10 Big Budget Movie 'Franchise Starters' That Totally Failed

1. John Carter (2012) Budget: $250m/Total Gross: $282.8m

It certainly seemed as though Andrew Stanton bit off more than he could chew with his first foray into live-action filmmaking. The Pixar alumnus, director of critical and commercial smash hits Finding Nemo and Wall-E, embarked on the mammoth undertaking of adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs' eponymous hero for the big screen. Despite the fact that movies set on Mars tend to perform poorly at the box office and the director had never worked in live action before, the movie was greenlit with a massive $250m budget. What could possibly go wrong? John Carter is by no means a bad movie. The world of Barsoom is incredibly detailed, the visual effects almost flawless and the production design is at times astonishing. On the flipside; Taylor Kitsch's performance is so wooden he'd struggle to convince me as a table, which does the convoluted script no favors. The double framing device doesn't really work and the action scenes are mostly forgettable. The most unfair criticism of the movie is that it was derivative; but in adapting a book that was originally published in 1917 and has since become a seminal sci-fi text, how could it not be? Disney also seemed unsure of how to sell the movie to audiences. Was it a space opera, similar to Star Wars? A story of lovers from across the stars, like Avatar? Or was it a war epic that just happened to be set on a distant planet? Either way, the confused marketing effort did nothing to entice the casual cinemagoer, and John Carter's opening weekend came in at just $30.2m on its way to a paltry $73m domestic.

The underwhelming box office performance of the movie would ultimately end up costing Disney over $100m and lead to the resignation of studio head Rich Ross soon after. Stanton's labor of love has instead become something of a cult favorite, instead of the blockbuster franchise it was intended to be.