Led by James Gunn and Peter Safran, DC Studios was tasked with rebuilding audience trust after almost a decade of mismanagement and rushed course corrections had undermined the DC brand. The first test of the new strategy came with 2025’s Superman, which became the biggest superhero release of the year, charmed fans and critics alike, and introduced a lived-in universe that included other heroes, including Superman’s (David Corenswet) cousin Supergirl (Milly Alcock). However, Supergirl’s solo movie was disastrous, finishing its theatrical run with $125.9 million worldwide and causing an estimated $200 million loss for the studio. Supergirl now sits among the biggest DC theatrical bombs at Warner Bros., a list that includes a supernatural Western still remembered as one of the studio’s worst production disasters.
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Jonah Hex arrived in theaters on June 18, 2010, adapting the DC Comics gunslinger for a big-budget Warner Bros. production. Josh Brolin starred as Jonah Hex, a disfigured bounty hunter tracking his old commanding officer, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich), across the postwar West, with Lilah Black (Megan Fox) as his love interest and Burke (Michael Fassbender) serving as Turnbull’s chief enforcer. Lieutenant Grass (Will Arnett) and Doc Cross Williams (Michael Shannon) rounded out the principal cast, alongside Wes Bentley, Aidan Quinn, and Lance Reddick in supporting roles. Many of these names went on to become big for comic book lovers once they managed to find a project where they could prove their talent. Brolin went on to play Thanos in the Avengers films and Cable in Deadpool 2. Fassbender became Magneto across four X-Men films and earned an Oscar nomination for 12 Years a Slave. Shannon returned to a DC blockbuster three years later as General Zod in Man of Steel before earning a second Oscar nomination for Nocturnal Animals. Speaking on awards, Malkovich already carried two Oscar nominations, for Places in the Heart and In the Line of Fire, before he ever signed on to play Turnbull. None of that talent translated into ticket sales. Jonah Hex opened to $5.4 million and finished its run with $11 million.
Why Did Jonah Hex Bomb at the Box Office?
The chaos behind Jonah Hex began with the budget. Warner Bros. and Legendary initially budgeted the film at $80 million, then cut that figure to $40 million before production began, without reducing the scope of a script that included a major set piece on a ship and a full-blown Civil War battle. The cut didn’t serve the studio well, because reshoots later added roughly $25 million back to the budget, with the final numbers believed to be close to the full $80 million. Brolin has since said the mismatch between scale and comic books was the real problem, arguing the character would have worked better as a lean, low-budget Western in the vein of High Plains Drifter than as a special-effects-driven studio tentpole. As it was, the production crew was always fighting the constraints of the budget and the script’s ambition, which helps explain the lackluster movie that hit theaters.
Jonah Hex also suffered from years of behind-the-scenes drama. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the writing and directing team behind Crank, were attached to write and direct Jonah Hex as an R-rated Western before Warner Bros. removed them from the director’s chair in November 2008 over creative differences. The studio kept their script but replaced them with Jimmy Hayward, an animator whose only prior directing credit was the family film Horton Hears a Who!. Warner Bros. also shifted the rating target to PG-13. That’s why the finished film frequently cuts away from violence in weird ways, an effect of the PG-13 mandate colliding with material written for a harder rating.
Filming of Jonah Hex began in Louisiana in April 2009 under Hayward. Warner Bros. was unhappy enough with his cut, so they brought in Francis Lawrence to direct a separate round of reshoots. Brolin later said the crew reworked 66 pages of script in twelve days, working at a fast pace just to get everything on film. The reshoots added the film’s superweapon plot, additional scenes explaining Hex’s ability to speak with the dead, and new material involving President Ulysses S. Grant (Aidan Quinn), while trimming Michael Shannon and Will Arnett’s roles down to a handful of seconds each. Footage from Hayward’s original cut, including a dream-sequence fight between Hex and Turnbull, remained in the release alongside the newly shot material, making the movie look like a visible patchwork.
Advance word about Jonah Hex‘s troubled production had circulated for months before its release, with many DC fans giving up on the film before its release. Yet, Warner Bros. still decided to release the movie as counter-programming against Pixar’s Toy Story 3. The strategy wasn’t so bold, as Warner Bros. had projected only a $10 million opening, and it’s likely they just wanted to use Toy Story 3 to partly justify the failure. Even then, audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a C+ following its opening weekend, which means a widespread rejection from people who watched Jonah Hex in theaters. Yes, the cast was phenomenal, but the back-and-forth of changes and creative interference killed Jonah Hex long before its release week.
Jonah Hex is currently available to stream on HBO Max.
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