Thanks to the erratic box office track record of 2020s superhero movies, once invincible comic book companies have become associated with box office flops. Even Marvel Studios, a bulletproof label in the 2010s, has produced 2020s money-losers like Thunderbolts*, The Marvels, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. The world of DC Comics movies, meanwhile, has produced modern duds like Joker: Folie a Deux, The Flash, and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, not to mention money-losers impacted by simultaneous HBO Max launches like Wonder Woman 1984 and The Suicide Squad.
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Even before the 2020s, though, Marvel and DC adaptations (as well as properties from other comic book companies) could be attached to box office flops. For the latter outfit, box office flops included Catwoman, Green Lantern, and one particular would-be 2010 tentpole that remains one of the biggest DC Comics disasters ever. Jonah Hex went down in flames so badly in June 2010 that it makes the whole Flash debacle look like a minor box office fender-bender.
How Badly Did DC’s Jonah Hex Do?
Though a punchline today (if it’s even remembered at all), Jonah Hex started out as a high-profile project with lots of buzz-worthy talent from late-2000s. Josh Brolin signed on to headline the feature roughly a year after headlining No Country for Old Men, a Best Picture Oscar-winning title. Megan Fox was set to play the film’s leading lady in one of her first major roles after the exceedingly lucrative Transformers films. Original filmmakers Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, meanwhile, were late 2000s genre cinema cult favorites thanks to the 2006 Jason Statham feature Crank. Putting them all together for a blockbuster western, suggested Jonah Hex had the potential to be a hit.
By the time cameras started rolling on Jonah Hex, Neveldine and Taylor were no longer the directors. Horton Hears A Who! helmer Jimmy Hayward instead directed the feature, which was plagued with problems and hefty reshoots. Warner Bros. eventually began the Jonah Hex marketing campaign in late April 2010, just seven weeks before its June 18th release date, an ominous sign of how little confidence the studio had in this title. Unsurprisingly, Jonah Hex opened to just $5.37 million domestically despite playing in just over 2,800 theaters. In fact, at the time of its release, Jonah Hex had the 10th worst domestic opening weekend ever for a movie that launched in over 2,700 theaters.
Audiences gave Jonah Hex a C+ CinemaScore, which reflected dreadful word-of-mouth for a mainstream PG-13 action blockbuster. Unsurprisingly, Hex proved incredibly frontloaded and ended up making more than half of its lifetime domestic gross in just its first three days of release. Grossing $10.54 million domestically and only $475,579 overseas, Jonah Hex had a dismal $11.02 million worldwide haul, which meant it came nowhere near turning a profit on a $47 million budget. In the pantheon of comic book movie flops, Jonah Hex was an especially poor performer.
How Badly Did Jonah Hex Do Compared to Other DC Films?
Among live-action DC Comics movies, Jonah Hex had the second-worst launch ever, only ahead of Steel’s $870,068 launch in August 1997. Even before taking inflation into account, Hex still had a worse domestic launch than 1980s superhero films like Supergirl and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Meanwhile, Catwoman still tripled Hex’s opening weekend haul during its North American launch in July of 2004.
While Jonah Hex’s $47 million budget meant it didn’t need to be as big as Wonder Woman to be lucrative, Hex’s meager $10.54 million domestic total negates that price tag entirely. Unless Jonah Hex had a budget akin to the first Insidious film ($1.5M), there was absolutely no way for it to be profitable. The fact that it was a costly mid-budget major studio release, with several recognizable names in its cast, just made its substantial failure all the more fascinating. Given ticket price inflation and the increased ubiquity of these superhero movies, it’s doubtful there will ever be a DC Comics movie adaptation that performs this poorly again.
Jonah Hex’s failure cannot be simply laid at the feet of Westerns being a box office crapshoot, the last-minute Warner Bros. marketing campaign, or the titular character’s obscurity. This was a bad movie that inspired toxic word-of-mouth even before it hit theaters. Failure seeped into Jonah Hex from the start, and its historically low box office haul reflects that reality. Modern comic book movie box office duds can console themselves that at least they didn’t perform anywhere near as badly as Jonah Hex.
Jonah Hex is now streaming on Hulu and The Roku Channel
