Director Tells Us What We Already Knew: ‘Battleship’ Was a Failure

'Battleship' was not a good movie. Even animated GIFs know this. But now even the director, Peter Berg, is admitting that his big-budget film was a critical and commercial disappointment and is trying to figure out what went wrong.

Berg spoke on a panel titled "Passion Projects: Making Films Everyone Says Will Never Get Made" on Sunday morning and couldn't help addressing the irony that he was on a panel about passion projects when his last film was a $200 million-plus adaptation of a kids board game.

When asked about 'Battleship' Berg said it "obviously underperformed in many ways" and that he's spent the time since wondering "what went wrong and how it went wrong." Can we start with the fact that over $200 million was spent making a movie out of Battleship?

Berg added:

It was a movie that I tried as hard as I could to get inside of. But...the money is so big and so powerful, that the movie is going to run away with itself. I want to get inside the movie's world and feel like I know it better than anyone, and I couldn't do that.

It's one of many costly failures for movie studios lately (see: 'John Carter') and one that will certainly make studios more closely examine their budgets. That likely won't always stop a movie like 'Battleship' from getting made but it might at least save some money for more appealing material.