From Publishers Weekly:

For this list, we didn’t just want book adaptations that were a critical/audience failure or a box office failure–we wanted both. That’s why the films you see below might not be the biggest money losers or the most panned; instead, they’re a combination of the most hated and most wasteful uses of celluloid out there. If none of these movies were made, over $913,000,000 would have been saved and approximately 4 billion viewing hours would have been saved.

. . . .

10. John Carter (2012)

Net Losses (inflation adjusted to 2012): $67,221,900

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 51%

Representative Review Quote: “There’s nothing to see, nothing to think about, nothing to care about, and nothing to feel, just emptiness. The emptiness is never filled over the course of 132 long, barren minutes.” -San Francisco Chronicle

Everyone was excited to call John Carter a flop before it even came out in 2012, and though it did tank, it lost less money than some of the other films on this list and it actually received so-so reviews. It’s hard to justify the $250 million dollar budget, and while it was trying to capture the same adventure feel of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it ended up being compared to the worst aspects of Prince of Persia, The Phantom Menace, and Cowboys & Aliens. Yeah, I forgot about Cowboys & Aliens, too.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to Eric for the tip.

Looking for authentic dialogue and accents from all over North America?

From io9:

This is the culmination of Rick Aschmann’s years-long “hobby” of collecting dialects. It’s a comprehensive and detailed map of the dialects (and sub-dialects!) of English-speakers in Canada and the United States.

. . . .

Aschmann’s site is a veritable font of information on English dialects. There’s the Dialect Information Chart which tells you which vowel sounds can be found in what dialect and each dialect’s “unique features.” Like Mat-Su Valley Alaska, which has the unique feature of being “strongly like North Central” but with some “main Alaska dialect” mixed in. If that doesn’t mean anything to you, there’s a helpful parenthetical there: “See Sarah Palin.”

. . . .

The one on his site is especially useful because clicking on a place takes you to audio sample of that dialect on his curated list of audio examples of many of the dialects.

Link to the rest at io9 and thanks to Joshua for the tip.

If you would like a brief sample of an American accent from the Eastern Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin, this excerpt from the movie, Fargo should do the trick. PG spent several years during his youth in rural Minnesota and he can attest to the accuracy of both the accent and the conversational style.

And don’t forget The Onion Book of Known Knowledge

Thanks to Julia for the tip.

Thanks to Suzan for the tip.