Why Did Mortal Engines (2018) Bomb at the Box Office?
It turns out "from the creators of The Lord of the Rings" isn't the golden ticket it used to be.
Case in point: Mortal Engines — a $100 million+ steampunk disaster that opened in 2018, stumbled out of the gate with a $7.5 million domestic debut, and quietly bled out at the global box office.
Produced and co-written by Peter Jackson, along with longtime collaborators Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, the movie was supposed to launch a new sci-fi/fantasy franchise. Instead, it lost an estimated $175 million, making it one of the most expensive flops of the decade.
Directed by Christian Rivers — a first-time filmmaker whose main credits were doing visual effects on Jackson's movies — Mortal Engines was based on the YA novel by Philip Reeve. The film featured moving cities that roam a post-apocalyptic Earth consuming each other like mechanical predators. It had scope. It had scale. It had Hugo Weaving and Stephen Lang. What it didn't have was anyone who gave a damn.
Let's run the numbers:
- Budget: Estimated between $100–150 million
- Domestic opening weekend: $7.5 million
- Global opening total: $42.3 million
- Estimated final loss: $175 million
- Rotten Tomatoes score: 28%
Critics liked the visual effects, but that's where the compliments stopped. Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times summed it up as "visually elaborate and dramatically inert," which is a polite way of saying it looked nice but had the emotional range of a screensaver.
The marketing didn't help. Trailers showed a masked girl, a giant moving London, and... not much else. No one could tell what it was actually about. Universal leaned hard on Peter Jackson's name, but that wasn't enough to sell a murky sci-fi story with no big stars, no recognizable IP, and no coherent hook.
And then there was the competition. The same weekend, Aquaman pulled in $126 million internationally, with Bumblebee right behind it. As analyst Jeff Bock put it:
"If you want big CGI thrills, you're going to have Aquaman and Bumblebee in theaters next week. These franchises aren't just big because people recognize the names. They're big because they're marketed in a way that makes it easy to understand what the film is about."
Universal had a strong 2018 overall (Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Halloween, The Grinch), but Mortal Engines was the studio's big swing at launching a fresh sci-fi property — and it struck out so hard you could hear the flop echo through Valhalla.