List of major flops

A flop is something 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.

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 of America 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, New Coke is generally regarded indisputably a "Major Flop".

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.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger's self-parody Last Action Hero[?] 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)
• 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.

Commercial Flops

• 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.
• Ford Motor Company's Edsel
• Sinclair C5 a battery powered car designed by Sir Clive Sinclair
• Sony's Betamax
• DIVX, a take-off on DVD that required users to pay per viewing. Retail electronics giant and DIVX backer Circuit City[?] lost about 200 million dollars over the fiasco.
• Ford Motor Company and General Motors, who only had lukewarm interest in the technology, have dropped production of their electric car[?] models.

Flops in Computing

• 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.
• 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.
• Apple has had flops, notably the Apple III, Apple Lisa, and Apple Newton.
• IBM had the IBM PS/2[?] and the IBM PCjr[?].
• 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.

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.

• Europa rocket
• Cold fusion - after much hype, claims of success proved false. (Research into cold fusion continues.)
• 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

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 CDTV[?] and Amiga CD-32[?]

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.

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 XFL
• The WHL[?]

Flops in Television

• The disastrous 1980 season of Saturday Night Live
• The BBC soap opera Eldorado[?]
• Supertrain[?]
• The Chevy Chase Show[?]
• Pink Lady & Jeff[?]
• Bette[?]
• The Pat Sajak Show[?]