15 Fascinating Premises That Were Bigger Than The Movies Themselves

5. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen

The Premise: Sean Connery leads a team of fiction's greatest characters, including Dorian Gray and Jekyll/Hyde, on a top secret mission. You'd expect the last film of the great Sean Connery, before his retirement, to be a larger-than-life, astoundingly entertaining caper. That's the task that director Stephen Norrington was probably setting himself, adapting Alan Moore's comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. As Spider-Man and X-Men were taking off into the stratosphere, it seemed a no-brainer to bring characters written by Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Mark Twain to the big screen; it was a literary legends' Justice League, and a chance to launch so many universally-loved characters. The movie was universally panned though. Still, great concept.