The 10 biggest flops of 2024 ...Middle East

Sure, there’s been some magnificent culture to feast our eyes and ears on this year, from films like five-star Anora to Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!”, which sparked her meteoric rise. But it has also been a year of mega-flops – of songs that failed to connect with the public, movies that alienated their audiences and books that begged to be chucked into the bargain bin. But which disasters deserve a place in the hall of infamy and which were merely forgettable? Who was top of the flops?

Not every disaster is created equally. There are the straight-up failures – instantly reviled by critics and rejected by the public. Then there are the flops that perform adequately on paper (perhaps they even turn a profit) whose awfulness takes a little longer to sink in. Buckle up, this might be triggering.

1. Katy Perry’s comeback

Katy Perry might have layed the Super Bowl, clocked up 13 Grammy nominations and sold nearly 50 million records, but the pop star’s 2024 comeback was her cringiest attempt to stay relevant yet.

Her single “Woman’s World” was a dated attempt to capitalise on feminism, harking back to the toe-curling “girl-boss” era of the early 2010s. Worse still, she hired Dr Luke as producer, a man famously accused of sexual harassment by Kesha. The lyrics are uncomfortably trite, and to the shock of no one who heard it, “Woman’s World” stalled at 63 in the US charts, hampered further by a bizarre music video.

Matters didn’t improve when the full album, 143, dropped. Its sappy, generic pop was widely compared to AI-generated music, and Perry was mocked for the absurd cover art.

2. Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis

Francis Ford Coppola sold off a chunk of his winery to fund this $120m film himself when no one else would touch it – and damaged the reputation of all involved. Will Adam Driver ever recover from playing Megopolis architect-with-a-God-complex Cesar Catilina, a character who came on like an escapee from an Ayn Rand fever dream and whose wonky line-readings suggested he was daring Coppola to fire him?

Driver wasn’t alone in staggering away much diminished. Somehow, Coppola made the usually charismatic Nathalie Emmanuel look like the worst actor on the planet – quite an achievement, given her talents. The retro-future New York setting even puts you off Art Deco design. Coppola thought Hollywood had let him down by refusing to back this grand fandango. In hindsight, it was clear the movie industry had been doing the director a favour all along.

3. Joker: Folie à Deux

In 2018, Lady Gaga saved the remake of A Star is Born from Bradley “give me an Oscar, pleaaaase” Cooper’s trying-too-hard Kris Kristofferson impersonation. She would surely work her magic again when cast as the Joker’s unhinged on/off girlfriend, Harley Quinn, in the sequel to Joaquin Phoenix’s surprise 2019 mega-smash, right? Alas not. Gaga was effectively sabotaged by Phoenix and director Todd Phillips’s apparent determination to ruin the franchise.

Folie à Deux was a musical – but not in the classy Broadway sense. Rather than seeking to illuminate the internal life of its characters with gravity-defying power ballads, the movie was largely stuffed with karaoke-like covers, like Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”. Then there was the mid-movie switcheroo where it was explained that Harley Quinn had never been on the Joker’s side and was actually a psychiatry student, Lee Quinzel, who saw him as a case study. Next, came the reveal that Phoenix’s character wasn’t the real Joker. So why were we even watching in the first place?

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Comic-book fans hated it. As did Gaga devotees, who’d expected to see the singer claim her place as the 21st-century Barbra Streisand. A star was thrown under the bus by a film that went out of its way to be awful.

4. Boris Johnson’s memoir

Given that Prince Harry’s Spare shifted 400,000 copies in its first week, the publishers of Boris Johnson’s Unleashed were confident of sales in the high six figures. In the end, it moved only 40,000 in its first seven days – none too shabby but hardly worth the £2m advance paid to Johnson, which Harper Collins has yet to recoup.

It isn’t just Harry who has eclipsed Johnson – memoirs by Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair had sold more than double Johnson’s figure. No wonder he was plugging it so shamelessly on Channel 4 on US election night.

Then there was the actual content – which reviewers dismissed as self-serving and full of Johnson’s trademark guff. Or, as one headline put it, the “memoirs of a clown”.

5. Back to Black

Did the world need an Amy Winehouse biopic just 13 years after her tragic death, amid ongoing controversy over whether the music industry has exploited her memory via a series of posthumous releases? The answer was obviously no, of course not. But that didn’t stop Sam Taylor-Johnson churning out a box-ticking straight-to-streaming rags-to-riches tale.

It wasn’t helped by its charisma-free lead, Marisa Abela (and her iffy, wavering accent), who failed to capture Winehouse’s mischievous intelligence. There was also criticism of Eddie Marsan’s portrayal of her father Mitch as a kindly, somewhat naive soul – despite accusations that the real Mitch had cashed in on Winehouse’s fame. Weirdly, this part was left out of the Winehouse family-approved production that had dad Mitch apparently on set throughout (despite not having a formal role). Funny that.

6. Both Prince Andrew depictions

Prince Andrew’s 2019 grilling at the hands of journalist Emily Maitlis was one of the decade’s great TV moments – so much so that there was no need to revisit it. But the streaming industry felt differently, with both Netflix and Amazon offering their take on a right royal shambles.

Scoop had promise, given it starred Billie Piper as Sam McAlister, the Newsnight booker who had secured the interview. But the film was so determined to position McAlister as the lead character (it was adapted from her memoir) that the actual interview came off as a sideshow.

Then there was Prime Video’s A Very Royal Scandal, in which Ruth Wilson and Michael Sheen recreated the Maitlis v Andrew encounter word-for-word – to the point where all you could think was, why bother?

7. Gladiator II

Was there ever a film that needed a follow-up less than the entirely definitive, one-and-done Gladiator? And was it ever possible that Paul Mescal could “slay” in the same way that Russell Crowe had 24 years previously? Though Ridley Scott’s sequel to his broadswords-’n’-brawn epic conquered the box office, the film itself felt like a letdown. It had none of the heart of its predecessor, with Mescal’s Lucius following beat by boring beat the path taken by his father, Maximus (Crowe), in the original.

The film made clear that Mescal is an art-house actor at heart. For him, it’s all about digging deep and serving raw emotion – an approach entirely unsuited to a popcorn romp such as Gladiator II and you could see it in his every sweaty, uncertain turn. The only memorable performance was by Denzel Washington as a sort of José  Mourinho of the gladiatorial pits – largely because he alone recognised the movie for the camp cheese-fest that it was.

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8. Almost every reboot, remake and sequel (there were many)

Hollywood has been running short of ideas for years now. In 2024, the barrel-scraping rang out more desperately than ever: Moana 2, Twisters, and the aforementioned Gladiator II all cynically traded on the goodwill of their predecessors. At the same time, soulless reboots of Mean Girls, The Crow, and an Australian Office confirmed some things are best left in the past.

There were a few exceptions, notably Pixar’s blockbusting and tear-inducing Inside Out 2. In general, however, the entertainment industry’s unwillingness to try something new has never been more glaring – a point proved all over again in the Christmas run-up with Barry Jenkins’s opinion-dividing Lion King prequel Mufasa (fine, it’s had a few positive reviews – but those who hate it, really hate it).

9. Masters of the Air

When it was announced that Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks were executive-producing a mega-budget World War II drama, thoughts naturally went to Band of Brothers, their Allies v Nazis classic from 2001. But where Band of Brothers soared, Masters of the Air stayed stubbornly earthbound.

The tale of American bombers operating out of Britain and taking out Germany one residential area at a time suffered from wonky CGI and there was the oddly flat acting from an A-list cast. Lead Austin Butler, was clearly still locked into the Elvis impersonation he mastered for the Baz Luhrmann movie. Barry Keoghan meanwhile wandered through the action seemingly in a state of perpetual shock. Perhaps he was still getting over that Sophie Ellis-Bextor dance in Saltburn.

10. The Devil ...

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