A blockbuster sci-fi bust that lived up to expectations by losing $140 million survives streaming annihilation

The law of diminishing returns isn’t just for franchises being driven into irrelevancy, with the disastrous critical and commercial performance of Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall proving that cinema’s Master of Disaster had well and truly run his signature style of bombastic filmmaking into the ground.

The architect behind such box office sensations as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 had suffered several notable failures to seriously dent his reputation as one of the industry’s most consistently bankable blockbuster orchestrators, but Moonfall somehow conspired to fare worse than the laughably inaccurate 10,000 BC, forgotten war epic Midway, and the wholly unnecessary sequel Independence Day: Resurgence.

While the ludicrous slice of intergalactic chaos does boast some neat visuals and a wonderfully committed pair of lead performances from Patrick Wilson and Halle Berry – who know exactly what they’re doing in playing everything so straight – ending Moonfall on such a sequel-baiting tease was a questionable call when almost everyone was predicting it to bomb hard.

To be fair, that’s about the only way it managed to live up to expectations, with a tally of only $67 million in ticket sales leading to an estimated loss of up to $140 million, but the disaster in more ways than one has nonetheless experienced an massive uptick in popularity on streaming.

Per FlixPatrol, Moonfall has shaken off its reputation to emerge as the second most-watched movie on HBO Max’s worldwide rankings, and it might be the last time Emmerich gets to play with a budget of this size again.