8 Reasons Matilda Bombed At The Box Office: Examining The Childhood Favorite’s $33M Failure

To the surprise of many, 1996’s Matilda was actually a box office bomb, and here are eight reasons why the childhood favorite had a notoriously bad $33 million failure. Matilda is now considered to be a classic film, with the beloved adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book being so popular that it even spawned a Broadway musical, which itself got a movie titled Matilda: The Musical in 2023. Despite the film’s newfound popularity, Matilda was originally a financial bomb, with it losing a significant amount of money at the box office. A variety of factors played into the commercial failure of 1996’s Matilda adaptation, and here are eight of them.