But, but Conan had the greatest Schwarzenegger line of all time!
I’ve mentioned this one before: Push. The 2009 movie was supposed to be the first movie is a series (I believe a trilogy was planned). I really enjoyed this movie but apparently I’m not part of the consensus on this one. The movie did poorly and the sequels were never made.
Percy Jackson was looked at as the next Harry Potter-like film franchise, but seems to have stalled after only two movies.
A Series of Unfortunate Events never became A Series of Movies.
If I remember right, the director got the gig because of a great effects sequence that he did at home on his Mac. It showed. The movie was gorgeous to look at, but the characters and staging just didn’t work. The fight scenes were too video-gamey (a problem I have with lots of flims) and Gwyneth Paltrow’s character was played all wrong. I’ve always wondered how much of that was due to Paltrow or the director.
I don’t mean to pile on the Chronicles of Narnia, but as a fan of the books since I was a pre-teen I was beyond disappointed and downright irate with the filmmakers. They took all the best parts, and all of the emotional heft of the books and left it out. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was adequate, although they left out some key dialogue and went for over-the top action instead. Prince Caspian was a mess, with the White Witch shoehorned in for no reason and a complete upending of the themes of the book.
Voyage of the Dawn Treader apparently jettisoned the entire framework of what is my favorite book of the series, dropping the idea of a sacred quest to find the Utter East and again making wholesale changes to the hear of the book on which is was based. I couldn’t even get through the reviews let alone watch it.
I was glad they weren’t going to make any more. My only hope now is that Douglas Gresham (CS Lewis’ stepson who signed off on these changes) has learned his lesson and returns to Lewis’ vision for the next books. The Silver Chair, IMO, is the weakest of the books so good luck to them.
I think Netflix is turning it into a television series starring Neil Patrick Harris but I haven’t seen it.
Bulldog Drummond was a tough-guy adventurer in a series of novels in the interwar period. The novels eventually got turned into a series of films that ran from 1922 to 1951. Along the way, Drummond was played by Ronald Colman, Ralph Richardson, Ray Milland and Walter Pigeon (!), among others.
In the 1960s, with James Bond being a big box-office draw, they thought that maybe they could revive him. But after two movies – Deadlier than the Male and Some Girls Do, they pretty much let that drop. Drummond was pretty much of an anachronism.
A lot of those Bond wannabes fizzled out. James Coburn’s Derek Flint only had two outings. I’m surprised that Dean Martin’s Matt Helm (based on Donald Hamilton’s book series) got as many as four films. They were awful.
Stolen from Genghis Khan?
I’m still waiting for a final Conan movie starring Schwarzenegger, one where Conan is already king by his own hand but has to go forth on one last mission, bla bla bla…
They’ve already done so; they released Season 2 of it in March (Season 1 came out last year). I watched Season 1 – very strange, but very funny. Barry Sonnenfeld worked on it, and it has a feel that reminds me of Pushing Daisies (on which Sonnenfeld was executive producer).
Thought of another one. Supposedly the Guy Ritchie film from last year, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, was meant to be the first in a six film franchise. But it was a colossal flop, the series didn’t proceed and the studio lost tens of millions.
Incidentally, Charlie Hunnam, the star of this film, turned down the lead role in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey to star in this. (Sure that was an awful film but it was profitable and led to two sequels.) We could probably do a whole thread on actors who made the wrong choice of one role over another.
Judge Dredd. Both versions were meant to be a new series of movies, and neither succeeded. Which is a great shame, as the second one was quite excellent. There is a TV series planned, but who knows if and when that will see the light of day, and it’s going to be a new reboot again anyway.
I also suspect there won’t be another Tomb Raider movie after the recent one kind of fizzled, but I guess it’s too soon to call.
With the (horribly adapted) movie City of Ember, they optioned the second book in the series for a movie, too. The first bombed.
Also, this topic is a bit radioactive, but the Ghostbusters reboot was supposed to be the start of a new franchise. (And now that I think of it, Ghostbusters II pretty much killed the original franchise.)
They killed off every iconic Dick Tracy bad guy at the end of the first one. Who the heck would he battle with, Tess’s in-laws? A growing waistline due to the drop in crime increasing his time behind a desk?
They did The Silver Chair in an earlier Narnia series for the BBC, but that’s as far as they got in the series.
I remember the Flint movies from my youth with great fondness (I have the president’s red phone ringer on my cell phone) but I saw them recently on Netflix. They have not aged well.