#NewsBytesExplainer: Understanding box-office bombs—meaning, reasons, prominent examples
What's the story
Making a film takes months, even years, and it's a collaborative effort between hundreds of skilled people. While entertainment and commercial success is the eventual goal, not everyone's luck agrees to favor them. Even though box office collection is only one of the several parameters to gauge a film's quality, dismal collections are a huge setback for the entire team, especially the producer.
Meaning and definition
Bomb versus flop: What's the key difference?
Box office bombs are films that have a dismal start at the box office and are unable to gather any momentum whatsoever in the coming days. Negative word-of-mouth and critics' reviews play a part here and these projects aren't able to recover their production costs. While a flop is bad enough, if a film "bombs," it means it has simply crashed irreparably.
Reasons
There are numerous reasons that lead to films' poor performance
Several reasons can lead to films' poor box office performance. The most obvious ones are the lack of a proper storyline, offensive content (in some cases), a frustrating screenplay that is disjointed and hard to understand, or a done-to-death story. Moreover, now, in the OTT era, only selected movies have the potential of being crowd pullers; others simply bite the dust eventually.
Hollywood examples
This film earned only $11 on its first day
In 2011, the English-language film The Worst Movie Ever! registered a bizarre record. It opened only in one theater and earned $11. Some other movies that feature in the list of the biggest box office bombs are The 13th Warrior, Alexander, Allied, Chill Factor, Chaos Walking, Dark Phoenix, Fantastic Four, Gemini Man, Ghostbusters, Hugo, The Invasion, and The Nutcracker in 3D, among others.
Bollywood examples
These are some of the biggest commercial failures in Bollywood
Like any other film industry, Bollywood, too, is not untouched by box-office bombs. Examples include Ajay Devgn-Anil Kapoor's Tezz, Akshay Kumar's Joker, Ram Charan-Priyanka Chopra Jonas's Zanjeer, Anurag Kashyap's Bombay Velvet, Vikas Bahl's Shaandaar, Abhishek Kapoor's Fitoor, Vishal Bhardwaj's Rangoon, Raj-DK's A Gentleman, and Dinesh Vijan's Raabta, among others. Such films gradually fade into oblivion and even the actors don't mention them often.