Movies With Big Potential That Completely Failed At The Box Office (18 pics)
Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets.
Luc Besson (the Fifth Element guy) doing a passion project of adapting his favorite comic book to the big screen. Could have been amazing... but it really, really wasn't.
Independence Day 2. THEY HAD 20 YEARS TO WRITE A GOOD SEQUEL!!!
Jupiter Ascending felt like it could have done a lot more.
Came here for this one. An amazing and gorgeous world with interesting lore. Some really cool concepts that should have been great. A few missteps sank the potential. Regular jet boots instead of gravity rollerblades, drop the whole bees recognize royalty, and let Jupiter be a proper hero and saver herself at least once and it could have been a new Sci-fi classic. Instead, we got a screenplay that feels like it was written by a 12-year-old girl and not updated over the decades.
Downsizing. Some great ideas, sh*t movie imo.
That movie couldn't decide what it wanted to be. It started as a look at excessiveness and climate emergency. Then it wanted to be a statement on recovering from the end of a relationship. Then tried to tackle capitalism and struggles of the poor. Then it was back to the climate emergency which wasn't talked about for the last hour of the movie.
I feel like the movie could've been really good if it focused on one or two of these topics instead of whatever mashed-together film that was.
I felt the same way about Push (which is a movie I actually liked a lot after skipping it in theaters cuz it got poor reviews).
It built this fantastic world lore that I wanted to explore a ton, but then just made a C-grade movie.
Tron Legacy
The first 20-ish minutes is damn near EXACTLY what you would want from a Tron sequel. A Daft Punk score that shreds. An amazing update to the original film's visuals. An arena death-match that gets bigger and crazier with each passing minute. And as soon as that movie exits that arena, the whole thing falls apart into mediocrity and ripping off dogfights from Star Wars. What a waste.
The fantastic 4 revamp could have been the prelude to some pretty intense storylines, but they messed it up properly and most certainly killed any future endeavors.
Artemis Fowl. It's the only movie I've ever ragequitted.
Batman v Superman.
Agreed. If they had just picked one of the ten storylines they tried to stuff in that screenplay... it might have been quite good.
I went into that movie with a very open mind, knowing full well that it wasn't going to be like the books, in an attempt to just view it and enjoy it for what it was.
And what it was was a f*cking sh*t movie. It was insultingly bad, and I don't say that as a 'Dark Tower' fan, I say it as a movie-goer in general.
Jumper is probably my all-time "wish it had been better" movies. I loved the concept and the way they executed the jumping was so good, but the acting and script were super flat and it was huge sequel bait that never panned out.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Had a great plot, could have been a fantastic return for the franchise if it stayed within the mythological framework the other three movies operate in. We could have got a catalyst for the rekindling of the greatest movie series of all time, instead we got aliens. It didn't make any sense and now I don't think anybody wants to see another attempt.
Hitman: Agent 47
Turning a stealth-based videogame into a generic action movie. Agent 47 not even being the main protagonist. The actor that played him not even remotely looking like 47.
My ideas that would have at least made the movie a bit better, probably:
- do not have 47 fight someone that is almost invincible.
-instead create a situation where some of 47's strengths are "countered", like mess up his planning in some way, a disguise not working at places he expected, forcing him to improvise.
- to start the movies main conflict have one of his contracts backfire in a way that results in him being hunted by a powerful individual who he tries to hunt down for the rest of the movie.
-if 47 is given a partner make it someone he has a closer connection with (like Lucas Grey in Hitman 3).
Avatar the Last Airbender
I saw someone refer to it as “a cinematic version of the Ember Island Players” and I immediately said “don’t insult the Ember Island Players like that” and they were like “###t u right.”
Suckerpunch. How did a movie about women in schoolgirl outfits fighting monsters with swords and machineguns end up so damn dull?
Assassin’s Creed
When I saw it there was a total of 5 people in the theatre. 2 of my friends and a couple a few aisles up. I think it was about an hour in the movie, the guy from the couple stands up yells "what the ###k is this sh*t" and stormed out of the theatre. The girlfriend looked incredibly confused but followed a minute later after collecting herself. In hindsight, that was probably the right call...
I'll end with the movie that still enrages me to this day. 'The Last Jedi'. So we're gonna take arguably the greatest, most powerful, and least corruptible character in Star Wars lore and turn him into a reclusive curmudgeon who refuses to help anyone?
What we deserved was the badass version of Luke that season 2 of the Mandalorian gave us, instead, we just wasted a favorite character without him doing hardly a single thing that helped the rebel cause. That, along with about 50 other plot points, still pisses me off all these years later.
Luc Besson (the Fifth Element guy) doing a passion project of adapting his favorite comic book to the big screen. Could have been amazing... but it really, really wasn't.
Independence Day 2. THEY HAD 20 YEARS TO WRITE A GOOD SEQUEL!!!
Jupiter Ascending felt like it could have done a lot more.
Came here for this one. An amazing and gorgeous world with interesting lore. Some really cool concepts that should have been great. A few missteps sank the potential. Regular jet boots instead of gravity rollerblades, drop the whole bees recognize royalty, and let Jupiter be a proper hero and saver herself at least once and it could have been a new Sci-fi classic. Instead, we got a screenplay that feels like it was written by a 12-year-old girl and not updated over the decades.
Downsizing. Some great ideas, sh*t movie imo.
That movie couldn't decide what it wanted to be. It started as a look at excessiveness and climate emergency. Then it wanted to be a statement on recovering from the end of a relationship. Then tried to tackle capitalism and struggles of the poor. Then it was back to the climate emergency which wasn't talked about for the last hour of the movie.
I feel like the movie could've been really good if it focused on one or two of these topics instead of whatever mashed-together film that was.
I felt the same way about Push (which is a movie I actually liked a lot after skipping it in theaters cuz it got poor reviews).
It built this fantastic world lore that I wanted to explore a ton, but then just made a C-grade movie.
Tron Legacy
The first 20-ish minutes is damn near EXACTLY what you would want from a Tron sequel. A Daft Punk score that shreds. An amazing update to the original film's visuals. An arena death-match that gets bigger and crazier with each passing minute. And as soon as that movie exits that arena, the whole thing falls apart into mediocrity and ripping off dogfights from Star Wars. What a waste.
The fantastic 4 revamp could have been the prelude to some pretty intense storylines, but they messed it up properly and most certainly killed any future endeavors.
Artemis Fowl. It's the only movie I've ever ragequitted.
Batman v Superman.
Agreed. If they had just picked one of the ten storylines they tried to stuff in that screenplay... it might have been quite good.
I went into that movie with a very open mind, knowing full well that it wasn't going to be like the books, in an attempt to just view it and enjoy it for what it was.
And what it was was a f*cking sh*t movie. It was insultingly bad, and I don't say that as a 'Dark Tower' fan, I say it as a movie-goer in general.
Jumper is probably my all-time "wish it had been better" movies. I loved the concept and the way they executed the jumping was so good, but the acting and script were super flat and it was huge sequel bait that never panned out.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Had a great plot, could have been a fantastic return for the franchise if it stayed within the mythological framework the other three movies operate in. We could have got a catalyst for the rekindling of the greatest movie series of all time, instead we got aliens. It didn't make any sense and now I don't think anybody wants to see another attempt.
Hitman: Agent 47
Turning a stealth-based videogame into a generic action movie. Agent 47 not even being the main protagonist. The actor that played him not even remotely looking like 47.
My ideas that would have at least made the movie a bit better, probably:
- do not have 47 fight someone that is almost invincible.
-instead create a situation where some of 47's strengths are "countered", like mess up his planning in some way, a disguise not working at places he expected, forcing him to improvise.
- to start the movies main conflict have one of his contracts backfire in a way that results in him being hunted by a powerful individual who he tries to hunt down for the rest of the movie.
-if 47 is given a partner make it someone he has a closer connection with (like Lucas Grey in Hitman 3).
Avatar the Last Airbender
I saw someone refer to it as “a cinematic version of the Ember Island Players” and I immediately said “don’t insult the Ember Island Players like that” and they were like “###t u right.”
Suckerpunch. How did a movie about women in schoolgirl outfits fighting monsters with swords and machineguns end up so damn dull?
Assassin’s Creed
When I saw it there was a total of 5 people in the theatre. 2 of my friends and a couple a few aisles up. I think it was about an hour in the movie, the guy from the couple stands up yells "what the ###k is this sh*t" and stormed out of the theatre. The girlfriend looked incredibly confused but followed a minute later after collecting herself. In hindsight, that was probably the right call...
I'll end with the movie that still enrages me to this day. 'The Last Jedi'. So we're gonna take arguably the greatest, most powerful, and least corruptible character in Star Wars lore and turn him into a reclusive curmudgeon who refuses to help anyone?
What we deserved was the badass version of Luke that season 2 of the Mandalorian gave us, instead, we just wasted a favorite character without him doing hardly a single thing that helped the rebel cause. That, along with about 50 other plot points, still pisses me off all these years later.
