Kevin Costner has had a number of critical flops to go alongside his more iconic successes, but the movie regarded by many as his worst ever, 2002’s Dragonfly, was born directly out of M. Night Shyamalan’s classic thriller The Sixth Sense. The supernatural thriller from director Tom Shadyac (Liar, Liar, Patch Adams) stars Costner as a doctor who is grieving the loss of his wife, who was seven months pregnant when she died in a landslide. His wife reaches him from beyond the grave through his patients that have near-death experiences, which ultimately leads to a brief supernatural reunion.

Dragonfly fits in with the thriller style of the times, alongside movies like Memento and The Butterfly Effect. Unfortunately, the movie was so widely panned that it made very little impact on pop culture, so much so that it is all but forgotten now. While some of the story elements overlap, it was the movie’s marketing that was specifically modeled after The Sixth Sense in one very specific way.

Universal Wanted To Replicate The Sixth Sense’s Success With Dragonfly

The Fantasy Thriller Had Similar Genre Elements

The concept of a doctor communicating with the dead certainly conjures The Sixth Sense, and that was part of the point with Dragonfly. Universal’s ultimate intention was to replicate the financial success of Shyamalan’s thriller with Dragonfly, which played a major role in the movie being made in the first place. The movie originally carried an estimated budget of $75 million, which scared off its original studio, MGM. While not unheard of, that was still a massive investment on the part of any studio for something that wouldn’t necessarily be a tentpole.

Per Variety, Universal plotted to present Dragonfly to the public in the same manner as The Sixth Sense from a distribution standpoint. Universal handled the domestic distribution and tagged in Spyglass Entertainment to handle foreign presales of the movie, just as they did on The Sixth Sense. That successful arrangement from a few years earlier gave everyone involved the confidence that Dragonfly could be just as big a hit, but that isn’t how it played out, unfortunately.

Why Dragonfly Was So Poorly Reviewed And Flopped At The Box Office

The Movie Was Considered Boring And Clichéd

Dragonfly is far and away the worst-reviewed movie that Costner has ever been a part of judging by Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score. With a dismal 7% from 125 critic reviews, Dragonfly was lambasted for being overly emotional, completely boring, and filled with corny dialogue. James Rocchi of Netflix dubbed it “an all-time low for Kevin Costner”, and all but a few critics seemed to be in agreement. Interestingly enough, the Popcornmeter score is at 62%, representing a significant difference between the perception of the public and the perception of professional critics.

Just a year after
Dragonfly
was released in the United States, it was loosely remade in India under the name
Saaya
, which translates to “Shadow”.

Regardless of what the audience reviews indicate, the box office was a major disappointment. Dragonfly failed to even earn back its budget of $60 million, and wound up earning a total of $52 million worldwide. The distribution arrangement between Universal and Spyglass Entertainment matched what occurred for The Sixth Sense, but unfortunately, the movie’s low quality was the difference-maker between the two. While The Sixth Sense is an iconic thriller, Dragonfly barely registers with anybody but the most die-hard Kevin Costner fans.

Source: Variety, Rotten Tomatoes