10 Movies That Tragically Wasted Their Genius Premise

The Premise: In a parallel version of Earth, where humans are accompanied by dæmons - creatures who are a physical representation of a person's inner-self - and there are such things as witches and armoured bears, a young girl travels to the far North in order to save her friend from a mysterious organisation who are doing unspeakable things to children, opening up a whole new world in the process. 

What Went Wrong: The Golden Compass should have had everything in place. There was some incredible source material to work from, it had a good cast, and with fantasy series being popular there could've been a successful trilogy (or quadrilogy, because they'd no doubt split that last book in two), but they completely botched the adaptation. 

The problem in part stemmed from pressures from the church (there's a pretty strong anti-religious sentiment in the books), and the studio watered this down in the movie. 

It's crucial to parts of the plot and the motivations of characters and organisations, and it didn't work without it. Of course, it also didn't help that they had an intro that clunkily over-explained everything, nonsensically changed the chronology, and, oh yeah, missed out the bloody ending. 

There are plenty of bad book to film adaptations, so many that it's really a separate thing from a failed premise, but the concept of His Dark Materials is so rich for translation to the screen that this one hurts more than any other. Hopefully the TV series will finally right this wrong.