A Catastrophic Fantasy Flop Racks up a New High Score on Streaming

Fantasy is arguably more at risk than most other genres when it comes to the dangers of bombing at the box office, and it’s not a coincidence that so many of history’s biggest flops and money-losing misfires are set in outlandish worlds. Enter the Warrior’s Gate might be one of the most forgotten failures, but it also happens to be one of the biggest.

On a budget of $48 million, the turgid video game-infused ancient epic earned the princely sum of $3.5 million from theaters around the world. That means it recouped a little over seven percent of its production costs from paying customers, which in turn ensures it a place in the history books as one of fantasy’s heftiest-ever failures.

Bringing nothing new to a genre that’s seen and done it all at this point, a teenage gamer ends up being transported back to a mysterious empire after a chest opens a gateway through space and time. Once there, he’s forced to utilize the skills he honed on consoles to battle a ruthless barbarian Warlord played by Dave Bautista for some reason, ensure the safety of a princess/damsel in distress/potential love interest, and somehow find a way back to his own world.

About as unimaginative as far-fetched flights of fancy could possibly hope to be, it went down as another black mark against co-writer and producer Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, a company that tends to endure more misses than hits when it isn’t churning out B-tier action thrillers with middle-aged stars in the lead role.

And yet, Enter the Warrior’s Gate has inexplicably risen from the ashes and ended up as something of a minor sensation on streaming this week, after FlixPatrol named it as one of the 10 most-watched features among HBO Max subscribers in the United States, which doesn’t make any sense at all given how badly it fared first time around.

via EuropaCorp

Fantasy is arguably more at risk than most other genres when it comes to the dangers of bombing at the box office, and it’s not a coincidence that so many of history’s biggest flops and money-losing misfires are set in outlandish worlds. Enter the Warrior’s Gate might be one of the most forgotten failures, but it also happens to be one of the biggest.

On a budget of $48 million, the turgid video game-infused ancient epic earned the princely sum of $3.5 million from theaters around the world. That means it recouped a little over seven percent of its production costs from paying customers, which in turn ensures it a place in the history books as one of fantasy’s heftiest-ever failures.

Bringing nothing new to a genre that’s seen and done it all at this point, a teenage gamer ends up being transported back to a mysterious empire after a chest opens a gateway through space and time. Once there, he’s forced to utilize the skills he honed on consoles to battle a ruthless barbarian Warlord played by Dave Bautista for some reason, ensure the safety of a princess/damsel in distress/potential love interest, and somehow find a way back to his own world.

About as unimaginative as far-fetched flights of fancy could possibly hope to be, it went down as another black mark against co-writer and producer Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, a company that tends to endure more misses than hits when it isn’t churning out B-tier action thrillers with middle-aged stars in the lead role.

And yet, Enter the Warrior’s Gate has inexplicably risen from the ashes and ended up as something of a minor sensation on streaming this week, after FlixPatrol named it as one of the 10 most-watched features among HBO Max subscribers in the United States, which doesn’t make any sense at all given how badly it fared first time around.