Thursday Movie Picks: Failure to Launch

 

For the 21st week of 2022 as part of Wandering Through the Shelves' Thursday Movie Picks. We go into the subject of failure to launch meaning films that were meant to start a franchise or a cinematic universe. There is always a film that is always meant to be the start of something and they end up being complete and utter failures to the point that everything falls apart. Here are my three picks:

1. John Carter

Andrew Stanton’s 2012 film based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novel series was a film meant to be so much more. The story of a Civil War soldier who finds himself in Mars where he tries to mediate between two warring factions in the planet. It is a film with a lot of ambition but its presentation of the story and trying to combine different genres with actors being in motion-capture didn’t work. It was one of three films that year starring Taylor Kitsch that really hurt his chance at a big film career though he’s managed to do well in TV. The film was meant to be the start of a big franchise and a decade since its release and opinions on the film hasn’t changed much since its release as it is a shame it ended up being just…. Eh…

2. Jem and the Holograms

A film that was meant to be part of a shared universe with the franchises for both Transformers and G.I. Joe as they were all from Hasbro. Jon M. Chu’s film based on the 1980s animated TV series is not just one of the worst films ever made but a fiasco that really did a lot to ruin the legacy of that TV series. A film that is about a girl who pretends to be someone else by singing a song on YouTube and then form a band with her sister and their two friends as they become big stars. It was a film that really appealed to the worst common denominator as it is often filled with YouTube clips from other videos while Chu committed sacrilege by having people send videos over their love of the show and then use it to express their love for the fictional band as it ended up pissing off a lot of people. A film that cost $5 million and only made less than half of its budget with plans for a sequel that was to have Ke$ha, Eiza Gonzalez, Hana Mae Lee, and Katie Findlay as the rival band the Misfits just came and went cancelling all of those plans.

3. The Mummy

Given the fact that Marvel had created a successful cinematic universe of its own and Warner Brothers with DC Comics was starting to find some success with its own cinematic universe. Universal should’ve stuck with The Fast and the Furious franchise as their meal ticket instead of doing what they did in 2017 by rebooting The Mummy franchise as part of a cinematic universe with all of the old Universal Studios monsters such as Dracula, the Invisible Man, Frankenstein, and others to create the Dark Universe. The eventual film ended up being this bad mix of horror, action, and adventure that ended up looking like every lame film Tom Cruise has been doing for a while with Russell Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde as it was just fucking shit. With plans for Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, and Angelina Jolie to be part of this cinematic universe, this film cancelled all of those plans as it would’ve been a fucking headache for Universal.

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