By There are flops and then there are flops. Jem and the Holograms is the latter. It didn’t just flop for Universal it broke records while doing it. The movie pulled in just $1.37 million its opening weekend, and couldn’t even crack the top 10 despite being released wide in 2,413 theaters. That makes it the lowest grossing film to debut in more than 2,000 theaters in the history of cinema. This past week didn’t help much as it dropped a whopping 71 percent to only gross $160 per theater. Now Universal has pulled it after only two weeks and just $2.1 million of grosses.
Pulling movies happens. Pulling movies after just two weeks of play does not. This is a pretty unprecedented move by Universal, but I doubt their sweating it much. Jem only cost $5 million to make and Universal has been having a pretty good year what with that Jurassic movie being the biggest movie ever and a few other hits. Still, this has got to burn. The movie had the fourth worst opening weekend of the year, and is easily the most wide released of the films at the bottom.
Maybe the issue was that it was a a really bad movie trying to appeal to teens who had no idea what it was about? Could it have been the poorly done marketing that abandoned both fans of the original cartoon and the younger audience? Whatever the reasons it’s totally, totally gone now.
[via Business Insider]