Speaking of Roddenberry, even “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” was developed from a TV pilot (Star Trek: Phase II) that was greenlit because Paramount didn’t want to do a movie but then repurposed again into a movie when Paramount saw the success of movies like “Star Wars” and “Close Encounters”.
So, it was born to start a film series, was repurposed to be a TV series that never happened, and then ended up starting a film series anyway.
Towards the end, they brought in a new character, a cousin named Oliver, which was presumably a setup for a spinoff, which also never happened.
I assumed cousin Oliver was there because the youngest Brady children were aging. (Sort of how in The Cosby Show a young grandchild was introduced when the youngest Huxtable child got too old.) The episode with Ken Berry was really obviously a backdoor pilot, even back in the 1970s.
It was done right, and quite well.
The directors cut of H2 is decent.
Not to mention the next two books have little in the way of fun fantasy elements, and the RELIGION IS EVIL thing gets really tiresome, really fast.
I give you Doc Savage Man of Bronze, where, according to legend, Doc Savage: The Arch Enemy of Evil had been film (but not edited) and was just thrown away.
First season was decent. I expect it to get boring and canceled very quick for the next season.
No, it’s still fairly awful, just different in some details (like immortals not being from another planet, but rather the “end of time”…)
Funny you mentioned that first, because it was my very first thought when I read your thread title. Decades have passed since that movie was released, and I am STILL deeply disappointed that the sequel was never made.
One of the most recent, and biggest budget attempts is, the Universal Monster Universe, or whatever it was supposed to be called.
GL isn’t as bad as the (is there a single word for the opposite of hype?) might lead you to believe. I thought that Reynolds was spot on and that the major weakness was the heavy. Of course the bad guy is half of any super-hero movie.
Supernatural had a spinoff episode called Bloodlines. It was so poorly written and ignored so much canon lore that it went precisely nowhere.
Matlock had an episode that was supposed to be a series starring George Peppard and
Tracy Nelson, but Peppard died shortly after the episode aired.
If memory serves, Buckaroo Banzai And The World Crime League was released as a comic mini series a few years ago.
I’m going to have to disagree with you there. While Cyborg wasn’t a good movie, it was much, much better than Masters of the Universe. Part of what made MotU so disappointing is that it had to live up to the toy line and cartoon. The biggest advantage Cyborg had was that it was its own thing and didn’t have to live up to anything.
Peter Clines has a multiverse book series and one of the characters is from a world where Star Trek has been forgotten, but Assignment:Earth was a long-running show followed by a bunch of movies. That was the first I’d heard of the pilot - I don’t think I’ve ever seen the episode.
As for the thread subject, mine is SyFy’s “The Lost Room,” a mini-series that was clearly meant to be a new series but didn’t seem to get enough buzz. Thing is, it had enough TV big names in it that I thought they’d never stick around for a series on SyFy.
This is what I came here to say. The Tom Cruise The Mummy was expected to be a glorious start to another MCU, but it was just a star laden turd.
I forgot about the 2004 movie “A Series of Unfortunate Events”. I mean, the word “series” is right in the title.
Netflix did turn that into an actual series a couple of years ago, but yeah, the move series stalled out after that first installment.
I imagine executives at Disney were hopeful that the 2013 film The Lone Ranger would lead to a string of sequels, but the film was a critical and commercial bomb, so it never panned out:
I actually rather liked it, especially the second half, but that’s just me.
I freakin’ loved The Lost Room.
I could never tell if History of the World, Part 1 was an actual attempt at a series or just Mel Brooks mocking franchise movies. I mean, they even had previews at the end of part 1 for part 2…