I can’t believe no one’s mentioned Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets yet. The concept had great potential, the effects were great, and Rihanna was hot, but the leads were annoying and Rihanna’s character served no purpose (but she was hot). 
Halloween. The original movie is rightly considered a classic. Halloween II was okay, but unnecessary. If Halloween III sparked a non-related series of films, it would have been interesting. Halloween 4 and beyond, pure money grabs.
I loved the Rocketeer (tho I’d been a fan of the comic it was based on, so I’m probably biased).
I really enjoyed Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (based on a book series by Patrick O’Brian), but it didn’t do great and a sequel never ended up getting made.
One abortive series was The Golden Compass as the planned first movie in a series based on His Dark Materials. It didn’t meet expectations, so the sequels never got made.
I thought the movie was intriguing but not having read the books it was very confusing. LOTR, Harry Potter, and Narnia may be fantasies but they at least draw from familiar sources. I actually laughed out loud in the final battles in The Golden Compass at the sheer incongruity of a melee featuring Tatars, Gyptians, an armored bear, wolves, a cowboy in a dirigible, and flying witches.
Apparently, however, the series is getting a reboot as a TV miniseries on BBC. Maybe it will do better this time around.
Actually, John Carter got screwed by the Disney Powers-that-Be. Andrew Stanton got the green light to make it, and he was a Pixar Golden Boy. But it was at a transition in the studio when the leadership was changing. They had just bought the Marvel franchise, which was now going to be their big money-maker, and none of them “owned” John Carter, so why should they put anything into it?
There was almost NO marketing given to it. Not a single movie tie-in toy or activity book or action figure or costume. No displays at the Disney Stores. Hardly any TV advertising (or in-comic-book ads, or billboards). No computer vital advertising [Yul Brynner] et cetera et cetera et cetera [/Yul Brynner]
the debacle is covered in great detail in the Michael D. Sellers book John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood
And some of us thought the movie was GREAT! It did the almost impossible of making the story fresh without completely rewriting it, keeping the best parts. Great special effects, too. I’d love to see a sequel, although that’s virtually certain not to happen.
Anybody remember that Doc Savage movie they made back in the mid 70s with TV’s Tarzan, Ron Ely? Considering there were around 180 Doc Savage pulp novels written, they had plenty of material for a long running series. Too bad the movie sucked donkey balls.
Parts of it are on Youtube, and it’s Unintentionally Hilarious™. Has a bit of the Adam West Batman campiness, and Ron Ely is almost winking at the camera. I wish for his sake there’d been a series; he was clearly having fun chewing scenery.
Some of you, perhaps. I saw it and thought it really dragged on far too long. Really boring. The weird thing was the same actor, Taylor Kitsch, was in another movie that also bombed the same year, Battleship. And that was a lot better than you’d expect it would be.
I wouldn’t say that John Carter was great, but it was pretty good, enough so that I don’t consider it a waste either of my ten bucks or my two hours. There are a lot of other movies I’ve seen that were worse, and it could have been the start of a decent series.
As for Green Lantern, the kindest I can say is that there was no way in which it was terrible. But every single thing about that movie was subpar. The story, the casting, the chemistry between the leads, the dialog, the special effects… It was truly remarkable in its consistency. Make just one or two of those things great, and it could have excused the rest, but there was nothing about it that was even mediocre.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Also don’t forget Kull the Conqueror and Red Sonja. And Arnold is about to reprise his Conan character in a new film.
In retrospect, there have been a fair number of films based on the world of Conan/Robert E Howard. Not a lot of them “good” though.
Someone already covered **Buckaroo Banzai **and the **Divergent **films.
I think there have been a couple of other aborted YA series:
The Fifth Wave
The Seventh Son
The Giver
etc
etc
I disagree with this. The the first movie barely takes advantage of its premise and is essentially a home invasion movie. The second one digs into it and is a good cheezy almost 1970s Sci Fi action movie. The third as well. The premise is kind of dumb but if you grant that one thing the movies work pretty well.
As far as other ones:
The Golden Compass is the first of a trilogy of books but was expensive and failed at the box office so it was one and done.
I am pretty sure the hope was that Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow would spawn a series. It did not.
A deep cut: at the end of the comedy Making the Grade, they promise the characters would come back in a second movie. Unless they filmed one in their backyard, they did not.
Let’s be fair - I enjoyed the books but they were silly (and increasingly racist) pulp fiction to begin with; any film based on them was going to be silly, even without casting Joel Grey (who was still miles better than Mickey Rooney’s bucktoothed Asian stereotype).
The danger of waiting too long where there is a continuity of characters is aging; Will Poulter was a teenager when the last one was filmed, although I suppose mid-20s is still young enough to get away with playing younger. Books 5 and 6 don’t really need any of the previous characters IIRC, and God only knows what they’ll make of the last book.
One of those is finally being made - Peter Jackson has churned out the first of the Mortal Engines books and the cities look good. Disappointment that they severely wimped out on Hester’s scar but that’s Hollywood for you. I can at least hope she turns out to be a complete amoral murderer; if they also make her nice as well as pretty they’ll have completely thrown out one of the driving forces of the story.
It wasn’t a movie, but a potential TV series – Judge Dee and the Monastery Murders, written and produced by the King of TV Movies, Nicholas Meyer*. It was amazingly faithful to the Robert H. Van Gulik novel it was based on. For once, all the roles in a story set in T’ang dynasty China were played by actors of Asian ancestry** Meyer clearly hoped that it would be the first in a series, probably adapting more of Von Gulik’s books, but either it cost too much, or the network thought that the folks in Peoreia wouldn’t go for an ancient Chinese hero, or something. He managed to get them to agree to updating it to the modern day and setting it in San Francisco as Khan!, still starring the only non-Asian cast member, Khigh Dheigh. But without his setting and his companions and the Chinese puzzle mysteries woven around Dee, there wasn’t any reason to watch it, so it died after only a couple of episodes.
There was a BBC Judge Dee series that ran for six episodes, but I don’t know if it’s available on any video form – I haven’t beemn able to find it. There were rumors of a Judge dee movie in the 1980s-90s that never happened. There have been two Chinese movies with gorgeous photography and effects about Judge Dee, but they recast him as a martial arts prodigy, and the result is neither like the historical character nor Von Gulik’s Dee.
- Besides this one, Meyer was associated with The Night that Panicked America, which gave the entire script of the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds broadcast, shown in context. And he also did The Day After, about a nuclear strike on the US. Besides that, he did three famed Sherlock Holmes pastiches, starting with the Seven per Cent Solution, which he also made into a movie. And he did the film Time after Time, and had a hand in the second through the fourth Star Trek movies. Meyer is kinda a Pop Culture god.
** (except, ironically, Judge Dee himself, who was played by Khigh Dheigh, who was born in New Jersey of Anglo-Sudanese ancestry. He played a LOT of Chinese roles, and for years I believed him to be Chinese. His real name was Kenneth Dickerson, and his stage name was a phonetic rendering of his initials.)
Joel Grey was Oscar-worthy compared to Malcolm McDowell as Chiun in the T.V. pilot.
There was a TV pilot filmed. Roddy McDowall played Chiun. I guess no Asian actors were available…
I have argued before and will argue again that the first film was a actually a good light movie overall. At least partly because they had the good sense to limit Schwartzenegger’s dialogue and let James Earl Jones ham it up :).
But I would agree that the less said of the second film, the better.
The 1980 version of Flash Gordon was intended to be the first of a series, but Sam Jones and Dino de Laurentis had a serious disagreement.
In 1943, Columbia Pictures made a matinee serial of Lee Falk’s The Phantom. A decade later, they decided to make a sequel. Unfortunately, the film rights had expired. King Features Syndicate wanted a lot more money than Columbia was willing to pay. They had already started filming when the negotiations collapsed. So they did some quick re-writes and costume changes, and it became The Adventures of Captain Africa.
Tarzan and the Lost City, starring Casper Van Dien and Jane March, might have had potential for a series. (Maybe a series of TV movies.) It needed a much bigger budget. But I liked the cast.
No! This one!
The 1990s Dick Tracy movie had plans for a sequel, but looks like the rights got tied up in a lawsuit.
Biggest flaw in Valerian (to me, anyway) was the premise that the very young leads were experienced agents with a long history. If they’d been written as inexperienced youths learning their trade, OR if they’d been replaced by mature adults, the premise would have been much more plausible. But the idea of the authorities (galactic? worldwide?) putting their trust in these cocky nineteen-year-olds strained credibility, even in a script where the plot revolved around possession of a tamagotchi that pooped out pearls.
Was that the one where Doc Savage is meeting with his team in their tower and an assassin puts his sniper rifle’s crosshairs on the Doc’s head and pulls the trigger…and misses? The characters duck down below the windows and one of them congratulates Doc on his foresight in installing polarized glass that makes everything appear a foot to one side of its actual position. That scene was corny but fun.
Went to see the first Conan movie when it was in theaters expecting total if diverting trash…it was surprisingly fun. Good dialogue saved the movie.
The only bright spot in the second film was Grace Jones being a badass…34 years before Black Panther gave fighting roles to black women.