10 Movie Franchises That Died In 2021
9. Space Jam
As soon as Space Jam: A New Legacy was announced, many considered whether Space Jam really needed to be a franchise at all.
The original 1996 live-action-animated hybrid is an iconic sports comedy for sure - and was a solid commercial success at that - but it's also so fundamentally a product of its era that giving it the soft reboot/standalone sequel treatment seemed like a desperate prospect at best.
Even with LeBron James starring and Black Panther's Ryan Coogler producing, the stonking $150 million budget implied to many that Warner Bros. was colossally overestimating the wider pop-culture appeal of Space Jam.
Sure, the easy nostalgic "in" is there for older millennials, but younger viewers likely have little affinity for the original movie, and the marketing frankly did little to suggest that A New Legacy was going to be anything more than a cynical rehash of past glories.
And that's exactly what it was, albeit on a much bigger budget with a glossier visual style and an over-layer of wink-wink meta commentary.
Though Warner Bros. was clearly hoping that the film would kickstart a new run of Space Jam movies, A New Legacy grossed just $162.8 million worldwide, in step with predominantly negative reviews.
Even factoring in both the effects of the pandemic and its same-date HBO Max release, that's pretty appalling.
While director Malcolm D. Lee has expressed an interest in a third film starring Dwayne Johnson, there's absolutely no chance in hell it's going to happen. The franchise is deader than dead after this.
And if the series' death wasn't evident enough, its status as a cinematic laughing stock was cemented when the two recent South Park streaming films, Post Covid and Post Covid: The Return of Covid, blamed its awfulness for bringing about society's collapse during the pandemic. Yikes.