Is 'Delgo' the Biggest Flop of All Time?
Filed under: New Releases, Box Office
There's a story making the rounds -- originating, as best I can tell, with this post over at Yahoo! Movies -- making the case that this past weekend's minor computer-animated effort Delgo is, to paraphrase, the biggest wide-release bomb of all time. Is that right? As usual, it depends on how you look at it. If you limit your scope to films released in over 2000 theaters -- Delgo occupied 2,160 -- then the raw numbers back up this claim: Delgo's $237 weekend per-screen average and $511,920 gross easily top the chart of all-time worst openings in that category. On the other hand, just this September a quasi-documentary called Proud American opened on 750 screens and managed an even more impressive $128 per-screen average. And Delgo even has competition this December: just the week before, the Alan Rickman action comedy Nobel Son opened on 893 screens to a comparable $374 per-screen average.
Both Delgo and Nobel Son were distributed by Freestyle Releasing, an independent distributor-for-hire. Freestyle fared slightly better with The Haunting of Molly Hartley over Halloween and much better with this summer's limited-release Bottle Shock. The lesson here, I think, is that unless you've got something that's easy to market (e.g. the PG-13 horror of Molly Hartley) and the budget to market it, an independently-arranged wide (or semi-wide) release is a very dicey proposition. Trying to shove a low-profile animated family film into the marketplace during the holidays is even dicier.
Delgo may be the biggest wide-release flop of all time, but no one will remember its failure like they remember Cutthroat Island and Last Action Hero: not because Delgo was low-budget (it reportedly cost $40 million), but because it was, for all intents and purposes, set up to fail.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
12-17-2008 @ 4:42AM
Scott Weinberg said...
Well, shouldn't a film's COST factor in? If DELGO cost $40 million and makes $4 million, it still did better than PLUTO NASH, which cost $100 million and made $5 million.
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12-17-2008 @ 11:03AM
techstar25 said...
So the other option for Delgo would have been straight to DVD, right? Would it have fared better? or would it have been lost on the kids shelf at Blockbuster?
How much money did they stand to lose by pushing it into theaters? I say, why not throw it out there and see what happens. I want to say they had nothing to lose, but how much did they lose? From what I understand, this flick was a labor of love for the creators, so any success is icing on the cake.
They gambled but lost. At least they tried.That takes balls.
They'll get their chance to succeed on DVD either way. You only live once. Take some risks. Why not?
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12-17-2008 @ 11:26AM
Andy said...
I'm not sure it completely nixes really small independent distributors. You just have to make something people want to see. I don't think it helped that 'Delgo's reviews are terrible and it's ugly and unappealing. Not to mention, the tales of how they treated their animators have been the stuff of legend for almost a decade.
There needs to be companies out there that will get some of these REALLY independant movies out there. As filmmaking tools get into the hands of more people there will be opportunities for some massive successes. The 'El Mariachi' example is an extreme, but perfect one..pick something up for next to nothing and make out like a bandit.
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12-17-2008 @ 11:37AM
Joseph Moore said...
I think the movie got decent promotion, I don't watch much TV and I saw ads. I know my kids saw ads, but they weren't clamoring to see it. I think the problem is that the film looks like ass. Sorry.
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12-17-2008 @ 1:59PM
Peter Hall said...
I'd never even heard of the movie until I saw it on a road marquee and thought, "What the hell is Delgo?"
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12-17-2008 @ 2:25PM
Paul said...
Why is Last Action Hero considered one of the biggest failures of all time? Sure, it didn't make a ton of money, but it made more than Speed Racer did and that movie cost more than twice as much to make. And I'm sure there's a bunch of other movies that cost as much as Last Action Hero and made less at the box office.
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12-17-2008 @ 3:07PM
ML said...
In terms of box office, certainly Speed Racer would be the bigger flop. Remember, though, in 1993, $85 million was a heck of a lot to be spending on a picture. I believe the budget is why LAH & Cutthroat Island are so notorious. Not to mention that (in my opinion, my apologies to those who like the film) artistically, LAH fails completely.
12-17-2008 @ 5:11PM
Jonathan Kuhn said...
I think the fact that LAH starred Arnold and was therefore expected to be a big hit plays into it as well. The biggest name surrounding Speed Racer was the Waschowski Brothers.