#1 Robot Monster (1953)
Estimated production budget: $16,000
Total worldwide box office: $1 million.
Quotes: It's commonly reported that this film's director attempted suicide after the film failed at the box office.
#2 Tron (1979)
Estimated production budget: $26 million
Total domestic box office: $35 million (worldwide box office unknown).
Quotes: It's easy to find articles listing this movie as a flop.
#3 Hook (1991)
Estimated production budget: $70 million
Total worldwide box office: $301 million.
Quotes: "Hook [is] the rare Spielberg flop." Time Magazine
#4 Planet of the Apes (2001)
Estimated production budget: $100 million
Total worldwide box office: $362 million.
Quotes: "Mark Wahlberg reveals why Planet of the Apes flopped" (headline from Movies.com)
#5 Vanilla Sky (2001)
Estimated production budget: $68 million
Total worldwide box office: $203 million.
Quotes: "The decade since Almost Famous hasn't been kind to [Cameron] Crowe, with only flops (Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown) and a couple of rockumentaries to show for it." The Tampa Bay Times
#6 Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed (2004)
Estimated production budget: $25 million
Total worldwide box office: $181 million.
Details: Apparently it was considered a big enough disaster that it banished the live-action Scooby movies to the direct-to-DVD zone. People did note that its domestic box office was down from the first movie's.
#7 King Kong (2005)
Estimated production budget: $207 million
Total worldwide box office: $550 million.
Quotes: Lots of people described this film as a box office flop, to the point where other people had to defend it.
#8 Superman Returns (2006)
Estimated production budget: $270 million
Total worldwide box office: $391 million.
Details: So as we've observed before, this movie made roughly as much money as Batman Begins. But because Bryan Singer's film was saddled with the budgets of all the failed Superman movies of the 1990s and 2000s, including Tim Burton's and McG's, it was a failure on paper.
#9 Eragon (2006)
Estimated production budget: $100 million
Total worldwide box office: $250 million.
Details: This is one of the first examples of a new phenomenon movies that underperform domestically but make more than enough money overseas to compensate. See also Last Airbender below.
#10 Ghost Rider (2007)
Estimated production budget: $110 million
Total worldwide box office: $228 million.
Quotes: "Although Ghost Rider was notoriously known as being one of Nicolas Cage's worst flops, Columbia Pictures has decided to give the Marvel comic another chance." - The Celebrity Cafe.
#11 Jumper (2008)
Estimated production budget: $85 million
Total worldwide box office: $222 million.
References: It's pretty easy to find articles where this is referred to as a major flop, or part of a mid-career stumble for director Doug Liman.
#12 The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008)
Estimated production budget: $80 million
Total worldwide box office: $233 million.
Quotes: "Fox forced out this turd of a remake, which not only tanked at the box office, but will likely harm the original's reputation in the memories of future generations of film fans." Screenjunkies
#13 The Last Airbender (2010)
Estimated production budget: $150 million
Total worldwide box office: $320 million.
Details: Another movie that failed in the U.S. and is regarded as a box office disappointment but did gangbuster business overseas, pushing it back into profitable territory. To a lesser extent, this also happened with X-Men: First Class.
#14 Spy Kids: All The Time in the World (2011)
Estimated production budget: $27 million
Total worldwide box office: $74 million.
Quotes: Frequently dismissed as an underperforming sequel, although people sometimes do note that the low budget made it profitable.
