Pictured: They don't know how she does it.

And now for your daily dose of easy Schadenfreude, the top 15 flops of 2011. While it’s easy and fun to tap dance on the grave of most of these ass piles (pour a little rum out for The Rum Diary – *I* liked it), remember: justice won’t truly be served until everyone involved in the making of New Year’s Eve gets shot out of a cannon.

1. Mars Needs Moms
Studio: Disney
Release Date: March 11, 2011
Budget: $150 million
Worldwide Gross: $39 million

2. Sucker Punch
Studio: Warner Bros.
Stars: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens
Release Date: March 25, 2011
Budget: $82 million
Worldwide gross: $89.8 million

3. Arthur
Studio: Warner Bros.
Stars: Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Jennifer Garner
Release Date: April 8, 2011
Budget: $40 million-plus
Worldwide Gross: $45.7 million

4. Green Lantern
Studio: Warner Bros.
Stars: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively
Release Date: June 17, 2011
Budget: $200 million
Worldwide Gross: $219.9 million

5. Cowboys & Aliens
Studio: DreamWorks/Universal
Stars: Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford
Release Date: July 29, 2011
Budget: $163 million
Worldwide Gross: $178.8

6. Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
Studio: Fox
Stars: Lea Michele, Chris Colfer, Darren Criss
Release Date: Aug. 12
Budget: $9 million
Worldwide Gross: $18.7 millon

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The Hollywood Reporter recently ran a feature on “Summer Box Office’s 10 Biggest Flops of 2011,”  (not to be confused with The Biggest Flops of 2011 So Far from a few weeks ago) and even though summer isn’t even over yet, I know these “lists of things with numbers next to them” soothe the internet beast. Just don’t expect me stop wearing these white shoes before Labor Day Weekend, you jackals.

I’m proud to say that in our Fantasy Summer Box Office Contest, Brendan and I predicted at least two of these (not that you needed to be Nostradamus to know The Change-Up or Green Lantern were going to tank). Sorry, Ryan Reynolds. If it’s any consolation, you still look like you’d smell nice.

1. Cowboys & Aliens
Directed by Jon Favreau and featuring James Bond star Daniel Craig, the $163 million-budgeted movie mixed two genres: Westerns and alien pics. Unfortunately, audiences didn’t embrace the result. From Universal and DreamWorks, Cowboys & Aliens has cumed [bwahahaha! it's hilarious because I'm 12! -Ed] only $129 million to date, including $93.5 million domestically and $35.5 million overseas (where it still has some territories yet to open).

2. Larry Crowne
Directed by and starring Tom Hanks (opposite Julia Roberts), Larry Crowne was intended to please adult audiences put off by summer popcorn fare. But the Universal film, fully financed by Vendome Films, topped out at $52.4 million worldwide, including only $35.6 million domestically.

3. Green Lantern
The Ryan Reynolds superhero pic cost a pricey $200 million to produce, yet has only earned $206.1 million worldwide. In North America, the Warner Bros. film topped out at $116 million, while it’s cumed $90.1 million to date at the international box office. Like Cowboys, it hasn’t fully rolled out overseas.

4. Priest
The Paul Bettany action pic, based on the Korean graphic novel, was the most expensive movie ever produced by Sony’s Screen Gems, sporting a price tag north of $60 million. It’s only earned $76.6 million worldwide, including $29.1 million in North America, and $47.4 million offshore.

5. The Change-Up
The Jason Bateman-Ryan Reynolds pic has earned only $34.5 million to date domestically, ending a dazzling winning streak for R-rated comedies. Universal hasn’t yet begun rolling out the movie in major foreign territories.

6. Conan the Barbarian
The reboot cost north of $70 million to make but is off to a poor start, grossing only $16.6 million domestically in its first 10 days, and $5.5 million in its initial foreign run. The film was fully financed by NuImage/Millennium, and is being distributed by Lionsgate.

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This could change when the final numbers come in, but early estimates have Cowboys and Aliens tied with The Smurfs with $36.2M for the weekend. It’s sort of a coup for Smurfs (with an alleged production budget of $110 million vs. $163 for Cowboys and 355 fewer theaters), but there are two ways to read it. The optimistic way would be to say that Hollywood may have finally found a premise too reductive even for Cletus Q. Sixpack. The pessimistic view is that thanks to inflated 3D ticket prices, not even Cowboys and Aliens and James Bond and Indiana Jones and the Iron Man director and Rocket Hands could beat a half-assed adaptation of a cartoon even people my age barely remember.

You might think the Cowboys and Aliens numbers might be more important, since Smurfs is a kids movie, and kids movies are and probably always will be lowest-common-denominator affairs, but also keep in mind that those “kids movies” you so cavalierly dismiss as someone else’s concern are the films I have to take my dates to.

[chart via BoxOfficeMojo, additional budget numbers via TheNumbers]

After the jump: Fantasy Summer Box Office Standings

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Visual pitch for my movie, Cowboys & Aliens & Velociraptors & Predator

MOVIES OPENING THIS WEEK: Cowboys and Aliens, Attack the Block (in select cities), Crazy Stupid Love, The Smurfs. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of reading all the rest of this, let’s put it this way: Attack the Block is the one you want to see, at least until The Guard comes out.

COWBOYS AND ALIENS: Jon Favreau takes a break from Iron Man to film Bourne in the desert with James Bond and Indiana Jones. It has other things boys like as well, like aliens, ‘splosions, and Olivia Wilde. No dinosaurs though. Weak, dude.

RottenTomatoes: 44%

Gratuitous Review Quotes:

Actually, the ampersand in the title is a tad misleading, since the genres never fuse into an extraterrestrial horse opera. A more accurate label would be Cowboys, Then Aliens, Then Cowboys Again, Then a Big Mess of Aliens. There’s no whole, just parts. -Rick Groen, GlobeandMail

Cowboys & Aliens has fun moments, but it’s a plodding entertainment because it mostly tastes like leftovers. -Owen Glieberman, Entertainment Weekly

The movie gets by on the strength of agreeable talent who enjoy playing along and can endure the horse manure and space goo being shovelled. -Pete Howell, Toronto Star

Armchair Assessment: Yeah, it’s pretty stupid.

FUN FACT: Spielberg has produced three movies so far this year (four, if you count I Am Number Four, which came from his company, Dreamworks), all of them about alien invasion (Super 8, Transformers 3, Cowboys & Aliens). Maybe he knows things.

NEXT PAGE: Attack the Block

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Cowboys and Aliens is an absurdist pastiche of overused action movie tropes (Bourne in the old west! With aliens!), which is occasionally compelling, if only for the sheer audacity of plot choices. That is to say, it’s ridiculous. And I’m a big fan of the ridiculous (see also: Lieutenant, Bad; Werner Herzog version of). I just wish Cowboys and Aliens‘ preposterousness wasn’t so couched in pre-fabricated stories and characters. It’s a lot like Lost, but even black smoke monsters and polar bears seemed more fresh than Cowboys, Indians, aliens, rocket hands, and amnesia. It plays like a producer brainstorming session that never got edited, which makes it all the more shocking that no one turns out to be a vampire or a hot cyborg lesbian (spoiler alert).

It’s hard to believe Lost exec producer Damon Lindelof had five co-writers, because the whole thing reeks of black smoke musk, from the character daddy issues driving every single plot point right down to the fat-faced kid with a dog who seems totally unnecessary to the plot. I imagine the writers meeting went something like this:

Alex Kurtzman: Cowboys!

Robert Orci: Indians! Aliens! James Bond! Indiana Jones–

Steve Oedekirk: (*loud gurgle, extended fart sound followed by terrible stench. the rest of the gang rolls his wheelchair outside before continuing*)

Lindelof: Amnesia! Religious themes! Re-incarnation–

Iron Man writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby: [together] ROCKET HANDS! (*they smash their beer steins together, down the rest, and stomp off like the Bushwhackers*)

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