Plenty of movies suffer the unwanted fate of bombing at the box office, but only a select and infamous few tank so hard that they go into the history books, before launching a bitter legal dispute that dragged on for almost a decade.
Breck Eisner’s Sahara is one such title, with the literary adaptation initially designed with an eye on launching a multi-film series starring Matthew McConaughey as Clive Cussler’s hero Dirk Pitt. Instead, the $160 million action adventure went down in a critical and commercial ball of flames.
On top of a paltry 38% Rotten Tomatoes score and a dismal $119 million haul from theaters, once marketing and promotion costs were factored in, Sahara ended up in the red to the tune of over $100 million. Ironically, that’s the exact amount author Cussler ended up seeking after suing the producers for failing to consult him on the script.
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Cussler was then countersued following accusations of blackmail and sabotage, with Crusader Entertainment initially coming out on the winning side, with the company awarded a total of almost $19 million in legal fees and damages. However, that was overturned a year later, and the courtroom saga ended with nobody paying the other party a single cent.
That’s an awful lot of trouble to go through for a film that was terrible and instantly forgotten by the general public, but Sahara has surprisingly started to mount a comeback on Netflix this weekend, with FlixPatrol revealing the notorious dud has cracked the platform’s global most-watched list.
Published: Feb 5, 2022 6:10 PM UTC