The Ten Biggest Summer Thuds in Movie History

Posted by Danny Gallagher (danny@filmschoolrejects.com) on October 7, 2007

A sleeper is a film that despite having virtually no big budget advertising or the full support of a major studio rises from the ashes of obscurity to become a major Hollywood blockbuster. It’s always satisfying to watch a small movie stick it to the Hollywood elite who think a movie can only become a hit if you saut© it in money, glaze it with cash and serve it with a side dish of lettuce.

Then there’s the sleeper’s doppleganger, a movie that has a huge budget, a big name studio’s undying support and an insane amount of advertising backing it not to mention some very big names fronting it and for some reason, it totally tanks at the box office. It falls so far from the top that you can actually hear the sound it makes as it crashes at the rock bottom of the box office charts and into the depths of mediocrity. Some people call these movies just bombs. We call them “thuds.”

The summer is the time of the movie year when “thuds” are ripest for the picking. Studios pull out all the stops for the summer time. They save their biggest names, their biggest budgets and their biggest explosions for the summer movie audiences. There are so many of them at one time that any of them are susceptible to becoming a “thud.” It’s just a matter of odds and certain factors: their release date, the competition and if they a starring role featuring Ashton Kutcher.

So with the summer movie season finally behind us, here are the biggest summer “thuds” to ever have a head-on collision with the bottom of the box office barrel…

10. Grindhouse

It pains us to have to put this creature creation of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez on the list because it’s a damn fine movie that’s practically heroin to the most hardcore movie buffs. It’s got zombies, hot chicks with guns, blood coming from every corner of the screen and the only decent piece of work Eli Roth ever made. But maybe the dream come true was the cause of the nightmare we never saw coming. “Grindhouse” had an appeal that really only appealed to the most hardcore movie buffs who seek out copies of the director’s cut of “I Spit On Your Grave” and “Death Race 3000” and actually watches them more than 100 times. But the fact that a movie where Rose McGowen had a shotgun strapped to her thigh becomes a thud really has us rubbing our heads and other parts of our anatomy.

9. Battlefield Earth

This piece of “Plop Fiction” didn’t have much going for it from the get-go, but everyone involved in bringing it to life either thought they had the next best thing to “Star Wars” sitting in the film cans or were clinically brain-dead during the entire production of the film. They inundated the public with TV advertisements, billboards and newspaper ads featuring John Travolta’s Rastafarian alien mug, and the word of mouth alone drove this pile of Scientologist propaganda to the bottom of the stink pile. It’s one of the most satisfying thuds to hit the bottom of the box office in recent memory.

8. Snakes on a Plane

Even though Samuel L. Jackson’s latest golden meal ticket finished number one on its opening weekend, it’s still considered a huge bomb because it didn’t make merely the amount of money everyone hoped it would from its extremely unusual buzz. When the trailer hit the web six months before the movie even started advertising, the title alone drove people into a foaming film frenzy. When the movie hit the theaters, it was a much different story. It may not have bombed in the conventional sense of the word, but it didn’t become the all-time great box office smash that everyone with the cushy studio office hoped it would become. Apparently, the studios haven’t learned their lesson because look out next summer for “Apes on a Rubber Raft.”

7. Showgirls

Here’s another one of those potential blockbuster that seemed to have everything going for it, but got killed by its poisonous word of mouth. It had a whirlwind of unnecessary controversy, ridiculous hype and that chick from “Saved by the Bell” in a sparkled G-string. It had the makings to become the next “Basic Instinct,” but it couldn’t even become the next “Body of Evidence.” Word spread faster than butter on hot toast that this erotic adventure stunk more than sex. It’s rumored that Kyle MacLachlan, one of the film’s stars, even walked out of the film’s premiere screening. We couldn’t confirm if he asked for his money back too.

6. Hudson Hawk

This Bruce Willis vehicle has achieved a cult status because it fell so hard at the box office. Part of the reason for its ultimate destruction is in the advertising. The movie, partly written by Willis, was designed to be a mad-cap screwball caper comedy, but the ball-less studio heads wanted to take the less risky road by falling back on Willis’ “Die Hard” credentials and market the film as an action packed adrenaline thrill ride. The low road ended up being the road that took the film straight to Hell.

5. Cutthroat Island

Long before the “Pirates of the Caribbean” trilogy had office cut-ups doing their Jack Sparrow impersonations and starting every sentence with a hearty “Arrrr” around the water cooler was this big budget ocean shoot-em-up from director Renny Harlin. It starred Geena Davis at the tail point of an acclaimed movie career as a bad ass pirate fighting against evil pirates for (what else?) treasure. It had a big, bold advertising campaign that ended up sinking to the bottom of Davy Jones’ locker liked it had an anchor tied around its waist.

4. Leonard Part 6

This is probably the only time we can recall when the star of the film caused it to thud himself. Comic legend Bill Cosby wrote and starred in this extremely screwball spy action spoof about a CIA agent who comes out of retirement to take on an evil psychopath by (we’re not making this up) riding an ostrich, wearing ballerina shoes and dispatching henchman with magic weiners. After the studio polished the final cut and started churning the ad ink, Cosby spread the word himself that the studio laid a huge egg and audiences should avoid watching it if the very sight of the film would give them brain herpes. They did.

3. Godzilla

Take a classic movie monster, stick him in the middle of modern day New York City and let him do his thing. The audiences should be stepping over each other to get to the theaters to see it, right? The studios that backed this big budget “Godzilla” remake not only put all of their Godzilla eggs in one basket, but they let the big lug stomp all over them as well. If only there was a little Chinese boy would understood Godzilla and could have warned us ahead of time…

2. Last Action Hero

Speaking of big lugs, Arnold Schwarzenegger has defined what it means to be a big time action movie star. So it’s only natural that he should get to make fun of the persona he created in a big spoof film that packs more of a punch than all of his previous action movies combined. Unfortunately, this thing ended up punching the studios in the nuts. Instead of becoming the dream summer movie Hollywood had been dying to make, it turned into a virus that infected just about everyone involved with it. Zak Penn, the movie’s screenwriter, would go on to write some of the worst thuds of all time including “Elektra,” “Inspector Gadget” and “Behind Enemy Lines.”

1. Howard the Duck

It’s not only one of the biggest bombs of all time and one of the worst films of all time, but it’s also the biggest thud of all time. It’s also particularly satisfying because it nearly tarnished the career of uber-producer George Lucas who served as the film’s executive producer. We like to think of it as our way of getting him back for making us give up our kids’ college funds so we could spend it on his never ending conveyor belt of “Star Wars” merchandise.

| | Read more articles by Danny Gallagher