20 Film Franchises That Were Cancelled After One Movie

In 1982, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard published his sci-fi novel Battlefield Earth, which revolves around an alien race that have ruled our planet for a millennium. Fellow scientologist John Travolta was blown away by this book and got the ball rolling to turn it into a movie, with him portraying the main villain. Because the novel was over a thousand pages, it only covered the first-half, with the second-half intended to be explored in the sequel.

But there was one teeny-tiny problem. Battlefield Earth is one of the worst films ever made. Not only did it fail at the box office and with critics, the studio behind it, Franchise Pictures, went bankrupt after it was discovered they secured the budget through fraud. With the studio gone bust, the sequel was off the table.