Failure to Franchise

What is best in life? Well, let's hope it's watching a bunch of failed franchise starters, because we're kicking off a brand new theme dedicated entirely to films based on the works of legendary pulp author Robert E. Howard. That's right, it's time to hear "The Lamentations of their Winter!" To kick it off, it's 1985's Red Sonja, the first attempt to forge a cinematic franchise out of the fiery red-headed warrior...

"FALLure to Franchise" concludes with a very recent movie. One starring two big movie-stars coming off of the biggest hits of their career, directed by one of the filmmakers behind John Wick, and a movie that helped influence a major Academy Award change. So why the heck wasn't 2024's The Fall Guy a hit?? Your guess is as good as ours, but we're here to try to figure it out. Another cinematic adaptation of a classic T...

As exciting as the start of a new theme month usually is here at F2F, this time it comes with a little bit of foreboding, as well. That's because we're kicking off September's "FALLure to Franchise" with a return to one of our most dreaded genres...the YA Lit Adaptation! This time, we're looking at 2016's Fallen, which poses the compelling(?) question...what if Twilight, but with angels? Also based on a popular series...

"Summer Surprise" comes to a close, perhaps appropriately, in the form of a shambling, rotting corpse...or, in this case, thousands of them, spilling over each other as they scale a giant wall. That's right, we're looking at 2013's World War Z, the big budget adaptation of author Max Brooks' bestselling "Oral History of the Zombie War." The film overcame skepticism from book fans wary of its massive changes from the s...

By 2011, the classic pulp character The Green Hornet had already been featured on the radio (where he was first born), movie screens (in a couple serials from the '40s), TV screens (in the 1966 series co-starring Bruce Lee), and the pages of comic books. As varied as these different versions were, they all played the character and his world fairly straight. Which arguably made the decision to turn the 2011 big-screen ...

A successful music video director and the filmmaker behind a recently well-received cult hit is hired to helm the cinematic adaptation of a beloved '60s sitcom. Clearly aiming for something more hip and edgy than the original show, he largely eschews the tone of the source material, instead populating his film with esoteric cult celebs and performers, upping the raunch factor, and filming it as a musical. And then...n...

A mega-successful Hollywood producer. A popular star ready for his first big lead role. A respected actor one year away from an iconic sitcom role. A singer turned actor enjoying the height of her sex symbol status. Another actress just a few years away from becoming one of the industry's all-time biggest sex symbols. And explosions. Lots and lots of explosions. Put them all together, and you got a stew going, baby! T...

Your iconic turn as a superhero made you one of Hollywood's most beloved (and well paid) stars, jump-started a genre's total dominance of the cinematic landscape, and gave you a decade-plus of mega-successful sequels and spin-offs. But that gig has finally ended. What do you do? Well, if you're Robert Downey Jr., and you've recently wrapped your long tenure as Tony Stark/Iron Man with Avengers: Endgame, you quickly fi...

By the early '90s, the slasher subgenre that had dominated horror in the '80s was already seen as on life support. But that didn't stop an upstart comic book company, formed in 1986 and already quite successful in the publishing world, from seeing the genre as potentially their ticket to join the movie big leagues. And so, four years before Scream would re-invent and re-popularize the slasher, Dark Horse Comics first ...

They say there ain't no cure for the summertime blues, but we here at F2F disagree. So allow Trev & Chris to make a house-call, as we ring in a brand new series - "JUNE is What the Doctor Ordered," taking a look at three doctor-themed (sorta) movies. First up, the 1983 oddity Doctor Detroit, perhaps most remembered as SNL legend Dan Aykroyd's first (and last?) solo starring role in a movie. Aykroyd plays a nebbish...

"No Fate But What We MAYke" concludes, with the TERMINATOR franchise under new ownership, and looking to forge a new path forward...by going all the way back to the beginning. That's right - perhaps appropriately for a series whose story has been built on a bootstrap paradox/causal loop time travel convention, TERMINATOR GENISYS looks to revisit and revisit and reinvent the events of the original TERMINATOR, creating ...

Did the Terminator franchise really need to live on past James Cameron's excellent T2: Judgment Day? Probably not! But Hollywood can't let a good (or moneymaking) franchise die. And so after the strong performance of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, not even franchise star Arnold Schwarzenegger leaving movies for the world of politics could kill the series. But what is a franchise to do when it's under new ownershi...

"Misfired Cannons" comes to a conclusion as a post Golan & Globus era Cannon limps to its final days amidst new ownership but continued, and growing, financial woes. In a blatant attempt to try to recapture some of their past glory, Cannon looked to start a new franchise that might capture the same fans as those of one of its most popular previous successful series, American Ninja. So, recruiting one of the stars ...

It's the third installment of "Misfired Cannons," and time to look at what happens when Cannon Films decides to work with one of Hollywood's biggest megastars. Sylvester Stallone was riding high off the success of both the Rocky and Rambo franchises in the mid-80s, so deciding to launch a new action franchise with the notoriously frugal and not always successful Cannon might have seemed a strange, unexpected move. So ...

So you've developed a sequel to one of your recent "successes," but the legendary action star of the previous film has decided he doesn't want to do a follow-up. Are you supposed to scrap the whole thing? Not if you're Cannon Films, who knew better than to throw out all the work they had already done on a potential Invasion USA sequel, and instead decided to rework it into a new potential franchise starter of its own....

For film fans of the '80s, one studio was synonymous with over-the-top action, wild premises, and low to mid-budget insanity. Cannon Films delivered a massive output of video store staples and cable classics, and today are looked back on nostalgically as an entertaining alternative to the "big" studio fare of the era. But Cannon certainly had at least one thing in common with the major studios - their fare share of fa...

"The Girl with the Failed February Franchises" concludes with our look at 2018's The Girl in the Spider's Web. Even though the previous film hadn't made as much as Sony had hoped for, it still earned Rooney Mara an Oscar nomination, received critical acclaim, and the entire creative team was down to return for more. So, of course the thing to do is...ignore all that and instead hire a new director and cast to jump ahe...

In 2005 (and 2008 for the American translation), the posthumous release of Swedish author Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy" took the world by storm. A series of Swedish cinematic adaptations soon followed, making even bigger pop culture icons of the characters of Mikael Blomkvist, a crusading journalist, and Lisbeth Salander, the punk computer hacker with a mysterious past. And then, Hollywood decided to take their...

"Thomas JANEuary" concludes with 2018's The Predator, an attempt to resurrect, revitalize, and "event-ize" the classic sci-fi action franchise. To do so, 20th Century Fox recruited famed Hollywood action screenwriter and the acclaimed director of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, The Nice Guys, and Iron Man 3 (and co-star of the original Predator movie), Shane Black, as well as his former Monster Squad collaborator Fred Dekker, to...