3. Sucks - Adapting Every YA Book Series Thats Remotely Popular (Pre-planning Franchises)
Also known as counting your box office chickens before they're hatched, this is the flipside to reboot/remake mania. Studios are forever looking for that next great film franchise, especially one that comes with an already built-in audience. Call it the Harry Potter effect. Sure, before Potter there had been novels that were adapted for the big screen - notably the roughly 147 different John Grisham books in the 1990's - but after Potter became the biggest franchise of all time, every studio wanted their own book series to adapt, and the more entries in the prospective series, the better. Or so went the thinking. This mode of thinking has proven to be a double-edged sword. For every commercially or critically successful film, like Twilight (thankfully ending this month) or The Hunger Games, there are several failed attempts at starting franchises: The Golden Compass, Spiderwick Chronicles, Percy Jackson, Eragon and many others have all tried to follow Harry Potter's lead, and all failed to do so. Some of this may be down to problems with source material strength, although with Twilight's success, that's up for debate. NB - The Chronicles of Narnia series falls into a bit of both camps: the first one was successful enough to warrant a follow-up, but Prince Caspian didn't do enough business to give Fox confidence in moving forward, so Disney stepped in for Dawn Treader. That one didn't go anywhere, so the franchise is now effectively dead, and even though there are several remaining un-filmed books, it looks to remain a trilogy.