‘Solo,’ ‘Godzilla’ and the seven biggest big-budget whiffs to strike out on Memorial Day weekend.
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.
