10 Movies Doomed From The Start

There is zero metric to determine what will or will not result in a successful movie. Now, the accountant and tech bro losers that have seized control of Hollywood may disagree on this, but as the saying goes, if there truly was a 100% effective formula for success, it would be implemented 100% of the time.

A million things can go wrong when making a movie. It's almost an applaudable feat for a movie, regardless of quality, to make it to theaters at all. And then comes the hard part of actually making enough money to make back the cost of production.

Movies fail at the box office for a myriad of reasons, most of which are completely out of the control of the filmmakers - from trends and audience tastes, to brutal competition, to even real-world events that just happen to occur close to a film's release. The quality of the film in question is not nearly as much of a factor as one might think.

Whether good or bad, the lead-up to these 10 films' respective releases were to the keen-eyed observer what the oncoming train is to the truck driver who really should've listened to the blinking light on his dashboard.

While the Harry Potter films were able to run their course and bow out gracefully before the property became toxic to a lot of people, the Fantastic Beasts movies came out smack dab in the middle of it. 

It doesn't help their case that the first one is the only half-decent film in the bunch, and the second one was one of those bad movies that folks naively believed just didn't happen anymore. And then there's the matter of Ezra Miller being a major player in the then-upcoming third movie - The Secrets of Dumbledore. Around this time, Miller was throwing their reputation into a pit of lava by constantly getting in trouble with the law - a spree that hurt both this and another movie we'll talk about later.

So that's already two strikes against Dumbledore's hype that would be hard for any film to bounce back from. But as was said at the top, the Harry Potter brand by 2022 might as well have been radioactive to most of the internet, with J.K. Rowling's endorsement of views widely characterised as transphobic well and truly established by that point.

While this hasn't been the silver bullet to kill the property entirely - a new series based on the Harry Potter books is in the works, and Hogwarts Legacy sold obscenely well - it was certainly enough to seal the doom of this film trilogy.