Released: June 30, 1999
Estimated Budget: $170 million
Domestic Opening Weekend: $49,705,055
Domestic Gross:$113,745,408
From the Men in Black franchise to Independence Day, Will Smith for years owned the summer-blockbuster category. But the least regrettable aspect of this 1999 misfire is probably the erstwhile rapper’s bouncy, Stevie Wonder–sampling theme song. It was a movie that probably sounded great on paper — a sci-fi/action/western/comedy smorgasbord, featuring the bankable Smith teamed with Salma Hayek, veteran Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh to lend some Shakespearean backbone. And despite underwhelming reviews (“You know something has gone wrong,” mused Roger Ebert, “when a story is about two heroes in the Old West, and the last shot is of a mechanical spider riding off into the sunset”) Wild Wild West scored a respectable U.S. gross of $114 million. Still, it wasn’t nearly enough to lasso its whopping $170 million budget.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLkSl0dKOsI]