A $90 million Christmas musical starring a young Elle Fanning, Nathan Lane and John Turturro still holds a perfect zero. The Nutcracker in 3D, released in US and Canadian cinemas on November 24, 2010, has 0% positive reviews from 32 critics on the best-known review aggregator, and as of October 2025 it was one of just 41 films to hold that rating with a review count that large.
It sank at the box office too, taking about $20.5 million worldwide, more than half of it in Russia.
What The Nutcracker in 3D actually is
Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky directed, co-wrote and produced the film, a co-production of the United Kingdom, Russia and Hungary. He called it his “dream project” of more than twenty years. It moves Tchaikovsky’s 1892 ballet to 1920s Vienna, where Fanning’s Mary receives a nutcracker doll on Christmas Eve that turns out to be a cursed prince.
Then the choices get stranger. There is no ballet. Konchalovsky argued that “ballet cannot work in cinema very well,” so Tchaikovsky’s music was turned into songs with new lyrics by Tim Rice, the lyricist behind Evita. Turturro plays a Rat King who burns children’s toys in factories so the smoke blocks out daylight, and his rats were given Nazi-like qualities, a decision that disturbed critics and parents alike. A pack of robotic Rottweilers also appears.
The cast is stacked: Richard E. Grant plays Mary’s father, Frances de la Tour plays the Rat Queen, and Shirley Henderson voices the Nutcracker, with Charlie Rowe as the prince in human form.
The numbers behind the flop
- $90 million: the reported budget.
- $20,466,016: the worldwide gross.
- $73.8 million: the recorded loss.
- 18 out of 100: its score on a second aggregator, which later named it the worst limited release of 2010.
- One: the number of positive professional reviews, a B+ that treated it as a so-bad-it’s-good cult pick.
Put another way, the film earned back roughly 23 cents for every dollar it cost, before any marketing spend. It also picked up a Golden Raspberry nomination for Worst Eye Gouging Misuse of 3D.
How it fits Christmas viewing in 2026
Fifteen years on, the film has become a kind of anti-tradition, a December curiosity for viewers who want to see how a big budget, a famous score and real stars can all miss together. It was released on home video in the US in 2011, and its songs never got a soundtrack album, likely because the film flopped.
It is a useful contrast with this season’s holiday slate, from the Christmas Eve thriller Aaron Pierre is set to star in for Sisu director Jalmari Helander to J.K. Simmons calling Red One his redemption after a miserable stint as a mall Santa.
Fanning, who was 12 when the film opened, went on to a long career, and she earned a Young Artist Award nomination for playing Mary. The film’s US release date, November 24, falls nine days from now, which makes it 16 years old this Thanksgiving week.
Further reading
Image: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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