The ‘bomb’ this weekend was Eddie Murphy’s new movie...0% at Rotten Tomatoes...0%. Carter got 50%, for crying out loud.
The MSM focuses on the budget of a movie too much. By their logic, you could have the #1 movie of the year be a bomb if it made a billion dollars but cost 2 billion to produce. The understood definition of a “bomb” is a movie no one goes to see, not one that just cost too much to make.
Last year, Mars Needs Moms was a bomb. It made $7 million opening weekend and $21 million total.
John Carter made $30 million in its opening weekend. That’s not a bomb, but it does mean the budget should have been half of what it was to be profitable. Prince of Persia opened with the exact same and ended up with $90 million, but made an unusually high amount overseas. These are B movies that were given A budgets. Anyone should have known this material shouldn’t justify this kind of budget, but it appears this was a vanity project as the first live-action movie for one of their top Pixar creators. Now that it’s out of his system, Disney will surely be happy to have him return to animation.