This movie cost Disney $150 million, but no one went to see it

The tragic galaxy of works that crumbled before the doors of the box office, unfortunately, is full of instructive examples, despite the sometimes pharaonic sums by the studios. Especially if we consider, for example, that for a work whose production cost 100 million dollars, the break-even point should be at least 2.5 times the equivalent of the production budget.

There is a hierarchy in chess. Americans have a term to describe the worst, most destructive of them: A box office bomb. The expression is sometimes used incorrectly and without nuance.

With a production budget of $200 million and a gross of $400 million, a movie like The Eternals is a serious commercial failure. Especially considering a team like Marvel. But this cannot be considered a devastating failure.

On the other hand, we can dwell on the particularly disastrous fate of a 2011 Disney film that almost no one remembers: Milo Mars.

Nobody wants to go to Mars except Milo

Directed by Simon Wells, this animated film grossed just $39.2 million at the international box office, including $21.3 million on American soil. A measly straw, considering the colossal envelope handed out by Disney: $150 million.

Adjusted for inflation, that equates to nearly $210 million today. The film caused Disney to lose an estimated $130 million at the time, or nearly $182 million today. The disaster is such that not only Milo on Mars Was the biggest drop at the US box office of 2011, but also one of the biggest box office drops.

In retrospect, some sites like IndieWireArgued that it was after this serious failure that Disney removed the mention of “Mars” from the following year’s film: John Carter. For what it’s worth, the calculation won’t be good with this movie, which is also cursed. John Carter is one of the worst failures Disney has ever experienced; So disastrous that it even cost the firm’s CEO his place, who abruptly resigned in April 2012.

Among the elements that explain the failure of Milo on Mars is the strange visual approach. If the environment is sometimes incredibly detailed, this especially the character design of the characters can cause problems. There is an Uncanny Valley effect about them. A feeling we don’t see in Robert Zemeckis’ films where he used performance capture. Ironically, Zemeckis is actually one of the film’s producers…

Between the partially failed Chara design, the story, the ultimately rather dark tone, and a Martian dystopia that doesn’t really make you want to go and land a space capsule there with none other than Elon Musk, Milo on Mars completely missed the boat. Where Pixar was still capitalizing on the heady success of Toy Story 3 and DreamWorks’ Dragons.

Want to see what it looks like? Milo on Mars is available on Disney+.