Making a fantasy franchise stick around is harder than it looks. For every The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, there are movies that hit theaters already planning for the sequel, only to never even get close to one. And the worst part is that many of these projects seemed to have everything they needed: books to adapt, worlds with endless possibilities to explore, an impressive cast, and room for several recurring storylines. Still, something went wrong, whether it was weak box office numbers caused by a lack of audience interest or issues with adaptations themselves. Naturally, some of these features ended up being forgotten.
But a few of these failed attempts deserve a second look since they had the potential to become something truly special and much bigger. On this list, you’ll find 3 fantasy films that were specifically designed as gateways to larger franchises, but none of them managed to convince anyone that they were worth giving a chance.
If you’ve watched His Dark Materials, you’ve probably heard of The Golden Compass before, considering it was the first attempt to adapt Philip Pullman’s book series. However, the main problem here was choosing the right source material and then failing to execute it properly on screen. The movie’s story focuses on the first installment of the literary saga, following Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), a girl who lives in an alternate version of Oxford and heads North after children start disappearing. Along the way, she discovers a conspiracy involving the mysterious daemons, the Magisterium, and the existence of other worlds. There was no shortage of material to continue with, but the beginning of a franchise needs to be clear, right?
The Golden Compass didn’t really know how to approach the complexity of this story and decided to be a more generic fantasy in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. To do that, a lot of things were toned down, including some of the books’ more provocative religious elements, which ultimately took away part of what gave the whole story its personality. It was certainly a visually grand movie and made around $370 million worldwide, but only $70 million came from the domestic box office, which was far from enough to justify adapting the sequels The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. Even though the story worked better in a TV format later on, it’s still a shame that this ended up being one of Hollywood’s clearest examples of getting it wrong on the first try.
Here’s another story that left the big screen behind and found a new life on TV, this time with multiple seasons — although some fans still prefer the movie version to this day. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones arrived at a time when the industry was basically desperate to figure out what the next Twilight-level franchise would be, and maybe that’s one of the reasons why the film has aged so quickly. Based on the first book in Cassandra Clare’s series, it follows Clary Fray (Lily Collins), a teenager who finds out her mother belongs to the Shadowhunters, a kind of secret society of warriors responsible for fighting demons and other supernatural creatures hidden in the human world. And the best thing about it, though, is just how massive the saga is.
Overall, The Mortal Instruments is a very well-built universe, with plenty of rules, tons of characters, different kinds of supernatural beings, and romance, which means none of the installments in an adaptation would have to feel like a repeat of the previous one. That said, when the movie was released, it simply failed. It’s very difficult to keep anything going with such a weak performance, even when the sequel is already in development. So, the production was halted. And all of this was very possibly the result of wanting a new franchise to become a hit without really thinking about giving the story the care it needed. It was a good start, but it could have been much better given there were just too many details to establish in a single film.
If you remember Seventh Son, congratulations, because that’s pretty rare. Few movies seem to have been so clearly destined to be forgotten as this one, and the ironic part is when you look at its stacked cast: Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Ben Barnes, Alicia Vikander, and Kit Harington. The story is loosely based on the first book in Joseph Delaney’s The Wardstone Chronicles, following Tom Ward, the seventh son of a seventh son (Barnes), who is trained by monster hunter John Gregory (Bridges) after the powerful witch Mother Malkin (Moore) escapes and threatens to unleash chaos once again. It might sound generic at first, but if you look at all the original material, you’ll see just how big the universe is and how much there was to explore. So what went wrong?
The film completely missed its timing because of production and distribution problems, and it didn’t have a strong enough identity to make anyone believe this was supposed to be the next big fantasy saga. There were many negative reviews, with critics calling it dated and a waste of potential. The effects and locations clearly received a lot of investment, but the story, which was the essential part, was kind of pushed aside, leaving Seventh Son with nothing exactly interesting to make it stand out in the fantasy genre of the 2010s. For a new franchise, especially one this expensive, it’s not enough to have monsters, magic, and a huge world if you don’t make all of that exciting for the audience. That’s why it would be really great to see it get a reboot with all of those mistakes fixed, exploring the darker, more folkloric side of the books.
