List of major flops

A flop or product failure is a product that doesn't reach expectations of success, failing to come even close. A major flop goes one step further and is recognized for its almost complete lack of success.

However, most of the items listed below are ones that had high expectations, large amounts of money or widespread publicity, but fell fall short of success. Obviously, due to the subjective nature of "success" and "meeting expectations", there can be disagreement about what constitutes a "major flop".

For example, David McReynolds ran for President of the United States in 1980 and 2000 on the socialist ticket, but came nowhere near winning. However, he would never characterize his campaign as a flop because he ran for president in order to get his causes recognized, without any hope of being elected. On the other hand, the creation of New Coke is generally regarded indisputably a "Major Flop".

Table of contents

1 Entertainment

1.1 Movie flops
1.2 Musical comebacks gone horribly awry
1.3 Flops in sports
1.4 Flops in television

2 Commercial Flops

2.5 Aviation Flops
2.6 Automotive Flops
2.7 Computing Flops
2.8 Video Game Flops
2.9 Miscellaneous commercial flops

3 Flops in science and engineering
4 Political flops

4.10 USA Presidential campaigns
4.11 French elections
4.12 Canadian elections
4.13 UK elections

5 See also

Entertainment

Movie flops

A movie is most likely a flop if it doesn't perform as expected. A major movie flop might barely (or not even) make back the money it took to finance it. In extreme cases it might put the studio out of business.

Some notable Hollywood flops include:

The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen (1988) -- The Terry Gilliam version.
Battlefield Earth (2000) -- The combination of a story by L. Ron Hubbard and acting by John Travolta have made it a camp classic. (Arguably not a flop in the true sense of the word, as no one outside of the Church of Scientology expected it to be a commercial success.)
Billy Bathgate (1991)
Cleopatra (1963) nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox
Cotton Club (1984)
For the Boys -- Bette Midler's USO tour falls flat.
Havana
Heaven's Gate bankrupted United Artists. MGM later bought it up.
Hudson Hawk was the biggest money-losing film of 1991.
Inchon (1981) -- Despite its impressive cast and enormous budget, this controversial war epic produced by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church lost tons of money.
Ishtar (1987) -- Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman just did it for the money.
Last Action Hero -- Arnold Schwarzenegger's self-parody was expected to be a massive success. It wasn't.
The Postman (1997) -- Cost $50 million to make; didn't make it back.
Raise the Titanic (1980) -- of which Lew Grade famously remarked that "it would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic".
Santa Claus -- the Dudley Moore epic from 1985.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978) -- A script written around unrelated Beatles tunes combined with some impressive musical cameos was a recipe for disaster.
Showgirls (1995)
Tron (1982) -- Flopped in its day, is today considered groundbreaking.
Waterworld (1995) barely made back its production costs (horribly large already, and over budget to boot) in international distribution.
Wild Wild West (1999) -- You can just see the money burn up on the screen.

Musical comebacks gone horribly awry

MC Hammer's failed restyling as a gangsta rapper.
New Kids on the Block didn't make the comeback cut as "NKOTB".
Diana Ross had to cancel her "Diana Ross and the Supremes" tour for lack of interest, mainly because she had refused to include other original members of the Supremes in the tour, cutting off 23 scheduled appearances.
Vanilla Ice

Flops in sports

The European Hockey League

Flops in television

The disastrous 1980 season of Saturday Night Live
The BBC soap opera Eldorado
Supertrain
Pink Lady & Jeff
Bette
The Chevy Chase Show
The Pat Sajak Show
Thicke of the Night - Talk show with Alan Thicke

Commercial Flops

Aviation Flops

The Brewster Buffalo - this World War II fighter aircraft turned out to be no match for Axis fighters
The Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes' white elephant.
The Bristol Brabazon - overweight, underpowered and prone to metal fatigue
The Convair CV-880 and CV-990 - these aircraft were commercial disasters as they only offered five-abreast seating, and were easily outcompeted on price by the Boeing 720 which was based on an existing aircraft type.
Supersonic transports: Boeing 2707, Tupolev Tu-144, arguably Concorde
The Dassault Aviation Mercure - this aircraft had extremely limited range and as a result only ten were built for the French domestic airline Air Inter
The Northrop F-20 Tigershark - this fighter aircraft was designed as a private venture for export, but failed utterly as foreign air forces wanted the more prestigious F-16 Fighting Falcon used by the USAF, despite the F-20 having superior performance and lower cost.

Automotive Flops

Ford Motor Company's Edsel
DeLorean automobile
Electric cars - Ford Motor Company and General Motors, who only had lukewarm interest in the technology, have dropped production of their electric car models.
Sinclair C5 - a battery powered car designed by Sir Clive Sinclair

Computing Flops

The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first attempt at building a supercomputer. Its actual performance was less than one third of its original specification. This resulted in IBM drastically dropping the price and losing money on every machine sold.
The ILLIAC IV array processor supercomputer.
Microsoft Windows 1.0 was a huge flop because its sales were low, it was very slow, needed a lot of memory for the time, and practically no software was ever written for it.
Microsoft Bob.
Apple has had flops, notably the Apple III, Apple Lisa, and arguably the Apple Newton.
IBM had the IBM /A> and the IBM PCjr.
Amiga CDTV - This early multimedia computer was overpriced and suffered from using the obsolete AmigaOS 1.3, when version 2.0 was already available.
Intel expected the Itanium processor to revolutionize the microprocessor industry, but after 7 years of development and billions of dollars spent the first Itanium chip proved an utter technical and commercial failure. However the project still goes on, and Itanium 2 is an improvement.
In the 1980s, Commodore International became the first company to sell a million home computers. Hoping to repeat the success of its multimillion-selling VIC-20 and C-64 computers, it released the Commodore Pl/A> in 1984. It flopped. Commodore tried--and mostly failed--for 10 years to duplicate the C-64's success and went bankrupt in 1994. INMOS Transputer

Video Game Flops

Sega has had numerous flops, for example the Sega Saturn, the Sega Nomad, the Sega Master System II and III, and the Sega 32X.
Nintendo, not to be left behind, has produced the Nintendo Virtual Boy, and light gun games.
The Game.com handheld
The Atari Jaguar console and the Atari Lynx handheld.
Daikatana
The Atari 2600 version of E.T
The Amiga CD-32
The Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I) player, a "multimedia machine" jointly developed by Philips and Sony. It was considered overpriced and underpowered.
The 3DO Multiplayer, a "multimedia machine" (it was marketed as a family entertainment device and not just a video game console) designed by R.J. Mical and the team behind the Amiga, and marketed by Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts. It was introduced at $699, twice the price of most game consoles.
The Apple Pippin, a games console based on MacOS and the PowerPC - was abandoned before production, clearly was unlikely to have succeeded.

Miscellaneous commercial flops

1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee
New Coke. The Coca-Cola company changed the formula and taste of its flagship product, a universally successful drink whose name was almost synonymous with soft drinks. It was a marketing and public relations debacle, and the company had to backtrack and return to the older formula. However, when they went back to the original formula, demand for the classic taste grew to a greater extent than before New Coke, propelling Coca-Cola to a market lead over rival Pepsi. Therefore, the situation became an unintentional success for Coca-Cola.
Lymeswold cheese (UK)
DIVX, a take-off on DVD that required users to pay per viewing. Retail electronics giant and DIVX backer Circuit City lost about $200m over the fiasco.
Elcaset audio format - a total flop by Sony.
Betamax VCR system - after some initial sucess it was soundly beaten in the marketplace by VHS. Betamax failed in part because it was not an open standard.
Digital Compact Cassette - a format introduced by Philips, which lost out to Minidisc and CD-R
The Tanganyika groundnut scheme, a plan by Clement Attlee's British government, financed by British tax-payers, to cultivate tracts of what is now Tanzania with peanuts.

Flops in science and engineering

A scientific flop may be something that took years of man-hours and a lot of money to complete (maybe never even got done) and ended in failure.

Chauchat light machine gun - the French weapon of WWI was notorious for its unreliability, prone to jamming and lack of precision manufacturing.
Cold fusion - after much hype, claims of success proved false. (Research into cold fusion continues.)
Europa rocket
Millennium Dome - a commercial and public relations disaster, it now lies empty.
Project Mohole was a 1950s proposal to drill through Earth's crust and sample the material below, but it was never implemented because in the mid-1960s the planners realized it was impossible.
Most reusable space vehicles: Shuttle Buran, HOTOL, various NASA space planes, arguably the Space Shuttle.
Tacoma Narrows Bridge

Political flops

USA Presidential campaigns

Lyndon LaRouche has run in every single election since his federal indictment.
David Duke, former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
Harold Stassen, former Republican governor of Minnesota, ran unsuccessfully for his party's nomination nine times, from 1948 to 1992.

French elections

Lionel Jospin's 2002 presidential campaign was such a flop he retired from politics.
The unnecessary dissolution of a favourable parliament (Assemblée nationale) in 1997 by President Jacques Chirac should have presaged an easy win for his partisans. They lost, yielding power to the opposition.

Canadian elections

Kim Campbell led the governing Conservatives in the 1993 election campaign and succeeded in winning only two seats in the legislature.

UK elections

Sir James Goldsmith's anti-EU Referendum Party failed to win a single seat in the 1997 general election, despite heavy publicity and a significant number of votes.

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