10 Oddly Specific Genres That Were Briefly Hugely Popular

After every YA property had seemingly been exhausted in countless futile attempts to replicate the success of the Harry Potter juggernaut, and a similar assault on fantasy novels had failed to come anywhere close to emulating The Lord of the Rings, the studios then decided to cast their eyes even further back into literary history and launch blockbuster adaptations of books that had been around for at least 100 years.

Robert Downey Jr. helped shepherd the big-budget Sherlock Holmes blockbusters to over $500m apiece at the box office, but the rest didn't turn out to be quite as fortunate. John Carter's $264m budget only resulted in one of the biggest financial disasters in history, the $100m Dracula Untold was quickly wiped from existence as Universal immediately attempted to reboot their iconic monsters again only to suffer an even worse outcome, while you'd be forgiven for completely forgetting that the $180m Legend of Tarzan even existed.

These characters had already been done to death on the big screen countless times before, so it hardly came as a surprise that modern audiences that had become accustomed to, and infatuated with, superhero cinema didn't have much interest in the majority of these period-set actioners that hoped a recognizable title would be enough to guarantee success.