The trend for remaking classic TV shows as big budget blockbusters has largely quietened down after a string of notable flops – even if Denzel Washington kept the dream alive by applying his Midas touch to The Equalizer – but there aren’t many to have bombed harder than Land of the Lost.
Carrying an estimated budget of $100 million, the time-tampering caper roped in Will Ferrell, Anna Friel, and Danny McBride to reinvent the beloved adventure series as a summer tentpole release, and things couldn’t have gone much worse than they did.
In addition to losing a fortune for Universal after failing to clear $70 million at the global box office, Land of the Lost was rewarded with a Razzie win for Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel, although a small mercy is that it turned out to be the only trophy it “won” from a total of seven nominations.
No matter how much anybody detests the movie, though, they won’t hate it anywhere near as much as original creators Sid and Marty Krofft, who at various convention appearances said “Land of the Lost was just crap, there was no excuse for it,” before actively apologizing to a Comic-Con crowd and calling it “one of the worst films ever made.”
Suffice to say, we can infer that the Kroffts are not among the legion of subscribers to have decided the woeful critical and commercial disaster was in need of a streaming resurrection, with FlixPatrol outing the incomprehensibly awful misfire as one of the biggest hits on iTunes heading into the weekend.
