Hollywood Transformers star Shia LaBeouf’s new move collected just £7 in sales on the first day of release in the UK.
Man Down, the story of an Afghanistan US marine veteran struggling to come to terms with life back home, went on to take £21 in the first week.
Granted the film was only taken up by a small art house in the industrial town of Burnley, Lancashire, but the LaBeouf has hardly set the world on fire.
Critics have slammed the film, directed by Dito Montiel, as misfiring and missing the target as a story of how combat scarred soldiers are supported in their new battle against post-traumatic stress disorder.
Man Down sets out to show the gritty realism of PTSD but is a ‘fascinating example of how a powerful performance and good intentions can be derailed by a misguided concept and flawed execution’, according to reviewer Ian Freer in glossy magazine Empire.
Man Down and out
As box office flops go, Man Down is certainly among the walking wounded, but a lot of big budget projects have performed worse.
The question is who is the person that handed over seven quid to sit in an otherwise empty cinema to watch such a disaster of a movie?
The viewer must have been a fan as LaBeouf’s mum is not a Burnley resident.
Unfortunately, Man Down was not alone – the same weekend saw the opening of Guru, which grossed £17 and The Void, which took £1,163 over the counter.
Fans paid over £6.75 million to watch Beauty and The Beast during the same weekend.
Only a year ago, Emma Watson, Belle in Beauty and the Beast and Harry Potter’s love interest in the schoolboy wizard series, grossed £47 when The Colony opened in the UK.
Biggest box office flops
But the real flops are the movies that lost $60 million or more – and that list has more than 100 entries.
John Carter, released in 2012, is the stand-out winner – or biggest loser – clocking up a $200 million loss at the box office.
Disney cast Taylor Kitsch as Carter, an American Civil War veteran transported to Mars.
The budget was $264 million and audiences handed over $284 million, but after deducting cinema costs, marketing and the production bill, the loss was gigantic.
Close behind comes The Lone Ranger (2013), losing $195 million, with Johnny Depp starring as sidekick Tonto – which is Spanish for fool or idiot, by the way.