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The Most Surprising Box Office Bombs Of 2013

It's quite difficult for a movie to totally bomb. Most movies, given a long enough timeframe, will make their money back. That timeframe differs from project to project - it might turn a profit at Christmas, or a year after the theatrical release, or after twenty years on DVD, but the high-stakes mega-budget mega-cast CGI extravaganzas that we get nowadays rarely fail, purely because of who's in them. How else do you explain the continued popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean series? Two words - Johnny Depp. He very rarely bombs (Dark Shadows notwithstanding) purely because he is attractive and the budgets of the films he's usually in are huge.

3) The Fifth Estate

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Benedict Cumberbatch in The Fifth Estate

For the past few years, Julian Assange has been front and centre of most global news stories. The founder of WikiLeaks, with the release of tens of thousands of diplomatic cables, changed our world. Suddenly, there was tangible proof that governments were spying on us. If nothing else, his actions facilitated the Edward Snowden revelations, proving to most that their worst fears about what their governments knew about them were not only met but exceeded by the truth. Basically, anything Assange should be box office gold. He’s currently holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London on Swedish rape charges, a real life fugitive from justice. How could a movie about him fail?

Well, somehow, it did. Starring the very British Benedict Cumberbatch – currently in the midst of a stratospheric career trajectory, playing both Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness and Smaug in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (to name but two roles) – as Assange himself, even getting a Hollywood megastar to play the reclusive but flamboyant hacker wasn’t enough.

Perhaps it was the abstract title – “the fifth estate” refers to the practice of online journalism and alternative media that WikiLeaks represents. Maybe it was a sense of a public apathy towards a subject that has dominated the world news since 2010 – how do you make an interesting and surprising film, the subject of which has been played out ad nauseam across thousands of news outlets for three years? And is still ongoing? Maybe it was Cumberbatch’s wig?

The film actually opened to decent reviews, but ended up taking $6 million against a budget of $28 million. That’s not good at all, and pennies for a Cumberbatch movie. I bet his trench coat in Star Trek Into Darkness cost more than that.

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