Earlier this month, Borderlands arrived in theaters to horrendous reviews and bad box office numbers. At the time, many assumed it might be the biggest cinematic dud of 2024. But, that title is now held by the newly released Crow reboot.
The idea of rebooting The Crow was already a strange and controversial one. Sure, the original 1994 film was a small but profitable hit, but it is more widely known for the tragedy surrounding the death of Brandon Lee during its production. The following sequels to the OG Crow failed to find success. Most people believed it was wrong to even reboot the series. Yet, Hollywood went ahead and made a reboot anyway. And what do you know, it’s flopping hard!
The Crow reboot released on August 23 to negative reviews from critics and moviegoers. After its opening weekend, it only earned $4.6 million domestically at the box office. Yikes! In comparison, Borderlands made over $8.5 million during its first weekend.
After about five days in theaters, The Crow has made less than $10 million. Meanwhile, Borderlands—which is reportedly already getting a home release in late August—is sitting at a cool $25 million worldwide at the box office.
Based on a ratio of box office to production budget, Borderlands is still the biggest bomb hands down.
Do we have the budget for the Crow? It definitely seems cheaper with that lame ending, but they didn’t spend no money on advertising either.
the-numbers.com has it at $50m
OK well dang, really proving that movie costs explode from digital effects.
It will be fun to see if any movie manages to beat the flop that is Borderlands then by end of the year. Doubtful.
has anyone past the 90s been able to pull off anything even remotely “goth”?
Does The Batman count? Or is that emo? Please don’t hate me, I’m an old man.
i was never goth, i don’t know what the minimum brooding darkness threshold is, but i hung around goths enough in the 90s to be pretty sure batman would not be considered goth. anne rice crap = definitely goth. the crow remake = definitely NOT goth
Man the new Interview with a Vampire is definitely goth.
Goth generally doesn’t have an uplifting single hero but a bunch of people all collectively wallowing in the mud of sorrow together vibe to it as someone that is basically pastel goth.
I’ve heard about both of these releases for the first time recently and had no idea they were out, so problem number 1 identified.
Problems 1 and 2 are: no-one thought this was a good idea when they were announced and that turned out to be the case. Not letting people know was them cutting their losses - Borderlands ad spend was very much lower than a film of that budget should have had and it’s likely down to the fact that they knew it’d crash and burn so they didn’t want to throw good money after bad.
I thought it was a good idea when it was Jason Momoa as The Crow but that’s just cause I think he is a secret emo and it would have been funny.
I mean, how do you typically hear about movies? I saw trailers for both at the last movie I was at, and Borderlands had a pretty big ad run.
I don’t go to movies very often, but I might if I heard more about what is playing. Targeting ads at people already viewing them regularly seems unsustainable.
Although they are the ones who go to the cinema regularly. Targeting them at people who don’t go seems a waste.
But if they stop going at any point then they stop hearing about it. Its a naturally shrinking demographic.
You need to reach out to new audiences to replace old ones. We need ads at locations and on platforms frequented by youth (under 30) to see good box office returns for obscure films.
Since I don’t go to the theater, watch tv, use adblock on the internet, and don’t follow any movie related news sources… I learn about movies by people complaining about how bad they are.
why advertise bad movies? just a waste of money doing marketing
Why create bad movies? It’s a waste of money in the first place.
Well the Borderlands movie gave a bunch of Hollywood socialites a vacation in Budapest before the covid restrictions were completely released in California… So probably for reasons like that.
Well they don’t always know ahead of time the movie will be bad, but once the movie is finished or nearly finished they can watch the movie and decide if it’s worth a lot of marketing or not
Because our metric for good and bad is whether or not a large number of people payed to see it.
Hollywood Accounting might see it as a loss, but sometimes they seem to want to kill a project for shits and giggles, like they did to Treasure Planet.
You want to know how to make almost every movie a good movie? Target the correct audiences.
Who makes box office flops when they use our symbol without permission?
We do!
I feel like hardly anybody except hardcore movie fans knew this movie was coming out until the eve of its release. This is surely still a massive flop, but it ain’t surprising.
The trailers have been running for a while and it has been talked about on social media quite a bit (rarely in a good light). I also assume it would be on the radar of fans of the games but I suspect most announcements would have annoyed them (quite who the target audience was is a mystery).
Is this the lowest rated year of movies ever? Does rotten tomatoes do average ratings by year?
I don’t think they do.
More interesting would be crunching the numbers at Box Office Mojo, who have an annual overview but it would be worth taking, for example, the ten or twenty films of the year with the largest budgets and look at the returns. I smell a spreadsheet coming on!
Ooooh Eric from The Regulation Podcast will be feeling this. He spent double the points on The Crow that Andrew spent on Twisters 😂
Is The Crow this year’s Morbius?
Crowbius?
