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The Japanese marketplace has always been mercurial with regards to North American cinema. Universal Pictures confidently rolled the dice anyway. 47 Ronin debuted in Japan roughly three weeks prior to its domestic release. And the dice came up snake eyes. Keanu Reeves’ first pure action flick in a decade behaved eerily similar to how the previous one had done on this side of the ocean. 47 Ronin earned only $1.3 million in 333 exhibitions, a pittance relative to the projections for the project. And its intended target market was Japan more than any other country in the world outside of the United States and Canada. Immediately, box office analysts started remembering The Matrix Revolutions, the movie that destroyed movie careers.

Sensitive to the issue and suddenly aware of the hot potato they possessed with 47 Ronin, Universal Pictures execs huddled about how best to proceed. Their options were binary. They could double down by investing a lot of money into a new advertising campaign for the struggling project. Option B was to let the movie die. They selected Option B.

The holiday season is always overly crowded with new releases. All of these movies are marketed well beyond the brink of saturation. In this fashion, 47 Ronin because the rarest of oddities. One of the most expensive productions of all time, it was the invisible film as its December 25th release date approached. Universal’s decision makers followed the maxim of refusing to throw good money after bad, bracing for the absolute worst, which is exactly what they received.

47 Ronin debuted to $7 million on Christmas Day. That would prove to be the highlight of its release, and that number is atrocious for a $175 million movie. On its second day in theaters, the film fell 48% to $3.7 million. Its first weekend in theaters continued the trend of audience apathy. 47 Ronin could not reach double figures, fading to $9.9 million, less than it earned during its first two days in theaters. 47 Ronin started horribly then trended down immediately. After five days, its domestic box office revenue was a paltry $20.6 million. And here is the scary thought. Its early results were holiday inflated.

Perhaps the only people unsurprised by this abject failure were the ones currently in charge at Universal. They quietly confirmed that they had admitted their mistake to their board of directors already. The movie was written down prior to its release, which is the accountant’s way of saying that Universal already allowed for the impending disastrous box office run of its presumed tentpole title. They took a loss on the ledger sheet prior to the release of 47 Ronin because they knew they had blown it. The question is why they did not recognize the impending mistake prior to investing such a massive amount of capital resources.

Every year, some films bomb horribly. That eventuality is simply the nature of high risk investments. Some pay out exponentially while others fail to recoup most of the capital devoted to their productions. To a certain extent, even including such titles in the Top Film Industry Stories of the year is a bit lazy in that the behavior is repetitive and predictable in such a perilous industry. In the case of 47 Ronin, however, the budget is so large and the potential return on investment is so terrible that we would be amiss to exclude it even if we have seen the pattern before.

A $175 million production should never ever never earn $20.6 million over a five-day Christmas holiday period. That’s the type of performance that causes people not only to need to update their resumes but also to start seeking a new line of work. Anybody involved with 47 Ronin will struggle to get any other movie studios to answer their calls after this.

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