‘Godzilla,’ ‘Star Wars’ And The Most Infamous Memorial Day Box Office Disasters

Today marks the 43rd anniversary of the domestic opening day, in just 32 theaters, of the original Star Wars. The extent that it and Smokey and the Bandit (which opened in semi-wide release two days later) created the notion that Memorial Day weekend was either the start of the summer season or, as the start date moved earlier and earlier, we’ve had 43 years of big movies opening on this family-centric holiday in the hopes of owning the summer season.

Alas, for obvious reasons, there’s no Memorial Day opener this year, as F9 will now open on April 2, 2021 and SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run will now open on August 7, 2020. I did a big post last week on the biggest Memorial Day hits, both including and not including the three Star Wars movies and the three Indiana Jones sequels, so now it’s time to run down the biggest whiffs of the holiday. And now, without further ado, here are the seven biggest Memorial Day weekend bombs.

Godzilla (1998)

Budget: $130 million

Worldwide Box Office: $379 million

Expectations can be a brutal thing, as this Sony release didn’t so much lose its shirt as massively underperform in terms of artistic and commercial expectations. That the pre-release campaign for the monster movie revival was shrouded in mystery was a nice touch, but unfortunately it turned out that the emperor had no clothes. By today’s standards, $379 million worldwide on a $130 million budget would probably justify a sequel, albeit few critics or audience members liked Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin’s “not quite scary but not quite campy” take on the title creature. The film was arguably victim to a classic case of “Hey, you like that thing, you’ll enjoy this somewhat similar thing!” Just because audiences loved Jurassic Park (the second-biggest global grosser ever at the time) didn’t mean they’d automatically flock to Godzilla, even one made by the duo behind Independence Day (the third-biggest global grosser at the time).

Terminator: Salvation (2009)

Budget: $200 million

Worldwide Box Office: $371 million

The first of three now comically-doomed attempts to restart the Terminator franchise (Rise of the Machines was arguably intended to end the series while giving Arnold Schwarzenegger one last mega-payday before running for Governor of California), this McG-directed sci-fi actioner is arguably the best of the last three such films if not because it’s not riffing on The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Even with Christian Bale fresh off The Dark Knight and a promise to finally deliver the much-teased-about “future war,’ Terminator Salvation fell victim to mediocre reviews and clear-cut audience indifference. It placed second behind Night at the Museum: Battle for the Smithsonian, which was a sequel to a recent and well-liked smash hit as opposed to a revival of a franchise that had peaked 18 years earlier. In a sane world, this would have been the end of the Terminator movie franchise.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

Budget: $200 million

Worldwide Box Office: $336 million

One of Walt Disney DIS ’s several early 2010’s-era attempts to create another Pirates of the Caribbean-level cash cow, this Mike Nichols-directed video game adaptation served as an ironic trivia question for awhile, being the biggest-grossing video game movie while still being a huge disappointment in relation to cost. Prince of Persia saw Jake Gyllenhaal as the title character, with Gemma Arterton as the “always feisty” princess and Ben Kingsley as the baddie. The film was a metaphor for the Iraq invasion of 2003, but it was more infamous for its hilariously white-washed casting (“Hold my beer,” said M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender just a month later) and for the fact that (comparatively speaking) nobody showed up. This began Disney’s run of mostly doomed Memorial Day openers, a curse only broken last year with Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, a film that actually cast non-white actors in its non-white narrative.

Tomorrowland (2015)

Budget: $190 million

Worldwide Box Office: $209 million

Brad Bird’s ambitious sci-fi original was essentially the last time Walt Disney took a swing of this size, at least without a guaranteed IP offering insurance. The film was also sold as a mystery to be revealed, but word got out that A) it wasn’t that good and B) the marketing wasn’t hiding anything. The biggest problem was the sky-high budget, as sans expectations Tomorrowland is an interesting sci-fi adventure that kinda washes out in the third act, but still offers plenty of entertainment value in its cast (Britt Robertson, George Clooney and Raffey Cassidy) and periodic moments of off-the-reservation story beats. Nonetheless, like Andrew Stanton’s John Carter leading to him directing Finding Dory, Brad Bird would follow up Tomorrowland with Incredibles 2, both of which topped $1 billion worldwide. In a skewed way, both sci-fi disasters turned out to be long-term successes.

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016)

Budget: $170 million

Worldwide Box Office: $299 million

When a $200 million movie earns $336 million domestic and $1.025 billion worldwide, you make a sequel and hope for the best. The six-years-later follow-up to Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was too late, lacking Burton in the director’s chair (James Bobin did fine) and arriving at a time by which its three biggest selling points (3-D, Johnny Depp in a fantasy lead role and the mere idea of a mega-bucks fairy tale action fantasy) were no longer huge draws for audiences mostly used to a consistent run of “big” tentpoles. The film earned $726 million below, or 71% less than, its predecessor. It was a grim reminder that Disney’s “remake a toon” franchise may not have been sequel-friendly. Still, in a year with Zootopia, Civil War, Finding Dory, The Jungle Book and Rogue One, Alice Through the Looking Glass was but a minor inconvenience.

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

Budget: $170 million

Worldwide Box Office: $543 million

X-Men: Apocalypse was technically a commercially successful feature. However, Bryan Singer’s poorly-reviewed and poorly-received 80’s-set superhero sequel suffered a huge downturn in North America compared to X-Men: Days of Future Past ($233 million in 2014) and only qualified as a hit thanks to a sky-high (for a non-Avengers comic book flick) $121 million in China. But as the Terminator: Genisys and Terminator: Dark Fate taught us, just because they showed up for the one franchise installment doesn’t mean that they liked it or will show up for the next one. Dark Phoenix would earn just $65 million in China and $65 million in America, compared to a still-lousy $155 million in North America for this installment. When your $170 million X-Men sequel earns less in raw grosses than the $75 million X-Men movie ($157 million) in 2000, it should be/should’ve been a sign that it was time to go.

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

Budget: $275 million

Worldwide Box Office: $394 million

Ironically opening 41 years after the first Star Wars (and two years ago today), this ill-advised and explicitly unrequested “young Han Solo” origin story prequel was the first Star Wars movie ever to outright bomb theatrically. Yes, the Ron Howard-directed movie is pretty good, even if its biggest artistic strength (it’s an unassuming outer-space western) was also its biggest commercial liability (it was not remotely an event movie). But audiences didn’t want a “young Han Solo” movie with the character played not by Harrison Ford but by comparative unknown Alden Ehrenreich in a film that played like a classic “turn this IP into a superhero origin story” mistake. It earned an okay $213 million domestic, but was completely ignored overseas, which is ironic when you consider how long overseas box office was used as an excuse for not-so-diverse casting and a plethora of “white guy hero’s journey” would-be tentpoles.