10 More Movies That Tried To Exploit Nostalgia And Failed

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.