Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of U.S. and Canadian box office bombs
It might seem like this article would would work but there is an insurmountable problem with it in that there is no commonly accepted definition of ''box office bomb''. An attempt to create such a definition for the purposes of the article would constitute original research. The de facto standard currently being used, that domestic box office is less than 60% of production budget, is an arbitrary cutoff with no bases in a reliable source. Even accepting a definition that might seem reasonable is fought with difficulty. Finances in the film industry are enormously complex and are often not completely Hollywood accounting|above board. In addition to production costs, marketing and and distribution costs account for a large percentage of the actual investment in a movie. In addition to domestic box office, foreign markets, DVD sales, merchandising etc. are significant revenue streams. The article only lists production cost and domestic box office and as Mandsford pointed out this seems arbitrary, but there is a good reason for it in that these numbers are often all that are available publicly; studios tend to hide the remaining numbers. So the actual profit or loss for a given movie is impossible to determine here. Given all this, the determination of whether a movie is a 'bomb' ultimately comes down to a matter of of opinion. This isn't necessarily fatal though, opinions can be obtained from notable sources or by reliable poling then they may used in an article (e.g. Films considered the greatest ever). In this case however, notable sources such was well known movie critics rarely go on the record to call a movie a bomb or equivalent term, and sites such as Box Office Mojo give financial data only, leaving the interpretation to user. There are many lists of worst movies that may be quoted, but there don't seem to be many lists of biggest bombs out there and what there is comes from dubious sources. (I think the reason for this is that reliable sources come up against the problems listed above.) In short, while the topic may be interesting or deserving of coverage, there is simply no objective way to make the determination for inclusion on the list that's implied by the article name. This may not seem very important but keep in mind that many movies are subject to POV based attacks (e.g. political documentaries), so inclusion of exclusion of a movie on this list could be politically motivated and lead to accusations of Wikipedia being politically biased. Given the actual criteria for inclusion and the fact that no further conclusions can be drawn, the name of the article should really be "List of movies whose domestic box office does not exceed 60% of its estimated production budget". This exactly describes the article but with this title it's obvious that it's an arbitrarily defined list that does not pass . There are few notable bombs, but these are already represented in Box office bomb. I know this comment is very long, but this article has already gone through two AfD's and I'm trying to anticipate the arguments that were given then. This is not a simple issue and I believe that the reason the AfD's did not result in deletion before is that the people participating in those debates did not fully understand or appreciate the problems inherent in this article. I've have been an active editor of this page recently, but only to bring it to the standard of not being an embarrassment to Wikipedia by removing blatant OR and unwarranted conclusions
— User:RDBury, 10:48, 18 September 2009 (UTC)
Stance: delete
Cited policy: WP:IINFO (Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not)