Blatant signposting of nothing to come: The 10 worst attempts to start a franchise
The majority of expensively assembled productions backed by major studios and designed to sell the most number of tickets are always crafted with one eye on franchise potential, but sequels need to be earned and not blatantly signposted.
It’s all well and good for name-drops, foreshadowing, cameos, and credit scenes to let the audience know what to expect in the next chapter, but the thing many of them seem to miss is that they need to make them care first. Nobody’s going to show up for a sequel unless they’re invested in the story unfolding right in front of them and genuinely curious to see what comes next, a mistake Hollywood continues to make regardless.
The days of sequels being awarded release dates before the opener has even hit cinemas are becoming a thing of the past, though, even if it’s largely due to how many of them never ended up happening. Cinema is often guilty of trying to run before it can walk in terms of franchise-building, but these offenders tried to outrun Usain Bolt before they’d even figured out what their legs were for.
As Transformers can attest, bad movies often give rise to very profitable enterprises, but there are plenty of films to have hit the unsavoury sweet spot of both being a terrible film and failing to spawn the saga that was obviously intended to follow.
The 10 worst attempts at starting a franchise:
10. Monster Trucks (Chris Wedge, 2017)
Not only is this an actual movie that existed and wasn’t released too long ago, Monster Trucks cost Paramount $125million to produce, despite anyone with two eyes and a working brain spotting a cast-iron flop from a mile away.
Indicative of the film’s overall quality, the concept – which, yes, is that the titular trucks are literal monsters – was developed by the studio’s president from an idea that came from his four-year-old son. Paramount envisioned it as a potential franchise with the same theatrical and ancillary earning potential as Transformers, but it ended up releasing almost 18 months behind schedule, taking a pasting from all corners and losing $115m.
Incredibly, star Thomas Lennon revealed he’d signed a three-picture contract when he boarded Monster Trucks, a fantasy blockbuster barely a soul remembers even happening. When the person footing the bill is responsible for the pitch with the assistance of a very small child, though, there clearly weren’t many people willing to tell boss Adam Goodman he was traipsing headlong into hubristic disaster.
9. Van Helsing (Stephen Sommers, 2004)
Having reinvigorated The Mummy to huge success and enduring appeal as an old-fashioned slice of derring-do burnished with cutting-edge visual effects, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect Stephen Sommers making lightning strike for a third time when Van Helsing was set as his first film after The Mummy Returns. At least until the excessively nauseating end product was unveiled.
Universal was all-in, with the movie’s release being accompanied by animated prequel The London Assignment, with theme park experience ‘Dracula’s Fortress’ debuting to coincide with Van Helsing‘s theatrical debut, not to mention spinoff TV series Transylvania being fast-tracked through development.
In the end, pitting Hugh Jackman’s titular monster hunter against Dracula, the Wolfman, Frankenstein, and a Robbie Coltrane-voiced Mr. Hyde was sensory overload and mind-numbing overkill, with the end result a nonstop barrage of pixels and noise that didn’t so much assault the senses as pummel them into oblivion. Two weeks after it hit the big screen, the TV series was axed, the theme park dropped the branding, and Van Helsing was never spoken of again.
8. Sahara (Breck Eisner, 2005)
Star Matthew McConaughey confirmed at the time Sahara was intended to launch a globetrotting multi-film series derived from Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt novels with the potential to emulate James Bond, which is nothing short of hilarious looking at how things turned out.
First-time director Breck Eisner struggled with a screenplay that burned through no less than ten writers, he shot an elaborate action sequence at a cost of millions that didn’t even make it into the theatrical cut, and there were widespread reports of bribes being handed out to local authorities in Morocco to grease the wheels of production. None of that would have mattered much were Sahara any good, except it wasn’t. In fact, it was awful.
From envisioning himself as an American version of 007 in his very own blockbuster franchise, McConaughey instead ended up headlining one of the biggest flops in the history of cinema, with the lasting legacy of Sahara being the years of protracted and contentious legal battles that followed after everyone decided to point the finger of blame at somebody else for such a flaming dumpster fire.
7. Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)
Thanks to Marvel Studios, it’s become an obligation for every major comic book adaptation to end on a tease of things to come, which backfired spectacularly for Green Lantern when the star of the entire movie embarked on a decade-long hate campaign.
Warner Bros. hired writers to begin work on the sequel script while shooting was still underway on the opening chapter, which made them look like complete idiots when the spacefaring superhero story made a mockery of its own ending by losing a fortune, forcing the studio into a complete course correction, and inadvertently ushering in the shared universe that began with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel.
It’s always a dangerous game for any movie to operate under the assumption that sequels are nailed-on, with Green Lantern making everyone involved look supremely foolish for believing they had a shot of getting to return to the well once it was discovered the film was a pixelated pile of crap.
6. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (Guy Ritchie, 2017)
Studio executives have a habit of looking too far ahead at the expense of the movie currently being made, which still doesn’t explain how Guy Ritchie‘s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword turned out to be as dismal as it was.
There were plans afoot for an entire Arthurian cinematic universe that would span six films and culminate in a Knights of the Round Table crossover, with nobody once raising the point to ask if audiences gave even half a shit at investing what would have been at least a decade of their viewing lives into a medieval Avengers.
Seeing as Legend of the Sword lost upwards of $150m and instantly canned no less than five follow-ups in one fell swoop, it was clear the average cinemagoer did not care in the slightest. Tonally misjudged, underwritten, poorly-acted, and featuring David Beckham in one of the worst acting performances ever committed to celluloid, the sole shining light from the entire debacle was Daniel Pemberton’s phenomenal score, it’s just a shame it was wasted on such a dire film.
5. The Dark Tower (Nikolaj Arcel, 2017)
At various points during its existence, The Dark Tower has been labelled as both unfilmable and Stephen King‘s magnum opus, the former of which explained why it had spent so long stalking the seedy underbelly of development hell.
Hacked to pieces in post-production and unleashed as a turgid 95-minute bore, Nikolaj Arcel’s Hollywood debut couldn’t have gone much worse. Barely comparable to the source material, bland to a fault, and attaining the unwanted distinction of alienating fans of the books while being rendered incomprehensible to newcomers, The Dark Tower was much better off remaining unmade.
During pre-production, it was announced Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey would reprise their roles in an accompanying TV series, which was obviously ditched after the film’s release. Any confident talk of sequels evaporated too, funnily enough, with the ball now in Mike Flanagan’s court as the purveyor of small screen scares mounts a reboot for Prime Video.
4. The Golden Compass (Chris Weitz, 2007)
Bringing a popular, acclaimed, and bestselling book to the screen and stripping it of all the things that made it popular, acclaimed, and bestselling in the first place is a curious move, with The Golden Compass falling so short of expectations it hammered the final nail into the coffin of New Line Cinema.
Writer and director Chris Weitz didn’t want to rock the boat and alienate potential customers, which necessitated the sanding down of Philip Pullman’s literary edges, with the His Dark Materials trilogy regularly pointing its scorn in the direction of organised religion.
By extension, that yielded a flimsy narrative robbed of any genuine substance, something not even a star-studded cast and Academy Award-winning visual effects could atone for. It was a hollow fantasy with nothing to say, nothing to offer, and no reason to care for what came next, which is just as well, considering it killed a studio when apathy reigned supreme.
3. Super Mario Bros. (Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, 1993)
The number one reason why the video game genre has spent over 30 years trying to overcome the stigma that it’s cursed beyond salvation, it’s all too easy to forget 1993’s Super Mario Bros ended on a sequel-baiting cliffhanger.
Samantha Mathis’ Princess Daisy shows up at the door of Bob Hoskins’ Mario and John Leguizamo’s Luigi to inform them she needs their help on a brand new mission, which is about the most misguided display of confidence in a movie’s prospects there’s ever been.
One of the worst films ever made and detested by a very large number of people who worked on it in a number of capacities, Super Mario Bros. dissuaded Nintendo from letting Hollywood touch any of its marquee properties in a live-action setting ever again, and it’s very easy to see why.
2. The Last Airbender (M. Night Shyamalan, 2010)
M. Night Shyamalan‘s once-promising career was already starting to wobble after the polarising twist of The Village and the pretentious self-aggrandising of Lady in the Water, but The Last Airbender almost obliterated it completely.
He’d made his name crafting small-scale chillers heavily reliant on atmosphere and ominous undertones, so handing him $150m for the first in what was planned as a trilogy of sweeping fantasy epics based on widely-known source material possessing a deeply invested pre-existing fandom could only realistically have gone one of two ways.
Everyone knows which way it ended up going, with The Last Airbender winning five Golden Raspberry Awards including ‘Worst Picture’ and ‘Worst Director’, infuriating fans of the original, confounding those who didn’t know the story, and sending the filmmaker’s stock tumbling dangerously downwards.
1. The Mummy (Alex Kurtzman, 2017)
The most laughable attempt at building a shared universe the post-Marvel cinema landscape has ever witnessed, Tom Cruise strong-arming the production to cater to his needs was only one of The Mummy‘s many, many, many major concerns.
First-time feature director Alex Kurtzman was woefully out of his depth, the continued breadcrumbs set to lead to sequels, spinoffs, and crossovers that didn’t exist made it more of a branding exercise than an actual film, with The Mummy the living – or undead, in this case – embodiment of what can happen when a studio spends so much time focusing on the bigger picture the movie being made becomes a secondary concern.
The photo of Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe, Javier Bardem, and Johnny Depp banded together is the Dark Universe in microcosm, an expensive, star-studded revision of tragic horror figures as the stars of action-packed blockbusters nobody wanted, needed, or asked for.