Some I’d like to have seen, and others definitely not
Buckaroo Banzai – at the end of the Buckaroo Banzai movie they promise the next film will be Buckaroo Banzai vs. the World Crime League. Considering how rabid the fans of the original film have been, I think it would’ve gone over. I would have watched it.
Jinx – The folks sat Eon were clearly hoping to spin off a spy film series starring Halle Berry as her character from Die Another Day. an NSA agent, but MGM pulled the plug. Berry reportedly views her character Ginger "Angelia’ Ale from the second Kingsman movie as "Jinx 2.0’, and hopes to keep it up.
Remo Williams – I only read the first book in the Warren Murphy/Richard Sapir series because of the 1985 movie, which I thought was abysmal (the screenplay was by Christopher Wood, who scripted the most abysmal of the James Bond movies). even the presence of Wilfrid Brimley, Kate Mulgrew, Fred Ward, and Joel Grey (in yellowface, which is unfortunate, although he was good) couldn’t save this.
Masters of the Universe in 1987 starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man with Skeletor played by Frank Lengella hamming it up. The movie ended with Skeletor rising from the bottom of a pit declaring, “I’ll be back!” But the movie was so terrible a sequel was never made.
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, a 2017 film starring Charlie Hunnam was an attempt at starting a new franchise, but it was really awful. And there have been other recent failed attempts at creating film franchises, but I can’t think of one at the moment.
Chris Pine was Jack Ryan in a pretty high budget (Knightley! Costner! Branagh!) installment a couple of years ago which, given the source material, must have been intended as a franchise. It was, as I recall, a perfectly decent movie. But not enough so, apparently.
Magnum PI had two obvous backdoor pilots (J Digger Doyle, Two Birds of a Feather) that tried to launch shows about “in-teresting” characters", Emergency! had one (905 Wild, about “animal cops”), Adam-12 had a horrible one about bunco cops with Frank Sinatra Jr. (A Clinic on 18th Street), Twilight Zone had “Cavender is Coming”. And almost all of them sucked. Only J Digger Doyle doesn’t have the unmistakable stench of a pilot, mostly because, unlike all the others, the main characters still had a lot of screen time, and something to do in the plot.
That’s a good example. And it was truly awful. (Although the same actor starred in a movie version of the board game Battleship the same year, and it was better than expected.)
As for legit pilots that never got picked up, I saw the unsold pilots for “Zero Effect” and “LA Confidential”. Don’t know if they would have worked as a series, but I thought Zero Effect had potential.
There was an episode of The Brady Bunch that focused on another family adopting three boys. I think the father was played by Ken Berry. I saw this back in the 1970s as a kid and we were all a lot less sophisticated about television and the idea of backdoor pilots, but it seemed obvious that’s what was being attempted.
Usually if they take an established series and try to use it as a stealth pilot, it’s bound to stink. I mean, they rarely take the long approach and introduce the pilot characters like say… 15 episodes earlier, and gradually familiarize the viewers of the established series with them and their interactions, before setting them off on their own.
“Book series that should have been a successful run of movies”…
I assumed that Jack Ryan would be a franchise, too. And I do wish League of Extraordinary Gentlemen had been done right and led to a series.
Oh, and how about that Highlander movie… skipped right from the first movie to a TV series. ;~}
I mean, they sort of did it with Gibbs on JAG, where he was a supporting character included in a couple of episodes before NCIS launched, but even then, it was clearly indicated as a sort of intro to a pilot. Why else would a star of Mark Harmon’s luminosity be playing fifth fiddle on JAG, if not because he was going to be on his own show?
Personally, I think the best way to do it would be to identify where there are possibilities for new supporting characters to be added, and from there assess the utility of a pilot with them. I mean, that way if a character turns out not to be popular, you can just fade them out without it being much more than a recurring character, and if they are popular, you can expand on it, and possibly spin them off into a pilot.
Kind of along the lines of Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad.
I’d have loved to have seen the John Carter of Mars series continue. It wasn’t sunk by being a bad movie – it was studio politics* But it could’ve been great.
The 1982 film Sword and the Sorceror was a ripoff of the Conan the Barbarian stories, rushed to the theaters to cash in on the big-budget Conan films. But it had more genuine Robert E. Howard stuff in it than any of the “official” Conan films. Nevertheless, things like the jet-powered triple-bladed sword were just too ludicrously stupid. The film ended vowing that it would be continued with Tales of an Ancient Empire, and we were sure that was the last we’d see of it…
…only it wasn’t! Damned if they didn’t actually make the sequel, 28 years later. It starred Kevin Sorbo, but it was repurtedly awful. I still haven’t seen it.
*(it was the product of a previous generation in management, kept going because a successful Pixar director was at the helm, but they scuttled it by not giving it anywhere near the publicity they’d give even a low-budget feature. Besides, they now had the Marvel franchise)
The Golden Compass was supposed to be the first installment of a trilogy based on His Dark Materials, but its box office and reviews led to the others being cancelled.
The Golan-Globus people made a new version of King Solomon’s Mines in 1985. It was wonderfully abysmal, with only an incidental relationship to the H. Rider Haggard novel. It starred a slew of slumming stars – Richard Chamberlain as Allan, Sharon Stone, Herbert Lom, and John Rhys Davies (they were obviously hoping to capture the Indiana Jones vibe).
They even went so far as to make a sequel, Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold , supposedly based on the novel Allan Quatermain. Sharon Stone is back, with James Earl Jones (how can you go wrong with Darth Vader/Thulsa Doom?) and Cassandra Peterson (Elvira!) . It was reputedly also abysmal. I’ve never seen it. The only excuse for making it was that they made it at the same time as the first one, to save expenses. They were going to make a third one based on Haggard’s She and Allan, but that never happened. If it had been successful we might have been treated to a whole string of awful movies claimed to be based on the interconnected fantasies of H. Rider Haggard. That would still be an interesting notion, if they took it a bit more seriously. Maybe one of these days…
Considering that there was a huge stack of Doc Savage “novels”, I suspect that George Pal and his backers wanted to turn Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze into a series. But the original movie was so bad that it was unintentionally hilarious. A sad comedown for producer (and former director) George Pal, who gave us War of the Worlds and The Time Machine and The Seven Faces of Dr,. Lao. He was reportedly unaware of how bod it was, and claimed that his film was the precursor tothe Indians Jones movies. Every now and then someone makes noises about doing Doc Savage again, but I think memories of this film stop them.
I haven’t read the books, but saw both the movie and the HBO series. I was glad that the series came along so I would find out what was actually supposed to be going on, but at the end of the first season I was still going WTF. While I generally like the TV series, Lin-Miranda Manuel is pathetic as Lee Scoresby compared to Sam Elliot in the movie.