11 Upcoming Movies That Have Ignored Massive Mistakes
1. Desperately Trying To Be "The Next Harry Potter" - Artemis Fowl
The Mistake
Given that the Harry Potter movie franchise grossed over $7.7 billion worldwide across eight films, it's not terribly surprising that every studio with the rights to a popular fantasy novel series is trying to push their new adaptation as "the next Harry Potter."
Case in point, we have Disney's Artemis Fowl, adapted from the first two novels in Eoin Colfer's acclaimed fantasy franchise.
With a name director in Kenneth Branagh and a $135 million budget, Disney clearly means business...even if the first trailer ultimately suggests a rather tepid outing that appears to have aged-down the title character, perhaps in a further attempt to emulate the Potter formula.
This proves depressingly reminiscent of all the studios trying to craft their own cinematic universes following the success of the MCU. Disney has put the cart before the horse by starting out with such a high-budget, risky adaptation, when something smaller and less ambitious was probably the right way to go.
But of course, Disney being Disney, they're just seeing dollar signs and the easy potential to transform the book series' 25 million sales into billions of movie bucks.
The Lesson(s)
Take your pick, really. Perhaps the most infamous fantasy failure since the launch of the Harry Potter franchise is 2006's Eragon, a $100 million adaptation of Christopher Paolini's acclaimed novel, boasting an A-list cast including Jeremy Irons, Rachel Weisz and John Malkovich.
And yet, the movie version ultimately felt like a joyless collision of Potter, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, blended together and fed to audiences as a crude, tasteless paste.
Reviews were scathing, and though it made just enough to evade true bomb territory, a sequel never materialised, presumably out of embarrassment.
But that's just one example - between failed adaptations of classic fantasy novels such as A Wrinkle in Time and briefly-popular Y.A. series like Divergent, everybody wants to get in on the post-Potter kid-lit boom, usually without putting sufficient thought into it.
What's your outlook for these dubious upcoming movies? Shout it out in the comments!