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8. London Has Fallen – $62 million
The Die Hard-in-the-White-House thriller Olympus Has Fallen did okay business in 2013 when it earned $98 million off a $70 million budget. This wasn’t a fantastic figure, but it definitely found an audience. In fact, it seemed the movie only earned a sequel when it surprisingly found a wider domestic audience than the mega-budget Roland Emmerich thriller with the same exact premise – White House Down. Emmerich’s film opened only a few months after Olympus and earned a meager $73 million off a $150 million budget. Overseas grosses obviously helped both films, but Olympus became a marginal money maker, whereas White House Down was a flat-out bomb.
Three years later, a sequel to Olympus with the same principal cast entered theaters. London Has Fallen shot its way to only $62 million, losing a sizable 40% of the original’s audience in terms of actual tickets sold. Luckily the sequel earned more than the first movie overseas, resulting in a situation where the film was seen as a failure in the states, but a hit worldwide.
Despite some timely and controversial subject matter, the movie was trashed by critics, and American audiences didn’t have the interest that they did in the original film. But with a $195 million worldwide gross off a $60 million budget, we still might get Earth Has Fallen in a few years. Domestic audiences, however, will likely remain uninterested.
