Double the disappointment
Games based on movies are notoriously mediocre. Developers know it, publishers know it, you know it. That's why they're often released without fanfare or significant advertising: why waste money on something you're not 100% confident about? Modern games are expensive enough to make anyway...
Hudson Hawk (1991)
It's pretty amazing how much sway Bruce Willis held in the early 90s. Sure, Die Hard and Moonlighting shot him to superstardom on the silver and small screen alike, but there were plenty of duds in Bruno's wake. Off-screen ventures like his blues albums were dreadful enough, but the Willis-led Hudson Hawk (the only movie Bruce has ever written) was a real money-sink, losing tens of millions of dollars at the box-office.
Cool World (1992)
The live-action/animated hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit released to massive success in the late 80s, though most people probably understood that it was because it brought dozens of animated icons together in a single film. Paramount didn't get the memo, and brought Cool World to theaters, replacing the innovative animation and Steven Spielberg with low-budget production and raunchy animator Ralph Baskhi. Cool World's reception in theaters wasn't hot enough to recoup expenses.
Waterworld (1995)
Okay, the numbers don't lie; Waterworld wasn't the out-and-out failure history would make you believe--though with marketing and distribution costs added to its insane production costs, profitability is harder to prove. However, it was hardly the summer blockbuster Universal Studios expected it to be, and Kevin Costner's career was never the same again.
Cutthroat Island (1995)
How big of a box-office bomb was Cutthroat Island? The Guinness record-setting flop sank formerly successful film studio Carolco and kept live-action pirate movies docked for almost a decade. It was also pretty much the last time Matthew Modine or Geena Davis would ever have the opportunity to headline a big-budget movie.
Blues Brothers 2000 (1998)
Sometimes, when financial failure seems inevitable, a publisher has to see the writing on the wall and cancel a game. Bringing a game to market two years after its movie counterpart crashed and burned should be one of those times, but there were not many publishers like Titus Software (of Superman 64 infamy).
Driven (2001)
Some 14 years after Over the Top proved that Sylvester Stallone's sports cinema prowess was limited to the boxing ring, Sly tried to recapture Rocky's box-office success with Driven. It has all of the ingredients of a successful sports flick: young and hungry rookie, reluctant champion coming out of retirement, inexplicable come-from-behind victories. But guess what? Days of Thunder did it all a decade earlier, so nobody saw this.
Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (2002)
As ill-conceived as some of the previously mentioned game adaptations were, at least they never spawned sequels. Somehow, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever's ineptitude stretched into two Game Boy Advance games. I have to assume publisher Bam! Entertaiment thought the movie would be so successful that people would only have time to play a portable version while waiting in the massive lines at the theater.
Treasure Planet (2002)
The 1990s taught us that historically accurate live-action pirates were box-office poison thanks to Cutthroat Island. The early 2000s taught us that historically inaccurate animated pirates were almost as unpopular. One of the last traditionally animated features to hit theaters from Disney (before it shuffled standard cartoons to direct-to-DVD sequels as Pixar movies kept the company active on the big screen), Treasure Planet joined Titan AE in proving that animated sci-fi isnt as mainstream as some would think.
Catwoman (2004)
Even at their creative heights, sometimes people make pretty big mistakes. In the early 2000s, Halle Berry followed up an Oscar-winning performance in Monster's Ball and box-office success in the first two X-Men movies with the film many agree is possibly the worst superhero film of all time: Catwoman.
Zathura (2005)
It's understandable to see why folks had high expectations for Zathura. Based on a book from the author of Jumanji, the fantasy concept probably had producers expecting another whimsical hit based on a board game with a weird name (the author also penned The Polar Express, but that's a straight-laced hit with a normal name). The spacey film was directed by Jon Favreau, whose Swingers and Elf proved he could appeal to adults and kids alike. Those expectations were not met, as the movie failed to capture an audience.
R.I.P.D (2013)
Yes, we're still seeing awful game adaptations for movies that don't deserve it, but at least they're being done the right way. A decade or two earlier, an ill-conceived comic book adaptation like R.I.P.D would have been released on disc for every platform under the sun with three separate developers and two publishers to account for the differences in generations.
Two Thumbs Down
It's a rare that ideas fail as colossally as these, managing to disappoint critics and audiences in theaters and on consoles, but it's possible we may have blocked out a few similarly panned movies that somehow snuck onto a cartridge or disc. If you know one, tell us about it in the comments below?
