The Pitch: A decade-and-a-half after John Carptneter's rambunctious Escape from New York became a cult hit, Carpenter brought starring man Kurt Russell back for another go-around, with 1996's Escape from L.A., relocating a very similar premise to the West Coast. The Result: Though the urban troubles of L.A. in the early-to-mid 1990s were what reportedly allowed the movie to be made (given the thematic similarity), it had been initially given the green light in 1985, yet sat stagnant for around a decade, by which point there evidently wasn't much of an audience for the continued adventures of Snake Plissken. The film was produced on a budget almost ten-fold that of the original, yet only made half its budget back at the box office, while reviews were incredibly mixed. Though the original movie endured over the years as a cult classic, that didn't necessarily mean that waiting would still guarantee box office dynamite, and the wildly over-inflated budget certainly did it no favours either. Still, had Escape from L.A. come out within a few years of New York (and therefore featured a considerably younger Russell) and been budgeted a little more conservatively, it definitely could have been much more successful. Much like the Sin City sequel, it's likely that most audiences had just stopped caring 15 years later.