Hollywood’s
always looking for the next big thing. So when a movie does well, you often see
a flood of imitators
in its wake. How well does this strategy generally work out? Not great. Here
are eight huge hit movies that failed to launch successful genres.
https://gizmodo.com/10-influential-movies-where-everybody-copied-the-wrong-1172586696
Once upon a time, Star
Wars started a boom
of space opera fantasy adventures, and Jurassic Park
started a “giant monster” craze. You could argue Spider-Man and X-Men
helped give us the superhero boom of the past dozen years. But it doesn’t
always work out that way. Observe:
https://gizmodo.com/unisex-metal-bikinis-and-dancing-robots-for-everyone-5070222
1) Harry Potter
After the first Harry Potter movie was a huge success, you
saw a wave of imitators, most notably the unsuccessful The Seeker: The Dark is Rising. There were lots of films about
teenagers learning about magic powers and going to school. (Remember The Covenant? The “weeotch”
movie?) And they pretty much all sank without a trace.
2) The Hunger Games
This one might be too early to tell — maybe Divergent will be the movie that proves The Hunger Games does have coattails.
But thus far, every futuristic teen dystopia film that’s come out since Katniss
hit big has been a bust, including The
Host and Ender’s Game. In
general, movies based on young-adult novels or featuring YA themes have not
done that well at the movies unless they’re based on mega-successful books,
which brings us to…
3) Twilight
There have been a few waves of paranormal romance films
since Twilight became a massive hit.
Most recently, Beautiful Creatures
and Mortal Instruments both tried to
make a splash, and fell flat instead. There’s been a steady trickle of vampire
movies — some of them arthouse-oriented — but there were vampire movies
before Twilight. What hasn’t happened is a successful batch of
teen paranormal romance films, which build on Twilight’s huge audience. Basically,
if the book wasn’t a phenomenon, the movie still isn’t a guaranteed hit.
4) E.T.: The Extra
Terrestrial
There were plenty of other kid-friendly science fiction and
fantasy films in the 1980s, but nobody was able to bottle the magic of
Spielberg’s tale of a lovable alien who befriends a fatherless boy. I’m
hard-pressed to think of any successful films since E.T. that feature a friendship with a cute alien as the main axis.
The most obvious failed imitator was the widely reviled Mac and Me, but you could also argue that Howard the Duck and DARYL
tried and failed to capture the cuteness and sweetness of E.T.
5) Lord of the Rings
The Narnia films (which had their own hugely popular book
series to draw on) are the closest things to hit epic fantasy movies in the
wake of Peter Jackson’s Tolkien adaptations. But even Narnia petered out after
the first film. And other attempts to capitalize on Rings, like Golden Compass
and Eragon, failed domestically. (Eragon did do well overseas, however,
which counts
for something.) It’s actually kind of surprising how little epic fantasy
there is on the big screen.
https://gizmodo.com/how-much-money-does-a-movie-need-to-make-to-be-profitab-5747305
6) Transformers
At one point, there were a million toy-and-game inspired
movies in the pipeline, including Stretch
Armstrong, Monopoly (directed by
Ridley Scott!), and too many others to count. Then we were denied the pleasure
of seeing Sorry: The Movie at the
theater, after the first G.I. Joe
underperformed and Battleship tanked.
(Not to mention that we’ll never get Boggle
2: The Final Sesquicentennial. Sob.)
7) Avatar
What’s fascinating about Avatar
is that it was one of the biggest-selling movies of all time, and nobody really
tried to copy it. There are no failed Avatar
imitators, because there were no Avatar
imitators. (You could argue that Avatar
itself copied
tons of stuff, but that’s a topic for another day.) The only thing anybody
copied from this film? The fact that it was in 3-D. There were no attempts at
doing other movies about going to alien worlds, going native, colonialism, inhabiting
an alien body, any of it.
https://gizmodo.com/the-complete-list-of-sources-avatars-accused-of-ripping-5460954
Update: The secret ingredient is phone suggests that John Carter was an attempt to capitalize on Avatar’s success, even though Avatar was partly based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. That still makes sense, though.
8) Inception
This is the other huge mega-hit from the past several years,
that absolutely nobody has even tried to copy. Other than the
“BRAAAM” noise.
