One Of Brad Pitt's Biggest Box Office Flops Almost Bankrupted A Studio

Movies Animation Movies

In 1994, David Geffen, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Steven Spielberg — three of Hollywood's biggest power players — united to form a brand-new major motion picture studio called DreamWorks, something that hadn't been attempted in decades. The trio of execs had three stipulations: they wouldn't make any more than nine films a year, they would be allowed to make movies for other studios, and they would be able to go home in time for dinner.

For three years, the trio would wrangle contracts and make deals with various music, film, and television entities to make sure it was standing on solid ground and could handle being the outsize business entity they wanted it to be. In 1997, DreamWorks finally released its first three movies: "The Peacemaker," "Amistad," and "Mouse Hunt." The year after, the studio broke into feature animation with the bad-but-popular CGI insect film "Antz" and the highly acclaimed and very good "The Prince of Egypt," a retelling of the stories of Exodus.

Thanks to those films, DreamWorks became a legitimate animation powerhouse, putting out "The Road to El Dorado" and "Chicken Run" in 2000, and "Shrek" in 2001. "Shrek" was particularly notable in that it parodied the images and story beats of Disney's fairy tale movies. (Katzenberg used to work for Disney, you see.) These animated films were mere punctuations in a string of solid live-action hits from "Saving Private Ryan" to "American Beauty," "Gladiator," "Almost Famous," "Minority Report," and "The Ring."

The party nearly came to an abrupt halt, however, with the release of DreamWorks' animated epic "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas" on July 7, 2003. "Sinbad," a Westernized adaptation of the Sinbad stories from "One Thousand and One Nights," cost a whopping $60 million to make, and it was met with widespread indifference. It earned only $80 million, but marketing costs brought the total losses on "Sinbad" to about $125 million. It's one of the biggest bombs of all time.

Sinbad lost DreamWorks $125 million

Taking its cues from the swashbuckling adventure films of the 1930s and 1940s, Tim Johnson and Patrick Gilmore's "Sinbad" reimagined the Baghdadi hero as a dashing Douglas Fairbanks type voiced by Brad Pitt. The story involved his plucky crewmate Marina (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and their quest to retrieve the Book of Peace from the clutches of the wicked, smoke-like goddess Eris (Michelle Pfeiffer). Joseph Fiennes played Proteus, Marina's fiancé, and animation veterans Frank Welker and Jim Cummings also voiced characters. The film was mostly hand-animated, but made extensive use of CGI for its sea creatures and sailing ships.

The film earned a lukewarm reception from critics and currently sports a 45% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. "Sinbad" isn't offensive, terrible, or even incompetent, but it is a disappointingly average, expensive, and otherwise mediocre piece of pabulum that doesn't raise the pulse or dazzle the eyes. Many people saw it, but most didn't care. It ultimately limped out of theaters despite a nationwide advertising blitz, tie-in video games, and a series of Burger King toys.

The $125 million that "Sinbad" lost is closer to $204 million when adjusted for inflation, making it a bomb as big as notorious losers like "Cutthroat Island," "Strange World," and "Joker: Folie à Deux." DreamWorks hadn't experienced a financial failure this massive since its inception, and it was large enough to throw the future of the whole studio into jeopardy.

It certainly didn't help that Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen took in enormous $100 million salaries for being its CEOs. In a 2005 article in the Los Angeles Times, Geffen noted the studio's overall failure, saying "When Steven, Jeffrey and I started the company, we hoped to make enough films to rationalize the cost of being our own distributor. [...] Sadly, we were never able to." In trying not to spread itself thin, DreamWorks ended up with too few eggs in too few baskets.

In 2005, DreamWorks was bought out by Paramount

"Sinbad" was such a disaster that it led DreamWorks to announce (via a 2003 article in the New York Times) that the studio would no longer produce traditional, hand-drawn animated features, making CGI films exclusively from then on. Disney, one might recall, made a similar announcement in 2004 after the release of its bomb "Home on the Range." Drawings were out and CGI was in.

In the mid-2000s, however, many studios were experiencing a slump. The same 2005 article in the L.A. Times noted that MGM had just been sold, and that the landscape was bleak when showbiz giants like Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen couldn't make their studio work. Paramount, under the Viacom umbrella, eventually purchased the live-action arm of DreamWorks for $1.6 billion, taking on the company's $400 million in debt. Fox News reported that the sale also had some struggles going through, as the active 2005 failure of Michael Bay's expensive sci-fi flop "The Island" gave some participants cold feet.

Co-ownership of DreamWorks has been wild ever since then, and may only be understood by Hollywood accountants. Needless to say, DreamWorks has, ever since 2006, survived through co-distribution deals and co-financing deals. The studio, for instance, had a big hit with "Transformers" in 2007, but that was a co-production with Paramount, which distributed DreamWorks' movies through 2011. From 2011 to 2016, on the other hand, Disney handled the distribution.

2004 was ultimately a turning point for DreamWorks, becoming the year it had to face a massive reckoning and restructuring. And it's very easy to link all of this financial drama directly to the failure of "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas."