10 Sequels That Were Cancelled Due To Box Office Flops

In the wake of Peter Jackson's phenomenally successful Lord of the Rings trilogy, New Line envisioned The Golden Compass to be their next money-making behemoth; the plan was to take Phillip Pullman's fantastic fantasy series, His Dark Materials, and produce three box office hits, one by one, thus cornering the market for magical creatures and strange lands for years to come.

Hey, it worked for The Lord of the Rings, right?

Yeah, except the only different was that The Lord of the Rings movies were brilliant, and The Golden Compass was... well, the very opposite of that. It was met with lukewarm to poor critical notices, and pulled in $372 million on a budget of $190 million. Not horrific, but hardly the stuff of New Line's fantasy dreams.

Without word of mouth to ignite the fire, nobody bothered to go out and see "that film with the armoured polar bear," because absolutely nobody was recommending it. There was also the little matter of the Church; given the anti-Christian themes in The Golden Compass, the studio were pressured into losing an entire segment of the film: the ending.

The Subtle Knife already had a script and a release date, but instead of making it into a film, the studio took the blade and used it to commit seppuku.