4) After Earth
We may never know if After Earth was intended as some weird Scientology induction film, because Will Smith controls all. Some folks certainly believed so, which would account for its exceptionally poor box office performance on initial release – $27 million against $130 million. Scientology never plays well on screen, just ask Battlefield Earth. Fishy insidious cults aside, After Earth is yet another film this year that should have worked. It should have made money on its first weekend in the domestic box office.
Some would argue that After Earth doesn’t belong here, because it did make money, eventually. Foreign box office and sweet lady time eventually allowed After Earth to turn a profit, but it says a lot about a film when a Will Smith project fails to spontaneously explode into a money cloud. There’s a multitude of reasons why this might have been the case, premiere amongst them the plot of the film. It centres around the idea of remaining as calm as possible to prevent special fear-smelling aliens from detecting you, essentially making the story a competition between father and son to discover which of them could be more boring than the other. Does this sound like the next Independence Day to you?
Also it was directed by M. Night Shyamalan. So yeah, that could be a reason too.
