10 More Movies That Tried To Exploit Nostalgia And Failed
The vast majority of nostalgic films end up failing—these recent examples are some of the worst.
These days, nostalgia is more than just a fun way of reminding us of our past, it's a money-making machine Hollywood has embraced to the fullest extent possible. Each year, new movies are released, which are either sequels of long-dead franchises, or they're reimaginings of shows and films from a bygone era.
When it comes to nostalgia films, they're usually not worth the effort, but occasionally, a good one will revitalize an IP, bringing it forward for a new generation while delighting the old one who grew up watching whatever spawned the new project.
More often than not, nostalgia projects fail to make much of an impact, and when they end up costing a ton of money to make, the negative reaction from fans often results in a massive loss of cash. This tends to kill potential franchises, and in the past couple of years, this has happened a lot.
The films on this list made every attempt to cash in on nostalgia but failed remarkably at the box office. The amount of money lost over these projects numbers in the hundreds of millions, and despite the failings of these movies, Hollywood isn't going to stop pumping out nostalgia-driven projects anytime soon.
10. Ben-Hur (2016)
So far, there have been five film adaptations of the 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, but the one that most people are familiar with starred Charlton Heston, and was released in 1959. That film won 11 Academy Awards and stands as an example of epic storytelling and remarkable filmmaking.
Since then, there has been an animated film and a television miniseries, but the biggest remake came in 2016, and it bombed. Hard. There has been an attempt at revitalizing the nostalgia of the "sword-and-sandal" genre since the success of 2000's Gladiator, and Ben-Hur was easily the most ambitious of these projects.
The film starred Jack Huston, Toby Kebbell, Rodrigo Santoro, and many more, and it served as a re-adaptation or reimagining of the original work. One of the biggest differences between the 2016 version and the 1959 one came in its run-time, which was almost an hour and a half shorter, making the story seem rushed and truncated.
The production budget for Ben-Hur (2016) ended up costing around $100 million, though it only managed to pull in $94 million at the global box office. The fans didn't care for the adaptation, and the critics tore it apart, making this an expensive lesson in the cost of nostalgic enterprises.