One of the biggest box office bombs in history was the 1997 movie Lolita, starring Jeremy Irons and Dominique Swain. The movie was based on the novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov, or as you might know from The Police hit song Don’t Stand So Close (To Me) as “that book by Nabokov.”  Per wikipedia, the filmmakers failed to find a distributor for the film, and it had only a limited release. It made just $1.1 million at the U.S. box office on a $62 million production budget.