Comedies Dominate Forbes’ Biggest Movie Flops of 2016

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As 2016 comes to a close, it’s time to take an accounting. Not of Presidential election votes, but the movie box office. This year, like most years, the box office was won by cartoons and super hero movies. Forbes.com has released a look at the other side of the box office, the flops or as the financial site calls them “Hollywood’s Biggest Turkeys Of 2016“. Half of the top 10 list of this year’s biggest flops were comedies which took a beating when it came time to earn their money back in theaters. The “turkeys” were determined using “information from Box Office Mojo, IMDB and other sources to find worldwide box office grosses and estimated production budgets.” Forbes “ranked films based on the percentage of their budgets they earned back at the theater as of November 21st.”

Zach Galifianakis took a double whammy at the box office. He had two films in the Top 10 biggest flops of 2016. His crime caper comedy, “Masterminds” co-starring Kristen Wiig, Jason Sudeikis and Owen Wilson came in at number ten. That film made $22 million, but had a budget of $25 million. Zach also came in at number six on the list with “Keeping Up with the Joneses”. The spy comedy co-starring Jon Hamm had a budget of $40 million and only made $26.9 million at the box office.

popstarWhile Zach Galifianakis made the list of flops twice, he did not have the biggest comedy flop of 2016. That honor went to Andy Samberg who landed at number three on Forbes list with “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping”. The combination rockumentary – mockumentary only made $9.5 million with a budget of $20 million. One problem could be that a lot of the press the movie received had the title wrong, including the Forbes piece. Besides not getting the title right, people also obviously didn’t get the joke of Andy Samberg playing a Justin Bieber-esque character in the film that co-starred his Lonely Island brothers, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone.

Other notable comedy names on Forbes list of 2016’s biggest movie flops included Tina Fey with her action drama comedy, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”. The dramedy about an embedded woman reporter in Afghanistan ranked number seven on the list. Sacha Baron Cohen was right next to Tina at number eight with his action spy comedy co-starring Mark Strong, “The Brothers Grimsby”. Also on the list was the horror action comedy, “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” which came in at number four.

The non-comedy flops on Forbes Biggest Turkeys of 2016 consisted of the number one flop, “Max Steel”. If you’ve never heard of the super hero film dud, don’t worry. Obviously, no one else has either. Number two was Matthew McConaughey’s Civil War period piece “Free State of Jones”, (it really wasn’t a good year for movies with the name “Jones” in the title). Number five was a cartoon that kids didn’t even want to see called “Ratchet & Crank”. And number nine was the biopic thriller which wasn’t all that thrilling, “Snowden” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the government secret leaker Edward Snowden who America got tired of hearing about.

Read more comedy news.

Ernie Tripper
Ernie Tripper