20 Years Ago, The Biggest Box Office Flop Ever Made $30

As we know, the biggest box office flops (including Jared Leto's "Tron: Ares") tend to come in different sizes, depending on budget, distribution, and marketing, which all factor into how a movie ends up performing once sent into cinemas. You've probably heard about some of the most infamous ones, like 2003's disastrous rom-com, "Gigli," with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, or Ed Wood's legendary, so-bad-it's-good 1958 B-horror, "Plan 9 From Outer Space." But there are those movies, and then there is 2006's thriller, "Zyzzyx Road," by John Penney.

Made on a shoestring budget of $1.2 million, starring Katherine Heigl (who shot the pilot for "Grey's Anatomy" around then), Tom Sizemore, and Leo Grillo, Penney's directorial debut (which makes it all the more painful) had a limited release at only one cinema in Dallas, Texas. Its plot follows a burned-out accountant, Grant (Grillo), seduced by Heigl's Marissa in Las Vegas. Her violent ex-boyfriend, Joey (Sizemore), attacks the two, and the altercation leads to him being killed by Grant. That's what the couple assumes, at least. But when they go to the Mojave Desert to bury Joey, his body seems to have disappeared from their car's trunk.

"Zyzzyx Road" ran for a week, screened seven times, and made a whopping $30 from the six people that went to see it, according to Entertainment Weekly. Two of those, however, received a $5 refund each since they were the film's makeup artists, whom Penney wanted to give a chance to see the final result for free. Thus, the net revenue was actually a total of $20. You're probably wondering how that's even possible, and the reason, unsurprisingly, has to do with money.

As EW reported in its coverage, Penney had to send the film into theaters (domestically) to avoid paying its stars a higher salary due to a Screen Actors Guild agreement. His solution was to rent out an entire cinema for a flat fee of $1,000 (aka "four-wall" it) until the required one-week period had passed. It was not a proper release, so Penney didn't care much for revenue from the screenings since "Zyzzyx Road" wasn't supposed to have a theatrical release at all. The writer-director was in a negotiation to secure deals for his picture's international DVD sales at the time, through which he eventually got around $368,000.

The problem was that once a small news outlet, CHUD.com, reported the story about the film's low earnings, the major ones (including Variety, NPR, and The New York Times) also began to run with it. In no time, "Zyzzyx Road" became the movie that made (almost literally) no money with all the negative reputation that comes with that label. However, since there's no such thing as bad publicity, "Zyzzyx Road" ended up drawing the public's interest due to its sensationalistic nature and eventually secured a domestic DVD release in North America in 2010. Penney even ended up releasing a collector's edition Blu-ray, including a 90-minute-long documentary feature about the whole fiasco that surrounded the 2006 release and how the film became the lowest-grossing movie ever in U.S. history.