Sometimes something looks like it’s the start of a Great New Series, and it doesn’t pan out after one, or at most, two outings.
Remo Williams – The Adventure Begins – This must’ve looked like a sure bet. After all, it was based on the Destroyer series by Sapir and Murphy that ran for 145 books (many by other authors), and they got Guy Williams to direct and Christopher Wood to screenwrite, both of whom had worked on the James Bond films. They got Fred Ward and Joel Grey for the leads, and Wilford Brimley and Kaye Mulgrew were in it, too. How could it go wrong?
Well, it was spectacularly dumb, for one thing. Wood had written easily the most puerile of the Bonds. It actually didn’t do badly at the box office, and the reviews weren’t all bad, but they decided not to go on. Fortunately Raise the Titanic! and Sahara – You’d think that Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novels would be a natural for adaptation to the screen. The books all read more like screenplay treatments than novels. They’re cinematic is scope and imagery, and packed with wonderfully ludicrous ideas. But the two forays into adapting it to the cinema didn’t go well. Richard Jordan isn’t flamboyant enough as Dirk. Jason Robards and Alec Guiness added enough heavy centering, but the movie just didn’t cut it. It ended up with three nominations for the first Golden Raspberry awards.
Matrthew McConaughey tried to fill the role years later as can alternative to starring in Rom-Coms, and ended up with the wonderfully ludicrous [B[Sahara**. It didn’t do well at the box office, and McConaughey decided to go for more serious roles. Otherwise we’d have a bunch of Dirk Pitt movies by now to make fun of. One for the Money was based on Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, in which each book has the book’sd ordinal number worked into the title. My wife and I have a soft spot for the novels – Evanovitch webnt to my high school, and we frequently recognize the places the story is taking place in. But the movie didn’t capture the feel or the appeal of the character, and there never was a Two for the Dough movie Conan and Conan the Destroyer both starred Arnold Schwartzenegger, who LOOKS right for the part. But they would’ve done better to actually use some of Robert E. Howard’s writing in the screenplays. They didn’t. In fact, the ripoff film The SWord and the Sorceror used more Howard writing than the Conan films did.
There was at attempt at a TV series, and a later film starring Jason Momoa, but Khal Drogo/Aquaman didn’t cut it as Conan, either. Gimme a good adaptation of Tower of the Elephant or Rogues in the House over this stuff anyday.
The Rocketeer: they’d already signed Billy Campbell and Jennifer Connelly for a sequel — heck, they signed Campbell for multiple sequels — because they thought they’d made an entertaining movie by casting every role to perfection.
And they were right; it just didn’t, uh, make nearly enough money.
I like that movie. It isn’t Great Art by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s dumb in kind of a clever way. If you just watch the trailer, or read a description, it looks like just another brainless action picture. People churn out those kinds of forgettable movies all the time. It’s not the action scenes in Remo that I remember, it’s stuff like Chiun balancing on two fingers while watching soap operas. It isn’t great, but every time I watch it I’m struck with a feeling of it being better than it should have been.
Buckaroo Banzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers Across the 8th Dimension was loads of fun and I would have loved to have seen a sequel. Alas, it never happened.
I had a college friend who was very excited about the Remo Williams movie, as he had read many of the novels.
What about the Narnia series? I think two of the seven books were adapted to films, but the series seemed to have died after that. (I got the impression that after the success of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings film series that movie studios were going through the children’s/young adult section of a bookstore looking for the next big thing.)
The Purge is at least an interesting concept done very boringly, a 24 hour period where all crime is legal and people just act like it’s just another natural disaster to be aware of. The problem is all the sequels pretty much do nothing with the premise except make bad action/horror movies with them full of terrible faux-symbolism. The more they try to explain the Purge the less you realize it makes sense.
Three have so far been filmed, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005), Prince Caspian (2008), and Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010). The fourth, The Silver Chair, is scheduled to start filming in late 2018. The sequels have been sufficiently successful that the series will likely continue, provided The Silver Chair isn’t a total flop.
Thanks for the correction. Still, it seems to be a slow-moving film series, unlike the LOTR or the Harry Potter films. I think the audience is going to lose interest if there’s such a long gap between films (especially the younger viewers, as they’re going to age out of the target audience).
Yes, 8 years (maybe 10 by the time it’s released) is a big gap,. My impression from reading about the series on Wiki is that some of that delay was produced by the fact that the rights agreement with the C.S. Lewis Company expired after the first three books and they had to do another one. I assume that in the case of LOTR and Harry Potter the rights to all the books were obtained in one package.
Maybe if they’d cast someone who was actually Asian as Chiun it would have been better. Joel Grey in the role is as bad as Mickey Rooney’s role in Breakfast At Tiffany’s.
I really wanted to see Buckaroo Banzai Against The World Crime League.
Another aspect that makes Narnia different from LOTR and Harry Potter is that it’s not really a single narrative but instead is episodic. Although the setting is the same, each story is independent. There are no human characters in common between the fourth book and the first. So having a big gap is less significant.
I’ve certainly heard of Rooney’s performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but I’ve never actually seen it, so I can’t compare the two. Does a portrayal have to be negative and stereotypical to be insulting, or is it problematic just to cast a western actor to play an Asian character? I find Chiun to be a generally positive and extremely capable character, but I’m not in a position to judge or take offense from it.
I often describe Buckaroo Banzai as being like watching the 12th movie in a series when you haven’t seen the first 11. There’s a sense that the hero has an amazing backstory, but you have to just accept it and hit the ground running.
Maybe the “Lost in Space” movie 20 years ago with William Hurt. I liked it but it gets reviled in most places. But it has returned as a Netflix series in a reboot.
In 1940 there was a technicolor movie of the Kenneth Roberts novel “Northwest Passage” starring Spencer Tracy and Robert Young, a fictionalized account of the St Francis raid in the French and Indian war. Since Major Roberts Rogers’s men don’t start marching for a Northwest Passage seaech until the very end, it was set up for a sequel that never happened.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the 1981 “Legend of the Lone Ranger” was meant to be a franchise. “Hey, if a radio/tv staple from decades ago like Superman can, why can’t the Lone Ranger”? But it flopped due to a lousy script, little interest in westerns and an actor who has spared us his non-talents ever since.
I was wondering about Sylvester Stallone’s 1986 “Cobra”. I remember it as a dreadful movie that flopped and thought it was his attempt to create his own “Dirty Harry” franchise. But wiki says it grossed $150 million on $25 million and despite hostile initial reviews, is now considered a cult classic. In any case, there hasn’t been another one.
