Why a massive steampunk epic became one of cinema's most expensive box office failures
In short: In 2018, the ambitious adaptation of Philip Reeve’s novel Mortal Engines arrived with high expectations and a massive budget. Despite its visually stunning premise of mobile, predator cities, the film suffered a catastrophic commercial collapse, losing Universal an estimated $175 million and becoming a historic box office bomb.
Directed by Christian Rivers, the film was a passion project for Peter Jackson, who purchased the rights in 2009. Set over a thousand years after the Sixty Minute War, the narrative follows a post-apocalyptic world where cities like London roam the earth on tracks, hunting smaller settlements for resources under a philosophy called Municipal Darwinism. The production was a significant international collaboration, filming in New Zealand from April to July 2017, and utilizing Weta Digital to design the massive, complex cities in computer-generated imagery.
Despite the pedigree of the production team, the film struggled upon its release in December 2018. It debuted to a disappointing $7.5 million in the United States, finishing fifth at the box office, and suffered a staggering 77% drop in its second weekend. With a production budget of at least $100 million, the film ultimately grossed only $83.7 million worldwide. Analysts at Deadline Hollywood calculated that the total losses for Universal reached approximately $174.8 million, cementing its status as one of the largest financial failures in film history.
Critical reception was largely negative, with Rotten Tomatoes reporting only a 25% approval rating from 189 critics. Reviewers often praised the visual effects but criticized the narrative, suggesting the film lacked the necessary momentum to sustain its high-concept premise. Even a planned tie-in video game, which was nearly complete, was cancelled by developers who reportedly sensed the film’s impending failure. Ultimately, the project serves as a cautionary tale about the risks of high-budget speculative fiction, where technical spectacle fails to compensate for a lack of narrative combustion.
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- Summary by Intellect · source: Mortal Engines (film)
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