We're all tired and fed up of movie franchises being constantly rebooted - did the Spider-Man series, for example, really need to be restarted when a simple re-casting would have sufficed? That said, some potential movie franchises that never got off the ground perhaps
do deserve to be retooled; after all, we all make mistakes, and with the right filmmakers and actors at the helm, these 10 failed franchises could be turned around into something truly special. Whether because they failed to adequately engage with their source material, or they simply failed to find an audience for a multitude of reasons - poor casting, bad script, crappy marketing - here are 10 failed movies that actually deserve to prove us wrong, and with a reboot, could just prove that they were worthy of the cinematic treatment after all...
10. The Shadow
The Shadow is a crime fighter best known for his presence as a radio mainstay during the 1930s and 40s, as well as a storied mythology in various comics. This is a reboot that has been on the cards for a while, though it has yet to come to fruition, in the wake of the execrable 1994 Alec Baldwin take. The character, who dresses all in black except for a crimson scarf, is supposed to be an awesome, slightly scary vigilante, yet the Baldwin film went the PG-13 route and thus severely neutered the character, with director Russell Malcahy clearly not knowing which tone to strike. The result was oddly cheesy, campy in much the same way that Warren Beatty's middling Dick Tracy didn't manage to service its source material. The movie was subsequently a box office bomb, barely making its budget back and putting to rest the plans for a Shadow franchise. However, the film still made it clear that there was something worth pursuing here, so with a darker, grittier, Nolan-style reboot, this one could be the sort of film that, say, Daredevil wanted to be.