It’s impossible to feel sorry for a multi-billion dollar conglomerate, but you do have to feel at least some sympathy for director Justin Simien, with the filmmaker being hung out to dry by Disney on two separate fronts in the last week alone.
As well as finding out from the trades that he was no longer the appointed showrunner of Star Wars series Lando, he was also forced to promote Haunted Mansion entirely by himself due to the actors’ strike, only to be left helpless as the braindead decision to release a spooky reboot in July as opposed to nearer Halloween ended in immediate box office disaster.
You might think it’s too early to write Haunted Mansion off as an all-timer of a bomb just yet, but the statistics do not make for good reading when you compare it to John Carter and The Lone Ranger, an infamous duo of Mouse House-funded catastrophes that conspired to lose a combined total of almost $400 million, a misfire so disastrous then-president Alan Bergman was forced to admit during an official earnings call that “we did lose that much money on those movies.”
Haunted Mansion‘s $24.5 million domestic debut was lower than both the $30.2 million and $29.2 million of John Carter and The Lone Ranger, but it’s the former’s overseas hail of $9.1 million that really stings when you consider the other two nabbed $70.6 million and $29.4 million. There is one positive, though, but it’s a minuscule one.
At a cost of “only” $157 million compared to the $200+ million of the cursed sci-fi and tortured Western, Haunted Mansion may not end up quite so deeply in the red when all is said and done, but it’s very bad news regardless.