Even if A Dame To Kill For had been made by well-respected filmmakers and generated a ton of positive buzz before release, it hardly ever stood a chance of succeeding mostly because it arrived far too late. The law of "Diminishing Returns" doesn't just apply to box office numbers. Audiences grow less excited about long-rumored projects the longer they stay in production. Sin City arrived in 2005, nine years before A Dame To Kill For. That's a gap that's at least six years too long. In the time it took Rodriguez and Miller to crank out Sin City, we got three Batman films, two Superman films, five X-Men movies and ten Marvel Studios films. While other studios were busy building cinematic universes and breaking box office records, Rodriguez and Miller were twiddling their thumbs and working on a slew of projects that were met with various degrees of failure. That doesn't do much to keep your fanbase interested in future installments.