Harrison Ford's Sci-Fi Box Office Flop Based On A Beloved Book Is Streaming On Prime Video

Many sci-fi movies that earn awful reviews are still worth watching. Can the same be said for 2013's "Ender's Game?" Yeah... maybe. In fairness, the film's reviews weren't exactly "awful," just not all that great. Its box office performance, however, was pretty rough. Sure, it made more than its budget, but only barely, which, if you know anything about how the box office actually works, means "Ender's Game" lost distributor Summit Entertainment and production company OddLot a pretty penny. Now, you can revisit this Harrison Ford-led flop on Prime Video and decide for yourself whether it deserved such a fate.

A sci-fi actioner featuring Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Viola Davis, and Hailee Steinfeld sounds worth a watch. Unfortunately, "Ender's Game" flopped despite its stacked cast, somehow squandering much of that talent in what Anthony Lane of The New Yorker described as a film that's "hard to comprehend and even harder to endure."

Alongside the aforementioned stars, "Ender's Game" is led by Asa Butterfield, who plays a gifted youngster training to repel a future alien invasion. It was written and directed by Gavin Hood, who based his script on Orson Scott Card's 1985 novel of the same name. Hood had directed some critically-acclaimed films by the time he came to "Ender's Game," including his 2005 crime drama "Tsotsi." His Hollywood career didn't necessarily yield a similar critical response, with 2007's "Rendition" and 2009's "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" drawing mixed reactions. 

Still, at least "X-Men Origins" made a decent profit. With "Ender's Game," Hood no doubt hoped to secure his first American hit that also garnered solid reviews. Sadly, neither came to pass.

As is to be expected from a man whose career now spans more than half a century, Harrison Ford has made a few flops, many of which he's defended. Ford believes his 2002 flop "K-19: The Widowmaker" is one of his most underrated movies, and doesn't care that "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny" flopped. He also defended "Ender's Game" after the author of the novel on which it was based came under fire for his views on gay marriage. As Ford said at the time (via The Guardian), "There is nothing in the film or the book addressing his current dispositions, or prejudices. We care about the positive aspects of the story we are telling." Unfortunately, not enough moviegoers cared about that story.

"Ender's Game" is set in the future following a devastating attack on Earth by a race of aliens known as Formics. Humanity is preparing a counter-attack, and, for some reason, they do so by training children to join a new fleet. One of those children is Cadet Andrew "Ender" Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), who's clearly much more gifted than the other trainees. His talents are noticed by Colonel Hyrum Graff (Ford) and Major Gwen Anderson (Viola Davis), who place him in Battle School, where Ben Kingsley's war hero Mazer Rackham also notices Wiggin's abilities. 

Rackham takes Wiggin under his wing. But all is not quite as it seems, and Wiggin soon finds he's been misled. Also, Kingsley sports a face tattoo designed to convey the character's half-Maori heritage. It's actually very distracting, yet he plays things extremely straight, and it's quite funny.

"Ender's Game" didn't get off to the best start considering the controversy surrounding author Orson Scott Card. Things didn't get much better from there, either — though at one point it looked as though the film's fortunes might change. "Ender's Game" bowed in theaters on November 1, 2013, and finished at number one for its first weekend. At that point it looked as though Gavin Hood's sci-fi outing had beaten its negative publicity. But the box office receipts dwindled significantly in the following weeks, ultimately making "Ender's Game" a flop.

The film was not as big a commercial disaster as, say, Ben Kingsley's "Desert Warrior," which became the biggest box office flop of all time in 2026. But it also failed to get anywhere near its break-even point. Bearing in mind a film typically has to double its budget to break even, and that's before marketing spend is taken into account, "Ender's Game" made $126 million on a $115 million budget. That's an expensive sci-fi flop no matter how you try to spin it.

Critics weren't too impressed either. The film maintains a 63% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, with several reviewers dismissing the film outright. That said, plenty of critics liked it, resulting in a general view of the film as just okay. As Donald Clarke of the Irish Times put it in his three-star review, "Ender's Game" was "perfectly satisfactory." If you're tempted to see whether the film deserved more than to flop at the box office and slip into obscurity, Prime Video subscribers can stream it now at no extra cost.