22 movie blockbusters nobody remembers

, which opened in 2009, unfolds in 2009, 2010, and 2012. Independence Day director Roland Emmerich once again set about destroying the world, with John Cusack as an everyman trying to save his family from multiple natural disasters. The film works pretty well. Shit goes boom, and there’s an ark (and a character named Noah) but it, more than any entry on this list, feels like a product of its time. It was sci-fi in 2009 and felt dated by 2012. Now, more than a decade later it’s a blockbuster (which grossed $769 million worldwide) more forgotten than forgettable.

Tim Burton and seemed like a match made in heaven—brilliant filmmaker and mind-blowing story. He delivered 108 minutes of eye-popping visuals, for sure, but everything felt garish and over-over-overdone, and that included the performances, as the scenery-chomping Johnny Deep (The Mad Hatter) and Helena Bonham Carter (The Red Queen) completely overshadowed more nuanced turns by Mia Wasikowska (Alice) and Anne Hathaway (The White Queen). Is there another film that grossed more than $1 billion worldwide—$1 billion!!!—that anyone cares less about?

Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s received ungodly reviews, but moviegoers lapped it up to the tune of $750 million worldwide, thus ensuring a sequel. Its follow-up, Angels & Demons, was no Godfather Part II, though, in fairness, it improved on its predecessor with a potboiler plot involving the Vatican, antimatter, and Tom Hanks and Ayelet Zurer racing to save the day. Here in the Hanks-loving U.S. of A., it conjured just $133 million against a $150 million budget. But it grossed $352 million elsewhere around the globe, prompting the unwatchable Inferno (which tanked at $34 million). God help us, but that’s an entire trilogy of instantly forgettable films.

We can envision the pitch: “Let’s remake with modern stars and contemporary special effects.” Sadly, Louis Leterrier—who went on to direct marginally better films including 2013’s Now You See Me and 2023’s Fast X—served up this blasphemous dud that stars Sam Worthington and features Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Elizabeth McGovern, and other big names collecting big paychecks. The movie somehow conjured up $163 million at home and $330 million abroad. At least we got to hear Neeson intone, “Release the Kraken!” Its far worse sequel, 2012’s Wrath Of The Titans, didn’t crack the $100 million mark in America.

Mega-producer Jerry Bruckheimer and then-bankable (and never picky) Nicolas Cage reunited after The Rock to deliver the action flick . Here’s the whole plot: a group of uber-dangerous inmates commandeer their transport plane in an escape attempt, and Cage (a good guy prisoner) and John Cusack (a marshal) must stop them. Con Air rates as scruffy, empty-calorie, stupid fun with an insane (OK, let’s call it memorable!) plane crash in Las Vegas. Given all the talent (Ving Rhames, John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, etc.), it should have been better. And it just made the cut at $101 million domestic.

Disney pushed the limits by melding CGI animation with live-action backgrounds for , a tale of an orphaned dino (voiced by D.B. Sweeney) who finds a new family with a bunch of lemurs after a meteor turns everything around them inhospitable. If only the studio put the same effort into the cliched, cloying, predictable, if heartfelt script. The costly film ($127 million) grossed $138 million in North America on the way to a $349 million worldwide take. Few people worship Dinosaur like they do plenty of other beloved Disney classics and the studio seems completely disinterested in it. Heck, it’s as if Dinosaur is extinct.

A straight-up action-thriller, casts Arnold Schwarzenegger as the title character, a guy who helps people disappear into the Witness Protection Program. Here, he must protect Vanessa Williams, an exec aware of dirty doings at a defense contractor. Schwarzenegger, by the mid-1990s, unleashed hits and flops in equal measure: Last Action Hero, True Lies, Junior, Jingle All The Way, Batman & Robin, etc. Eraser fell somewhere in the middle, and thus barely registers on Ahnuld’s filmography. For the record, the $100 million production grossed $101 million in America and another $141 million elsewhere around the world.

G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra—based on the beloved Hasbro toy line—hardly demanded a sequel, as it earned tepid reviews and grossed a mere $300 million worldwide ($150 million in the U.S.) on a $175 million budget in 2009. Still, we got G.I. Joe Retaliation four years later (and we won’t even mention 2021’s moribund Snake Eyes). brought back Channing Tatum and added Bruce Willis and Dwayne Johnson. The results? All action, a convoluted plot and no heart, yet $122 million worth of Americans saw this thing (while banking another $253 million internationally versus a reported $140 million-ish budget). A decade later, it’s completely out of mind.

On the heels of Independence Day, the Roland Emmerich-Dean Devlin tandem had carte blanche to make any movie at any cost. They chose to go with and spent nearly $150 million letting their utterly unconvincing titular creature wreak havoc on New York City. Nothing worked. It took too long to see Godzilla and when we finally did, he evoked no palpable menace. The usually reliable Matthew Broderick, as our everyman turned hero, seemed lost. Critics savaged it and its opening weekend was lackluster. Still, it managed to get over the hump and make $136 million domestic. Truly, no one remembers this one.

We love Adam Sandler, but he’s made some crappy movies. The Ridiculous 6 and Jack & Jill arguably rank as the crappiest, but the former streamed on Netflix and the latter didn’t crack our $100 million threshold, so we’re going with . In it, Sandler (Chuck) and Kevin James (Larry) play straight firefighters pretending to be a gay couple to secure life insurance benefits for Larry’s family. It eked out $120 million, but even hardcore Sandler fans put this one out of their memories thanks to its homophobia, misogyny, and dearth of laughs.

They can’t all be classics, right? The good folks at Dreamworks gave us , a perfectly OK comedy featuring amusing animals, a good environmental message, decent animation, and an utterly ridiculous cast that included Bruce Willis, Wanda Sykes, Steve Carell, Catherine O’Hara, William Shatner, Garry Shandling, Nick Nolte, Eugene Levy, and Allison Janney. It grossed $155 million domestically (and $336 million worldwide), thus putting the kibosh on hoped-for sequels and leaving lots of tie-in products in the discount bin. Still, $155 million! In 2006, no less!

This is Sam Raimi’s Alice In Wonderland, something that seemed so right in theory and turned out so wrong in reality. A miscast James Franco disastrously channels Johnny Depp as The Wizard of Oz and a game Mila Kunis doesn’t quite click as The Wicked Witch in , a Wizard Of Oz prequel. Raimi goes overboard production-wise, it’s way too scary for kids, and it lacks magic. Lost in all this is a wonderful, touching performance by Michelle Williams as Glinda the Good Witch. Though it grossed nearly $500 million worldwide, Oz The Great And Powerful was instantly forgettable—and forgotten.

The long-awaited reunion of Pretty Woman director Garry Marshall and stars Julia Roberts and Richard Gere turned out to be , a harmless, mediocre romantic comedy. Roberts plays a woman who has fled three weddings (so far), prompting reporter Gere to write a story about her. When they fall in love, which they must, will she run away again? Runaway Bride rode the popularity of Pretty Woman and the Roberts-Gere pairing (which didn’t click quite as well here) to a $150 million North American gross (and $309 million worldwide), but these days it’s a blip on the radar of all involved.

TV actor turned director Clark Johnson made his feature directorial debut with this serviceable action flick based, like so many other so-so movies, on a popular old TV series. boasts that classic theme music, Samuel L. Jackson chewing the scenery as Hondo, and strong work from young co-stars Colin Farrell and Jeremy Renner. But it was all just so … unnecessary. Still, audiences liked it to the tune of $117 million domestic and another $91 million internationally, which translated to … no sequel. CBS rebooted the series in 2017, canceled it in May 2023, and then days later.

In , Dwayne Johnson plays a rescue helicopter pilot who races from earthquake-stricken Los Angeles to save his estranged wife (Carla Gugino) and their daughter (Alexandria Daddario) in San Francisco. Try not to laugh at Johnson and Gugino as they outrun a tsunami in a boat. The movie established Johnson as a bona fide action hero (versus just a supporting player), but it’s preposterous as hell. Still, San Andreas grossed nearly a half-billion dollars worldwide ($155 million in the U.S.), but these days it gets lost in the shuffle among Johnson’s better films.

Be honest, you can still hum bits of the A.R. Rahman/Gulzar song “Jai Ho,” but you can’t recall the plot of the film it’s in. As a refresher: is about a Muslim teen (Dev Patel) who competes on the Hindi equivalent of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Colorful, inventively shot, and wonderfully cast (especially Patel and Freida Pinto), Slumdog Millionaire grossed $140 million (and $378 million worldwide) and won eight Oscars, including Best Picture. While it turned out to be more sugar-rush dessert than memorable meal, it ranks as the best film on this list, so it’s worth rediscovering.

Legions of fans revered Tron, a wildly ambitious sci-fi epic hampered by dodgy (even for 1982) FX. But if you wait long enough, all fanboy wishes come true and in 2010 Disney released , a sequel that promised the return of Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner, and state-of-the-art FX. Bridges gave it his all, Boxleitner made the most of his extended cameo, and the visuals rocked (except for the de-aged Bridges), but the crucial father-son (Bridges and Garrett Hedlund) storyline misfired, resulting in a glossy, loud, and impersonal experience that few people seem eager to revisit although it raked in $400 million worldwide. Still, a third Tron is in the works, with Jared Leto attached to star.

The late Wolfgang Petersen tried valiantly to transform The Iliad into an epic war movie, but came up waaaay short. Ponderous and endless (at a whopping 163 minutes), rarely lets leading man Brad Pitt do more than look pretty—though, boy, does he glisten (as Achilles). Eric Bana (Hector) and Orlando Bloom (Paris) seem uncomfortable and miscast, respectively, though Diane Kruger (Helen), Peter O’Toole (Priam), and Brian Cox (Agamemnon) shine. Like a Trojan horse, Troy found an audience, delivering $497 million across the globe ($133 million from North America), but no one remembers it, much less considers it a classic.

We’re feeling a little guilty about including on our rundown. It ain’t a classic, but this comedy delivered the laughs from beginning to end (and even after the end, with some great bloopers), and it nicely showcased the talents of leads Jennifer Aniston, Jason Sudeikis, Emma Roberts, and Will Poulter, as well as supporting players Kathryn Hahn and Nick Offerman. We’re The Millers also drove home $270 million worldwide (including $150 million in America). Yet no one seems to remember it, making it our go-to hidden gem.

Harrison Ford flounders in Robert Zemeckis’ Hitchcockian horror film . Though moody and atmospheric, and even with a strong performance by Michelle Pfeiffer as a woman who believes her husband (Ford) murdered someone, Zemeckis can’t sew all the threads into a cohesive whole. And so, the thrills, including a séance and a possession, hardly thrill. It grossed a hefty $291 million worldwide on a $100 million budget, but no one mentions What Lies Beneath when referencing the best horror movies of the past 25 years or the noteworthy film in the careers of Zemeckis, Pfeiffer, or Ford.

Back before Mel Gibson went off the rails, he starred with Helen Hunt in the perfectly agreeable romantic comedy , which let a surprisingly playful Gibson riff as a male chauvinist pig blessed—or maybe cursed—with the ability to hear women’s thoughts. Gibson’s ad exec realizes he’s a jerk and tries to course correct. Director Nancy Meyers elicits laughs, romance, and heart, and provokes some good questions, too. The movie performed well, grossing $186 million in North America (and $192 million more overseas), but it was already receding from memory when Gibson very publicly fell out of favor.

Arguably the worst film on this list, casts John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence, and William H. Macy as a quartet of unhappy guys who find joy in riding their motorcycles together but find trouble when they encounter a bad-guy biker gang led, of course, by Ray Liotta. Cue lots of lame jokes about aging and a shrill bit of corporate synergy (Extreme Makeover: Home Edition). How bad was the movie? The Hell’s Angels sued Disney! Though no one remembers anything about it now—maybe other than Peter Fonda’s humorous cameo—Wild Hogs grossed $168 million at the U.S. box office.