$150 Million Disney Movie Flops: No One Went to See It!

The tragic galaxy of films that have crashed at the box office doors is unfortunately studded with notable examples, despite the sometimes astronomical sums poured into them by studios. Particularly when you consider that, for a movie made on a budget of $100 million, it needs to earn at least 2.5 times its production budget to break even.

There’s a hierarchy in failures. To describe the worst among them, the most disastrous, Americans use the term: box office bomb. This phrase is sometimes thrown around carelessly, without much distinction.

With a production budget of $200 million and grossing only $400 million, a film like The Eternals is considered a major commercial failure, especially by a powerhouse like Marvel. However, it’s not categorized as a catastrophic failure.

However, one can ponder the particularly dire fate of a film released in 2011 and produced by Disney, which almost no one remembers anymore: Mars Needs Moms.

Nobody Wants to Go to Mars, Except Milo

Directed by Simon Wells, this animated film garnered only $39.2 million at the international box office, with $21.3 million of that from the United States. A mere trifle compared to the massive budget bestowed by Disney: $150 million.

Adjusted for inflation, that amounts to about $210 million today. The film resulted in a loss of approximately $130 million at the time, which would be nearly $182 million today. Such a disaster that not only was Mars Needs Moms the biggest box office flop in America for the year 2011, but it also ranks as one of the greatest failures in box office history.

In retrospect, some outlets, like IndieWire, have suggested that following this severe flop, Disney removed the word “Mars” from the title of the next year’s film: John Carter. Unfortunately, this decision did not prove effective for that film either, which also became a notorious failure. John Carter was such a devastating flop that it even led to the resignation of the company’s CEO in April 2012.

Among the reasons for the failure of Mars Needs Moms, one might point to its peculiar visual approach. While the environments are sometimes incredibly detailed, it’s primarily the character design that may be off-putting. There’s a sense of the Uncanny Valley about them, a feeling not encountered in Robert Zemeckis’ films where he used performance capture. Ironically, Zemeckis was indeed one of the producers of the film…

Between a partially failed character design, a rather dark tone to the story, and a Martian dystopia that hardly seems welcoming unless you’re Elon Musk, Mars Needs Moms completely missed the mark. Meanwhile, Pixar was still riding the massive success of Toy Story 3, and DreamWorks on that of How to Train Your Dragon.

Still curious to see what it looks like? Mars Needs Moms is available on Disney+.