it up for distribution.

[00:10:25]They went as big as they could, over 2,000 screens, which was the largest theatrical rollout in the company's entire history. They were chasing what happened with Thelma in 2024, that June Squibb movie that came out of nowhere and made $13 million.

[00:10:41]Problem is Thelma was a PG-13 crowd-pleaser that pretty much anyone could enjoy. Normal is a hard-R genre film for a specific audience. You can't just copy the rollout strategy and expect the same results when you're selling completely different products.

[00:10:58]The film made about $1,286 per screen, just over 5 million total.

[00:11:04]That means the theaters were empty, and part of why they even got that many screens was because there was nothing else opening wide that weekend except Cronin's The Mummy. Basically, theaters took the booking because they had space, not because there was demand.

[00:11:20]And there's also just the Bob Odenkirk thing. He did Nobody in 2021, proved he could do action, made 57 and a half million worldwide on a 16 million budget. Then Nobody 2 in 2025 made 41 million on 25 million. That's a 28% drop in worldwide gross on a higher budget, even with Universal behind it. Normal is basically the same pitch. Quiet guy turns out to be capable of serious violence, but without the brand, without the studio marketing, with a smaller distributor. The concept was already showing diminishing returns. This was one trip to the well too many.

[00:12:01]Magnolia announced streaming a month after the theatrical release. That's basically admitting it's over.