It was a good year for much of Hollywood, but a bad year for A Good Year. The Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe team-up only grossed $7 million domestically, and has been labeled a flop. Variety has listed the major box office disappointments for 2006, and interestingly enough, a few of them have to do with water. The appropriately bad way to describe their fate, then, is to say that they drowned. Flushed Away, The Lady in the Water, Poseidon and The Fountain (okay, I didn't see it, but I don't think there's an actual water-type fountain), just couldn't swim. Here's some more bad puns: Sharon Stone didn't have the Basic Instict 2 stay away from a dumb sequel; Producer Dean Devin said, "Flyboys," to his new movie but it crashed and burned; All the King's Men stayed away from this remake, and so did everyone else; Audiences let their Freedomland in other activities besides seeing a movie starring Julianne Moore and Samuel L. Jackson. There's no pun needed for The Wicker Man; it just sucked.Unlike the biggest flops of all time, none of these movies from 2006 broke a studio or likely ended a career. Ridley Scott and Wolfgang Petersen (director of Poseidon) have had flops before, but they can be forgiven for "flukes" every once in awhile since they usually turn out successful work. Plus, their films did okay business overseas. International box office saves more flops these days than back in the times of the really big bombs. Most of the other filmmakers represented are also probable to bounce back, or at least fall back on their other talents. Joe Roth (Freedomland) has already returned to producing. Steve Zaillian (All the King's Men) is back to writing. Tony Bill (Flyboys) may continue acting. Michael Caton-Jones (Basic Instinct 2) will eventually make another crappy film. M. Night Shyamalan (Lady in the Water) might need to be forced to work on somebody else's script for once, but he isn't going to disappear anytime soon, unfortunately.
There are two movies that could have more averse affect on their creators. Darren Aronofsky may not get to make another ambitious film with the sort of freedom he had on The Fountain, at least not for awhile. But his supposedly underrated, misunderstood picture may be considered a classic one day, just as happened to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, to which The Fountain has been compared. The other movie, Flushed Away, has already caused a punishing reaction. Last month, Dreamworks announced they'll be taking a write-down on the film, and the studio is thinking about severing its deal with Aardman Animation.
Other sites are giving their own opinions of what the biggest disasters of 2006 are. ING claims Zoom and My Super Ex-Girlfriend are the biggest flops. According to Wikipedia's list of biggest bombs, this year's worst sufferers were Basic Instinct 2, Bloodrayne, and Slither. Other analyses may point to Superman Returns, Snakes on a Plane, Akeelah and the Bee, Apocalypto, or Mission: Impossible III.
What do you think the biggest disappointment of 2006 was?
1. Well, what is a flop? A succesful bad movie? A masterpiece that is also a money loser?
For me the worst movie of 2006, hands down, was A Prairie Home Companion. Pointless, out of focus, critically acclaimed and a completely shallow exercise in snobbish filmmaking. Robert Altman used to stink.
Posted at 2:11PM on Dec 26th 2006 by Anibal Fernan