The Five Worst Big-Budget Movies of Summer 2009

Some of the season's biggest budgets and some of 09's biggest flops.

Jul 17, 2009

If you've ever seen a Michael Bay movie, you've probably wondered why a $150 million budget isn't enough to get a good screenwriter. I've wondered the same thing.

The film industry has had a good summer this year - action sequences were bigger than ever, and expensive displays of pyrotechnics and CGI showcased new and exciting ways to destroy cinematic credibility.

With the economic crisis forcing many companies to scale down or even discontinue some of their more opulent product lines (think GM), it's comforting to know Hollywood studios are still spending inordinate sums of money producing bad movies.

This film adaptation of the much-loved 1974 television series reportedly cost $100 million to film and grossed just over half that. Universal hoped the Will Ferrell vehicle would compete with the summer's other blockbuster-hopefuls, but it wound up opening third behind UP - an animated children's movie - and The Hangover, a small-budget comedy starring Bradley Cooper (the preppy lunatic from Wedding Crashers) and Ed Helms of Daily Show fame.

Ben Stiller reprises his role as a museum security guard in the sequel to 2006's Night at the Museum, which earned a quarter of a billion dollars domestically. Despite having a bigger budget, Smithsonian took in about half as much in opening-day ticket sales as its predecessor and the movie's current box office total is around $380 million - 200 million less than what the first one made.

A DVD-quality workprint of one of 2009's most hotly anticipated films was leaked online a full month before the movie's big-screen opening. Aside from a few incomplete special effects shots that made a couple scenes look like something out of a Tron re-envisioning, the pirated version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine was basically identical to the theatrical release and by the time the movie premiered in May, it had already been downloaded four and a half million times. Since there was little incentive to pay $10 for tickets when the film was available for free online, Wolverine made considerably less at the box office than 20th Century FOX projected.

A high-concept comedy produced by Judd Apatow and directed by the guy who did Ghostbusters and Caddyshack - sounds good, right? Michael Cera and Jack Black co-starred in this epic parody on ancient history that one critic called, "mediocre at best." Given the fact that Year One grossed about $43 million worldwide, expect some fancy packaging for the DVD release as Columbia tries to recoup the movie's $60 million production budget.

T4 showed great promise when initial details first began emerging of director McG's $200 million vision for the newest installment in the venerable Terminator franchise. Starring Christian Bale, the movie was hyped as the greatest entry in the series since the first two films, and it even set the record for most expensive independent production. But bad reviews and negative word-of-mouth quickly made it clear that the hype was just that: hype. Salvation opened second at the box office behind the Night at the Museum sequel and in the end, earned less money than T3.

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