Mega-Bombs

Where Titan A.E. (2000) was the death knell for 2D cel animation, Treasure Planet proved the coffin. A hollow casket it proved to be for Disney, with a $140 million budget, it bombed with just $40 million domestically, no doubt feeling the effects of being sandwiched between the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings sequels. It is a grand bomb, costing jobs at Disney's Florida division.

Francis Ford Coppola was one of the great American directors of the 1970s, critically acclaimed and commercially successful with hits like The Godfather Part I and II, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation cementing his place among the greats. The 80s he sought to produce more personal features, which his accumulation of wealth allowed him to do. One From the Heart was produced by his Zentrope Films Production Company. A mega-bomb of the highest calibre, the $20 million film managed just $1.7 million in return. It banrupted his company and plunged him into a steady downward spiral, with more low-key features like The Outsiders and The Cotton Club, another infamous bomb.

With his follow-up to Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffiths became one of the early pioneers of hype and expectation. His obsession with cinematic spectacle drove the budget of Intolerance to $2 million, unprecedented for the 1910s. Its failure to recoup resulted in the bankruptcy of Griffith's production company. Nonetheless it has since been recognized as one of the most culturally significant films of Hollywood, tackling racism and bigotry.

Like A Troll in Central Park and All Dogs Go to Heaven before it, Titan A.E. was a 2D film that felt the resounding bodyslam of Pixar's 3D revolution. Titan A.E. became the major scalp of backlash, the $75 million film made just $17 million. It forced Fox to close down its 2D animation studios and killed the fashionability of the style for many years.

With Dances with Wolves, Kevin Costner became the Golden Boy of Hollywood, the all-American stud and box-office draw who caused Scorsese fanboys to be seething with his clean sweep of the 90s Academy Award over Goodfellas and had a run of hits including Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, The Bodyguard and. With Waterworld he tested the waters (no pun intended), a cataclysmic failure that barely saved face, but The Postman was the final slap that drew his 90s to a close. It was another vanity project, Dances with Wolves meets Mad Max in an attempt to return himself to the one-man status of the early 90s. What it meant in the end was he was totally to blame for the fiasco, something which

Originally intended for a 1997 release date, the film had such an atrocious test screening that the studio had no choice but to pull it back in and go into damage control. Original director John McTiernan departed and Michael Crichton was brought in to salvage the adaptation of his own novel, with his reshoots and extended post-production driving the budget up to $160 million. It was finally dumped into theaters with little fanfare and became a worldwide bomb, making just $60 million worldwide.

Holds firm the record for the biggest money-loser of all time, with its $110 million production budget only seeing $10 million in global admissions. A clunker sat on the shelf at Warner Bros. for several years before nervous studio execs realized they had no choice but to dump it into cinemas and recoup their mismanaged investment. An ultra-bomb of monolithic proportions, this space stinker holds the record.