‘Cloud Atlas’ Learns the Hard Way That Sometimes Six Tom Hanks in Your Movie Just Isn’t Enough

Oh Cloud Atlas. You were an ambitious, cerebral piece of artistic filmmaking that had it's makeshift wings melted by the heat of the sun, crashing into the box office poison that lay beneath you. Opening at the #3 spot for the weekend, sending Argo up to #1 in its wake, the film by Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Tywker brought in less than $10 million in over 2,000 theaters. And with a price tag of $100 million, without even considering marketing costs which tends to double a film's budget, the movie has a long, long way to go if it ever hopes to recoup it's losses. (FYI, it won't)

While everyone celebrates when a film comes out of nowhere to earn bajillions upon quatrillions of dollars, the one thing that makes people in Anytown, U.S.A. happier is when a Hollywood flick does the exact opposite and just absolutely shows up to the box office D.O.A. no matter how much talent and money is behind it.

Which is why we take a look at some of the biggest flops in Hollywood history and ponder exactly who will be fired at Warner Bros. for greenlighting Cloud Atlas (though an interesting article on the film's strange development process was recently published in the New Yorker).