4. The Casting Was All Wrong - Alien Resurrection
The Failure: Though the fourth film in the Alien franchise is the highest grossing of the lot - unadjusted for inflation, that is - it is also easily the most expensive, and so its $161.3 million gross against a $75 million budget doesn't really seem all that great. Compared to the earlier films, its profit-to-budget ratio is much, much smaller. The film scored 52% on Rotten Tomatoes, making it the second-worst reviewed film of the four.
The Excuse: Joss Whedon wrote the film, and remarked that, "Casting is storytelling...I wrote two characters for Alien: Resurrection and their arc was that you would not know what way they were going to go. One of them turned out to be insane - and what do they do? They call Brad Dourif. So there is no plot twist. Brad is a very good actor but he has been pigeonholed into these roles. Then they case J.E. Freeman as a thug - and his character was also supposed to be a mystery. So there you go again - the mystery is gone. Those are just a couple of examples because there are thousands of them when it comes to Alien: Resurrection."
The Truth: Though Whedon has a point, he seems far too keen to shift the blame from his script to the direction and casting. One can't ignore the rather dull nature of Whedon's script, and how it does nothing to really move the mythology forward in an interesting way. Where is the quick-witted brilliance of his other works?