What The Biggest Hollywood Flops of 2024 Reveal
As the curtain finally draws to a close on 2024, it feels like a good time to take stock of the past 12 months at the movies. So what will we remember most from this past year? How about the renewed dominance of animated kids films like Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, and Moana 2, which raked in a combined $3.5 billion at the box office? Or the unsettling leadership soap operas at Disney, Warner Bros., and Paramount? Or what about the rise of tricked-out popcorn buckets that double as mutant sex toys? All of these are certainly worthy topics of discussion, but for me, 2024 will go down as the Year of Big Swings and Bigger Misses.
As a movie critic, the question I get asked most frequently is: Why can’t Hollywood make original movies anymore? Or course, it could if it wanted to. The real answer is complicated, and it’s not one that anyone will feel very good about. In short, the town is now permanently operating from a position of fear. Producing movies has become so expensive—the average budget for a major-studio film is closing in on $100 million—that taking risks has been removed from the equation. This is why you hear people droning on and on about intellectual property. After all, virtually every film that gets a green light these days needs to be as conservative a bet as possible to justify the sheer size of the bet. Which is to say that every new movie needs to be a sequel or a prequel or a reboot or based on some other form of existing IP. Yes, the bean-counters have officially won.
The fact that Tinseltown runs on flop sweat isn’t exactly a newsflash. But a quick glance at the year’s 15 top-grossing movies reveals that there were precisely…checks notes…zero original movies in the bunch. Trends like these are disheartening. Which is why, for me, the biggest story of the year was the slew of epic flops, follies, and failures. Let’s dive in, shall we?
The earliest commercial and conceptual whiff of 2024 came in February and belonged to Jennifer Lopez, whose ill-advised vanity project, This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, was a head-scratchingly bizarre bit of cinematic autofiction about the star’s then-rosy love life and her (let’s admit it) stubborn belief in romance. This weirdly self-revealing film featured a Who’s Who of awkward-looking guest stars that included Jane Fonda, Post Malone, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Fat Joe as her therapist (which, come to think of it, may explain her problems). The release of J. Lo’s daffy home movie was just one front in an all-out pop-culture blitzkrieg which also featured the roll-out of a new album and a North American tour to support of it. However, Lopez’s This Is Me… Now album stiffed, debuting on the Billboard 200 at No. 38—her lowest-charting music release ever. As for the concert dates, after depressingly slow sales, J. Lo changed the focus of her arena playlist from songs from her new album to her greatest hits. Unfortunately, that didn’t move the needle either. Finally, following the bust-up of her second marriage to Ben Affleck, Lopez announced that she was cancelling the tour to spend more time with her family.
In April, Netflix found itself in the thorny position of having to hype the sequel to a movie that no one much cared for the first time around. Technically speaking, Zack Snyder’s two-part sci-fi pastiche, Rebel Moon, was an original movie—and a damned expensive one at that. But the problem that most viewers and critics had with the films was how familiar (read: “how derivative”) they were. This was essentially a spendy greatest-hits package borrowing from every other space epic from the past 50 years. Hell, it even had light sabers! Netflix should have seen this coming, of course. I mean, Snyder wasn’t particularly shy about admitting that he initially developed Rebel Moon as a Star Wars movie. But it was further proof that the deep-pocketed streamer should probably stop writing blank checks to bring talented directors into its tent only to get first crack at their slush-pile rejects. Netflix is, of course, known for being a data-first company. And the viewership numbers were solid for both halves of Rebel Moon. But that data only tells you so much. For example, it can tell you how many people started a movie, but not how many times they got up to change the laundry or how much they actually enjoyed it. Snyder himself would fall victim to this fuzzy strain of logic when he claimed that, according to the numbers, more people streamed Rebel Moon than paid to see Barbie in the cinema. Nice try, but there’s also something called “engagement” to be factored in. And this was a film(s) that absolutely no one was talking about. Either way, Rebel Moon: Part One—A Child of Fire currently sits on Rotten Tomatoes with a 22% fresh rating, while Part Two—The Scargiver bears an even bigger green splat with 16%. That’s a data set we can all understand.
In May, the Cannes Film Festival provided the first looks at two of the most hotly-anticipated directorial projects of the year—Francis Ford Coppola’s long-gestating, shoot-the-works passion project, Megalopolis, and the first chapter of Kevin Costner’s Old West epic, Horizon: An American Saga. Both of these directors are Oscar winners with a string of commercial and critical hits under their belts. But in the studios’ corner offices, they seemed to be relegated to “yesterday’s news” status. In addition to giving films ridiculously-long standing ovations, the Cannes audience is known for being contrarian. They’ll almost always embrace anyone who smacks of being an auteur. After Costner’s film unspooled, the Dances with Wolves director could be seen in the audience with tears in his eyes as the crowd got out their stopwatches and started applauding. However, when the movie played back in the real world a month later, it was doomed out of the gate. Costner had sunk $38 million of his own money into the film and talked about a planned four-film cycle. But after the movie pulled in just $29 million at the North American box office, it began to look like it would come to a close after part two, which for the most part bypassed cinema and limped onto streaming instead.
In a way, Megalopolis was an even sadder story. After all, the 85-year-old Coppola—the artistic trailblazer who once upon a time gave us The Godfather, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now—had been toiling away on his idiosyncratic fantasia for more than 40 years. But as soon as it debuted on the Cote d’Azur, it was anointed as a confounding, colossal disaster. Those standing ovations were over before anyone could get their egg timers out. Meanwhile, reports of audiences laughing at (not with) the film quickly spread like a blaze of schadenfreude. Coppola had leveraged his personal holdings to self-finance the film’s $120 million budget. It wasn’t the first time that the director bet everything on a high-limit wager and rolled snake eyes (although it was certainly the most costly). Some, myself included, had hoped that Megalopolis would usher in a late-career resurgence for Coppola. And it was certainly bursting with Big Ideas. But as much as I admired the director’s sky-high aspirations and old-school ballsiness, in the end, the movie was a commercial disappointment, earning a mere $13 million at the box office.
If all of this all makes it sound like Hollywood was right all along to stick to its diet of predictable sequels and superhero brand extensions, well, not so fast. All you have to do is log onto YouTube and search for clips of Dakota Johnson awkwardly making the talk-show rounds to promote the god-awful Madame Web. Here was a rare moment of an actor not trying to act in the least. You didn’t have to squint very hard to see the embarrassment and sheer agony of a star hyping a movie she didn’t believe in. It was like watching a hostage video. Johnson wasn’t alone either. Just look at the woeful fate of the DOA Kraven the Hunter and the seismic failure of Joker: Folie a Deux, Todd Phillips’ DC supervillain sequel that decided to blow its $200 million budget on punking fans of the original film by essentially making them the butt of a very expensive private joke. Phillips’ musical Joker follow-up barely managed to earn back its budget, which doesn’t even tell the full story once you factor in marketing and promotion costs.
So what can we take from this? Well, as we take our first baby steps into 2025, it’s probably worth pointing out that the studios will glean all of the wrong lessons from this crater-festooned track record. Superhero movies starring tertiary characters will still be green lit without hesitation, while ambitious and original auteur-driven films will have inched one step closer to extinction. Which isn’t just a shame, it’s a tragedy. Personally, I liked Costner’s Western and I found more than a little to admire in Megalopolis. The less said of Folie a Deux, however, the better. Still, if we insist on calling cinema an art form, then we need to keep allowing artists to make movies. That’s not a lesson that you’ll hear many studio accountants talking about right now. But it wasn’t all that long ago that Hollywood, especially in the ‘70s, was a town of gut instincts and gamblers. Let’s hope some of that risk-taking spirit returns in 2025.
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