10 Movie Franchises Which Got Terribly Adapted TWICE
4. Alex Cross
James Patterson's thriller novel series centered around detective Alex Cross certainly seemed like a ripe fit for the cinematic treatment on paper, especially once Morgan Freeman was cast in the lead role for 1997's Kiss the Girls.
And though Freeman's steely performance prevents the film from divebombing into utter trainwreck territory, this is still a yawn-inducingly by-the-book '90s crime thriller packed to the gills with convoluted plotting and, yes, some very daft twists and turns.
It nevertheless performed well enough for a sequel, Along Came a Spider, to materialise in 2001, which makes Kiss the Girls seem positively competent by comparison.
Though generic to a fault and marred by some truly wretched CGI - which looked awful even at the time - it still grossed over $100 million globally. And yet, a sequel strangely never went into production.
A little over a decade later, however, the franchise was rebooted with 2012's thriller Alex Cross, which saddled fans of the books with the undeniable downgrade from Freeman to... Tyler Perry.
Easy though it should be to make Patterson's modest airport novels into entertaining movies, this attempt was the biggest dud of the lot, being roundly panned for basically every aspect of its production - save for Matthew Fox's over-committed, deeply menacing performance as the villain.
Given that Patterson is still pumping the Cross novels out, it's little surprise that a third adaptation is currently in the works, albeit shifting from the big screen to TV, with Aldris Hodge set to star.