Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler’s new film The House is a flop. Released in the US on 30 June, it currently has a 16% Rotten Tomatoes rating: that’s a full 7% worse than the hysterically trashed The Book of Henry. The House has also tanked commercially, opening outside the top five and recouping less than a quarter of its production budget. It’s Ferrell’s worst opening for a movie in 18 years.

Most damningly of all, though, none of this really came as a surprise. Right from its very first public sighting, The House couldn’t help but out itself as a failure. Without seeing it – without even reading a review – the seasoned moviegoer will have noticed all the hallmarks of a dud. Let’s trawl through all the signs hinting at its stinkiness, and use The House as a warning from history. Keep your eyes open for these in the future.

Embargoed reviews

This is the clearest sign that a studio knows it has a misfire on its hands. When there is a good film on the slate, it will crow from the rooftops about how much people love it. Baby Driver, for example, was the subject of glowing reviews for what felt like three years before it actually came out. But The House? Reviews were embargoed until the day of release. This is never good. It’s an act of cynicism on the part of the studio; an admission that the best it can do is trick a few innocent rubes into buying a ticket before word gets out about how awful it is.

Sub-90-minute running time

When a film comes out, check to see how long it is. If it’s over two hours, chances are you’re going to have to sit through a smattering of hubris. But if it’s a modern mainstream movie under 90 minutes long then – give or take a few exceptions – it’s probably a disaster. A sub-90 movie is a movie that’s been mauled to death in the edit suite. It’s a cut-and-shut job, a salvage gig. What you’re watching are the repurposed remnants of a grander vision that fell flat on its arse during production. In Will Ferrell terms, Step Brothers is 98 minutes long, but The House is 88 minutes long. Those missing 10 minutes tell you everything.

Production rumours

There are always telltale behind-the-scenes signs when a movie is in trouble. Has the release date been moved? Worse, has the release date been moved to a week after the Oscars? Were there reshoots? Did any key staff leave midway through filming? The House’s production issues can largely be boiled down to two words: Mariah Carey. Carey was booked for a cameo in a reshoot but, over a month ago, Rob Huebel was already trashing Carey’s disruption of the set. The story goes that Mariah Carey was supposed to turn up, sing a song and then get shot to death. But she turned up four hours late, and Huebel revealed that “She was like, ‘You guys, I don’t want to sing that song.’ [Then] she was like, ‘I don’t think my character would get killed by bullets’”. According to Ferrell, the drama ended at 11pm when, “There was a knock on my trailer door and they said ‘You can go home’. I got in my car and left everyone on set.” Mariah Carey does not appear in the finished version of the movie.

Poster chicanery

Obviously, there are no critics’ quotes to be found on The House’s poster. This is because a) there was a review embargo and b) the nicest thing, genuinely, that anyone has said about The House is that it’s ‘a dark, startlingly bloody journey into the bitter, empty, broken heart of the American middle class’, which might look a bit out of place on a poster for a kooky good-time Will Ferrell comedy. But still, the poster’s lack of any information whatsoever should be a warning. Perhaps, post-release, the film could hide its bad reviews in plain sight – as Legend did when it wedged a two-star review between the two leads – but in The House’s case, that’d require an awful lot of wedging.

Interviews about anything but the film

It’s easy to tell when an actor believes in a film, because they will sing its praises to the heavens. This did not happen with The House. On the promotional circuit, Will Ferrell either focused on the Mariah Carey incident or – as with a recent Conan appearance – turned up with a painted face and proceeded to sing Superstar by the Carpenters for five straight minutes, with a spoken-word interlude directed at his illegitimate son Justin. This segment, by the way, is notable for being a thousand times better than The House.