The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Financial decision · 2016-2017
Paramount wrote down $115M on Monster Trucks four months before it even opened
Viacom announced the write-down in September 2016 based on tracking alone, and the family film went on to gross just $64.5M against a $125M budget.
Paramount Pictures · Viacom · 2017-01-13
What happened
Paramount Pictures committed $125 million to Monster Trucks, a family film built around an unusual and hard-to-market premise combining a coming-of-age story with sentient creatures living inside truck engines, greenlit years earlier under different studio leadership.
By September 2016, months before the film's January 2017 release, parent company Viacom's own tracking data showed the film's commercial prospects were poor enough that it announced a $115 million write-down against the film — an unusually public and early admission of an expected loss.
Monster Trucks opened as predicted, grossing $64.5 million worldwide against its $125 million budget. The write-down had already priced in the failure before a single ticket sold, and the film became a widely cited symbol of an unmarketable premise reaching production regardless.
Why it happened
- The premise's marketing challenge was foreseeable at the concept stage, long before the $125M budget was fully committed.
- New studio leadership inherited a project greenlit under a prior regime without the authority or will to cancel it before release.
- Publicly writing down the loss months before release signaled the studio had already stopped trying to save the film commercially.
- Nobody intervened early enough in development to either fix the marketing problem or halt the production before the full budget was spent.
The lesson
A hard-to-market premise doesn't get easier to sell the more money is spent finishing the film — it needs solving before production, not after.
Aftermath
Monster Trucks became a standard example in Hollywood coverage of studios inheriting and completing troubled greenlit projects from prior leadership rather than cutting losses earlier in development.
Sources
- Monster Trucks (film) — Wikipedia
- The Hollywood Reporter — 'Monster Trucks' Leads to Huge $115M Write-Down
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