The term box office bomb or flop generally refers to a film that is viewed as highly unsuccessful or unprofitable during its theatrical run, sometimes preceding hype regarding its production, cost or marketing efforts. To earn this distinction, the film must also fail to earn more than the reported cost of its production, distribution and marketing by a wide margin.
Gauging the financial success of a film is difficult, and because there is no definitive definition, what makes Box-office bomb can be very subjective. Not all films that fail to earn back their estimated costs during their theatrical runs are bombs, and the label is generally applied to films that miss earnings projections by a wide margin, particularly when they are very expensive to produce, and sometimes in conjunction with middling or poor reviews (though critical reception has nothing to do with box office performance).
Read more about Box Office Bomb: Possible Success of Flops, Studios Pushed Into Financial Ruin, Independent Films
Famous quotes containing the words box, office and/or bomb:
“All your lovely words are spoken.
Once the ivory box is broken,
Beats the golden bird no more.”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“The office ... make[s] its incumbent a repair man behind a dyke. No sooner is one leak plugged than it is necessary to dash over and stop another that has broken out. There is no end to it.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.”
—John Hersey (b. 1914)