Forgotten Flops From The 90s Nobody Remembers

In a pre-streaming era, the 90s had an incredible stream of big hits and even bigger misses. Blockbusters like Titanic and Jurassic Park are now cultural linchpins, but the movies we’re looking at today have faded into obscurity following a brief peek at the spotlight. These big ol’ bombs have it all: ambition, stars, and especially over the top marketing, but they failed to connect with the audience at large. Take a look at these forgotten flops and let us know how many you remember.

Waterworld should be great. This epic post-apocalyptic film stars Kevin Costner at the height of his fame, it has a huge budget, and Dennis Hopper plays the villain with reckless abandon. The one thing this movie doesn’t have is focus. Its ambitious water-based location created a massive issue with rising costs, making it one of the most expensive bombs in history. The one amazing thing to come out of the disaster that is Waterworld is the Universal theme park WaterWorld stunt show; a blistering 16 minutes of action packed adventure.

Kevin Costner returns to Flopville in The Postman, another post-apocalyptic fable with an out of control budget. Released two years after the failure of Waterworld, The Postman asks the question, “What if there was a postman?” Following a drifter who restores hope in society by delivering the mail following a total societal collapse, the film is bloated, listless, and frankly there’s not enough mail delivery.

For a moment it felt like Vanilla Ice was going to be sticking around for the long game, thankfully we avoided that dystopian outcome. But in those fleeting minutes of Ice’s fame he starred in Cool As Ice, a super cheesy, romance/crime-caper that’s genuinely so bad it’s good. A critical and commercial failure, Vanilla Ice’s days as a heartthrob crashed down around him with the failure of Cool As Ice. If you’re into movies like The Room or Miami Connection, Cool As Ice will be your next obsession.

Pirate movies really hit their stride in the 2000s with the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, but Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island never had a chance in the 90s. Starring two of our tallest stars, Geena Davis and Matthew Modine, and directed by Renny Harland (A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master, Die Hard 2), this swashbuckling adventure was a gigantic flop when it was released in 1995. With a budget of $96 million, the film tanked so hard that it brought down the production company Carolco Pictures.

The Avengers (not those Avengers), a 1998 spy flick based on the classic British series, stars Ralph Feinnes, Uma Thurman, and Sean Connery. As fun as that sounds, the movie was a complete mess. Critics hated it and the audience stayed away from this movie about super spies trying to stop a mad scientist from controlling the weather like it came with a free helping of the plague.

The American remake of Godzilla was supposed to jumpstart a new era of stateside kaiju movies, but this Roland Emmerich helmed disaster flick turned out to be a legitimate disaster. Fresh off the success of Independence Day, Emmerich was in the zone. Or at least it looked like he was in the zone. Godzilla built on a weak story, poort special effects, and a lack of interest in actually being a Godzilla movie. Even though this movie was marketed to the moon, Godzilla completely turfed out at the box office and the plan to make Godzilla follow ups were shelved.

1993’s Super Mario Bros. is the first big budget live action adaptation of a video game and whoo boy is it a mess. Starring Bob Hoskins, John Leguizamo, and Dennis Hopper, this highly anticipated movie swerves away from the colorful world of the game and into a dark and dystopian sci-fi world that resembles a low budget Blade Runner. Bad reviews, poor box office returns, and a complete disregard for what audiences wanted ensured that Super Mario Bros. would only be remembered as a cautionary tale for video game adaptations to come.

The 1994 adaptation of Street Fighter is a brutally bad video game adaptation that completely fails to capture the magic of its source material. Starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Raul Julia, and (checks notes) Kylie Minogue, the film is a huge disaster. With a confusing plot, wooden dialogue, and oddly subdued performances, Street Fighter is a drag from moment one.

The Adventures of Pluto Nash may have technically bombed in 2002, but this Eddie Murphy let-down was actually filmed in the late 90s and shelved for years. Marred with script issues, bad effects, and a performance by Eddie Murphy that’s lacking in the funny, Pluto Nash lost more than $90 million at the box office, a number that’s so mind-boggling we can’t even think about it.

Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot is a brutal watch from start to finish. This pain watch from Sylvester Stallone was meant to be a black comedy about a cop dealing with his overbearing mother, but it’s just a mess that tries too hard to be cute. Universally panned by critics for its terrible dialogue and messy tone, the film derailed Stallone’s career for years. The star later said of the film, “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot was supposed to be like ‘Throw Momma From the Train’ with the mom as this really nasty piece of work. Instead you hire the nicest woman in Hollywood, Estelle Getty, who you wish was your mother. That’s the end of that! Also, I had heard Schwarzenegger was going to do that movie and I said, ‘I’m going to beat him to it.’ I think he set me up.”