The 10 Worst Blockbusters of the Last 10 Years

The term “blockbuster” is derived from a nickname for a particular type of bomb used by the Allies in World War II. That’s kind of ironic, because the word blockbuster was initially used in a cinematic contest to describe movies that were the opposite of bombs. Blockbusters, as the world now knows them, really came about in the mid 1970s, when films like Jaws and Star Wars drew such enormous crowds that people lined up around the block to see them. Hence, a block-buster.

Fifty years later, “blockbuster” has almost become a catch-all word for a genre: Massive spectacles filled with enormous special effects that typically come out in the summer or around the holidays and cost more money than anyone of us or our children (or our children’s children’s grandchildren) will see in our lifetimes. Today “blockbuster” describe a film’s scale, not necessarily its ticket sales.

In fact, the ten “blockbusters” below might actually return the word to something closer to its origins. These movies were big, yes, but they were also bombs — creatively, if not financially. They’re the worst blockbusters released over the last ten years. They’re ranked not according to quality, but by the size of their estimated budgets.

And in keeping with our theme of defining blockbusters by scale, we decided to consider only films that cost more than $150 million to produce, at least according to publicly available numbers on websites like Box Office Mojo. That meant something like Geostorm did not qualify because it only cost a reported $120 million. Which is too bad. That is a terrible, terrible movie. But according to our definition today, it is not a blockbuster! But all these movies are. And they are all pretty crummy.

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