Box-office bomb

In the motion picture industry, a "box office bomb" or "box office flop" is a film that is viewed as highly unsuccessful or unprofitable during its theatrical run, sometimes preceding hype regarding its cost, production, or marketing efforts. Generally, any film for which the production and marketing costs exceed the combined revenue recovered after release is considered to have "bombed".

Gauging the financial success of a film is difficult, and because there is no reliable definition, what makes a box-office bomb can be very subjective. Not all films that fail to earn back their estimated costs during their theatrical runs are bombs, and the label is generally applied to films that miss earnings projections by a wide margin, particularly when they are very expensive to produce, and sometimes in conjunction with middling or poor reviews (though critical reception has an imperfect connection to box office performance).

Beginning in the 1980s, cinemas started to drop movies that suffered a poor opening weekend. This made the performance of a film on its opening weekend much more crucial to its perception. With the growth of the Internet during the 1990s, chat rooms and websites enabled negative word of mouth to spread rapidly.

A troubled production history is sometimes also the case, as it was with Heaven's Gate, which famously went three months over schedule and saw its budget mushroom from $7.5 million to $36 million. These facts caught the ears of journalists and critics who were refused access to the film's set by director Michael Cimino, and upon its release the film was abhorred by the American press.

Films may attract low ticket sales if they are released against heavy competition from other movies also in theaters at the same time. A notable example of this was the 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life. The film was a financial loss for RKO because it was pitted against the highly successful films Miracle on 34th Street and The Best Years of Our Lives. However, it became highly popular during the television era and is now considered a Christmas classic.

While it is rare, films which might otherwise have fared well may under-perform because of issues unrelated to the film itself, with the timing of the film's release being perhaps the most common. This was one of several reasons for the commercial failure of one of Hollywood's first "flops", Intolerance. Owing to production delays, the film was not released until late 1916, by which time the widespread anti-war sentiment it reflected had started to shift in favor of U.S. entry into World War I. While the film would later be considered groundbreaking, its failure drove D. W. Griffith's production company, Triangle Studio, out of business. Other examples include MGM's The Wizard of Oz and Walt Disney's Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi all of which under-performed merely because they were released during World War II, which cut off 60% of Hollywood's international release market. However, these films became popular and critically acclaimed in later years, especially the first, which has gone on to become one of the most iconic films in history.

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