It’s not every day you come across a film primed for failure before it’s even been released. Whether it’s due to shabby marketing tactics, production dilemmas, poor directing, or an untimely combination of all of the above, many films can be doomed beyond hope before critics or audiences can even get a word in. It’s not just tiny indie pictures, either - many of the biggest commercial failures over the past decade have come from Disney and Warner Bros., more often than not with a few familiar faces attached to them. If there’s anything we can remember about these movies, it’s usually seeing the commercial for them, proceeded by the inevitable thought, “I’ll wait until it’s on cable.” Here are some of our favorite “least-favorite” movies - films whose downfall began before the cameras even started rolling.

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Artemis Fowl (2020)

     Disney+

Like many of the films that will appear on this list, 2020’s Artemis Fowl had more than a handful of ingredients that would ostensibly mark it for success. Based on a best-selling novel series, directed by Kenneth Branagh, and starring Colin Farrell and Judi Dench, how did the film end up with a whopping 8% on Rotten Tomatoes? For one thing, it might be universally hated because it is nothing like the books; a hero as the main character was really not what we needed in 2020. The movie also heavily diluted some of the novel’s most essential storylines in order to appeal to a more commercial audience, which ended up doing just the opposite. Empire magazine claimed that the script showed signs of having been “cut to ribbons and woven back together” - yikes.

Super Mario Bros (1993)

         Buena Vista Pictures

In 1993, there was not a single demographic who did not fiercely detest Super Mario Bros - critics, parents, and kids everywhere ripped the film to shreds. The essential problem of the disastrous film is that it neither looked nor felt anything like the beloved video game, but rather a bizarre and uncanny perversion of it. Maybe we can appreciate the strange, almost cyberpunk feel of the movie today, but it was hard to see it as less than a catastrophe thirty years ago. Barring the aesthetic conundrums, the film was doomed from the get-go due to there being nine different writers on board, as well as production going way over schedule. Stars as big as Dennis Hopper were left with lines being changed last minute, which caused him to have an on-set screaming match with the directors. Watching the movie now, it seems a bit hard to blame him.

John Carter (2012)

     Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

It’s not always the epically bad films that are bound to flop. Disney’s infamous John Carter lost over $200 million at the box office, and, looking back, is a perfectly mediocre film. But unfortunately, that might be one of the biggest curses for a big-budget action movie. Ironically enough, a large part of the film’s budget went towards marketing, and yet it was the film’s series of confusing, dull trailers that ultimately caused viewers to skip out. The studio catered to those already familiar with the source material, which left the majority of potential audiences unsure of what John Carter was even trying to do. After the first trailer dropped, which gained quite the buzz for its bizarreness, it seemed that no one cared enough about this Mars adventure to give it another visit.

Battleship (2012)

     Universal Pictures Releasing

For the few aspiring filmmakers out there, Battleship is certified proof that you might want to think twice before making a live-action film based on a board game. In this case, what was supposed to be a Transformers-esque blockbuster ended up being a massive flop. Like John Carter, Battleship is not necessarily a bad, as opposed to a merely generic movie, but it simply failed to appeal to summer-blockbuster audiences, especially children who were familiar with the game. Trying to tie in the game with an alien invasion plot ultimately became an extremely convoluted affair, and it didn’t help that Taylor Kitsch was no household name. The movie might have also starred Rihanna and Liam Neeson, but that only made it feel increasingly like an SNL skit.

Son of The Mask (2005)

     Warner Bros.

The Mask is arguably one of Jim Carey’s finest films, timelessly clever and brimming with dark, horror-inspired comedy. The fact that, ten years later, Son of the Mask would traumatize innocent theater-goers is a tragedy of the profoundest sort. To put it in kind terms, the film simply should not have been made, a fact that audiences young and old seem to agree upon. Everything about Son of the Mask is a cringe-inducing beyond belief; instead of Jim Carrey being Jim Carrey, audiences got CGI babies battling CGI dogs and quite bizarre-looking $84 million-dollar cartoon violence. The humor just doesn’t manage to land, and it seems that The Mask’s premise of legendary status should have existed as just that. It won’t get any better than it was the first time around.

The Last Airbender (2010)

     Paramount Pictures

Movies like The Last Airbender are why M. Night Shyamalan’s reputation precedes him in Hollywood. When they hit, we get classics like The Sixth Sense - when they miss, well… oh boy. Not only did The Last Airbender completely blaspheme the iconic show on which it’s based, but it’s also been accused of alleged racism with its inclusion of an almost entirely White cast. While this naturally wouldn’t look good for any film, it’s especially problematic considering that the characters of the show are based primarily on Asian cultures. Furthermore, while what made the show so successful was its blending of and subversion of genre, the film just comes across as wooden, self-serious, and dull. These many details aside, Shyamalan still nobly contests that the film flopped because it was a “kid’s movie” instead of an adult blockbuster.

The Emoji Movie (2017)

     Sony Pictures

It’s quite the gamble to make a movie about emojis that people take even half-seriously. Yet, it’s not even necessarily the plot, acting, or animation of The Emoji Movie that led to such poor ratings and its meme-ification all over the internet. Rather, the film feels just like that: more of a meme than a movie, with a constant barrage of product placement and unfunny jokes to only add insult to injury. Emoji Movie doesn’t very much try to hide its overt pandering to millennials, shoving the same old “be unique” message we’ve heard a thousand times before down our throats. Ultimately, the film might have garnered some successes for being such a punchline - unlike other films on this list, it did not lose money - yet its overall legacy holds up as less than a positive one.

Battlefield Earth (2000)

Battlefield Earth is the single movie that almost destroyed John Travolta’s career - and this is someone who participated in the film Gotti. With its ridiculously outlandish plot that not-so-subtly allegorizes Scientology, Travolta was one of the only ones to initially have faith in the film; it serving as a passion project of sorts for the actor. But ultimately, no element of the film was safe from universal scorn upon release. Not only were its aesthetics comically grotesque and ugly-looking, but the writing and plot of the film can elicit some serious laughs for their inability to make a modicum of sense. Travolta is completely unrecognizable under pounds of prosthetics as an evil alien, and his presence in the film alone wasn’t enough to pull audiences in. The film ended up losing $40 million, but shines as a cult classic for epically bad cinema today.