8. The Golden Compass
Among the countless novel adaptations trying to follow in Harry Potter's footsteps, The Golden Compass was certainly one of the more likely ones to succeed; based on the first in Philip Pullman's enormously successful series of His Dark Materials series, it had a massive in-built audience, an all-star cast including Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, and a meaty $180 million budget to boot. Though the film was not a financial disaster - grossing over double its budget at the global box office - it performed considerably under expectations, with reasons ranging from the controversy of its anti-Catholic sentiments, to the fact that these ideas were in fact considerably toned down from the novel (and therefore angered fans, who boycotted it). Director Chris Weitz cited studio interference as compromising the film - they asked for the novel's themes to be watered down to appeal to more audiences - and described the process of editing the film to suit their requests as "terrible." In their quest to "know better", they threw a franchise potentially worth billions of dollars straight down the toilet.