Worst business decisions ever.

[Dalisclock]

You'd think that, wouldn't you? But again, they had to drop Mars from the title because, with Mars Needs Moms bombing, CLEARLY audiences weren't interested in movies that involved Mars. Couldn't have anything to do with that movie just not being very good.

I swear that joke about replacing Executives with apes in suits and getting better results never gets old.

 

[Bedinsis]

Morgan Freeman has argued that the title of The Shawshank Redemption is the reason that movie did poorly at the box office, since it was too complicated for people to remember. I wonder if it would have fared better with a translation of the Swedish title (Nyckeln till frihet meaning "The key to freedom").

Another movie that I believe hurt from a poor title was Edge of Tomorrow, since that is a fairly generic title and the movie's tag line did a much better job of advertising the movie's central gimmick: "Live. Die. Repeat".

The YouTube channel DYKGaming (Did you know gaming) did an episode on the Professor Layton series and revealed that the reason that series did better in Europe than its native Japan is that they advertised it as an adventure game natively and as a puzzle game abroad. Having played the first title I'd argue that calling it a puzzle game would be more accurate.

 

[Masonicon]

Deviantart's owners sold their website to Wix, latter overprotectiveness to it's AIs allows spambots to outnumbers real users in Deviantart, among other reasons

 

[Silvanus]

The Russian Empire selling Alaska to the US for ~7 million dollars (~140 million dollars adjusted for inflation).

Full of fucking oil.