What about dragonball evolution? It's got a couple of decent actors on the cast, it was produced around the time when special effects were already capable of showing guys that can fly fast and shoot big lasers from their hands, and the franchise it was based on had a built-in rabid fanbase. It's not like the source material required a deep, meaningful story with twists and turns - all dragonball movies follow the same formula: evil villain appears/kicks the shit out of everyone/protagonist powers up by defeating the villain. They really had very little excuse as to why they managed to piss off the demographic they were after.
Or Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It had a good story that is accessible to people who don't know shit about videogames, the voice cast was full of Hollywood A-Listers, and the CG was workable (it looks crap now, but it was good enough at the time.) It still performed below expectations. Maybe because when you put Final Fantasy in the title, the people who are going to see it expect Final Fantasy with swords, guns, swords that are guns, and giant dragons. Advent Children sort of proves it - the movie was just 50% fight scenes and 50% epilogue to a 3-disc playstation game. Yet it made big money.
On the other hand: Shaolin Soccer. Stephen Chiau is already big in his home turf (he regularly beats even Jacky Chan's movies on the box office), but his early movies were not suited for the west as they depended on a hybrid of slapstick, wordplay, and Hong Kong-specific pop culture references. Moviegoers at that time were even critical of films that use big budget CG, as most of the movies that tried were crappy fluff trying too hard to look like Hollywood films (they hated it because it was crappy, and partly because they consider big budget Hollywood as the enemy.)
Shaolin Soccer managed to get so big outside of Asia because of the Internet. And then after the rest of the world got wind of it, the influence sort of went back to Asia and influenced a whole bunch of crappy sports/martial arts hybrid films (there have been movies like that before but you can easily tell if a film was aping Shaolin Soccer, like when its posters boast about being "in the same vein as Shaolin Soccer." or when the story concerns shaolin masters that have the same uniform.) It even got a lot of kids interested in the sport. Usually it was the sport that gets people interested in a movie, not the other way around.
Right now Chiau is enjoying a good brand name because of Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle, to the point that people will check out CJ7 even though it wasn't really a Stephen Chiau-style film. He didn't even get bad rep for being one of the producers of Dragonball Evolution.
