7 Huge Upcoming Movies (That Are Massive Gambles)

Reported budget: $150-$200 million

Release date: 21st December 2018

Let's be honest right away: history has proven that we should never write off a massively expensive movie with James Cameron's name attached. Many of us did that prior to the release of both 1997's Titanic, and 2009's Avatar - and we all know how those turned out.

Even so, Alita: Battle Angel only has the Hollywood golden boy attached as producer, with Robert Rodriguez (who hasn't had a real hit since 2005's Sin City) in the director's chair. And based on what little we've seen of the film thus far, it's hard not to see the warning signs.

First off, it's based on Battle Angel Alita, Yukito Kishiro's 1990s manga and its subsequent anime adaptation. So right away, we can see the problem. Hollywood adaptations of anime tend not to do great business: 2008's Speed Racer made a mere $93 million worldwide, whilst 2017's Ghost in the Shell made a more respectable but still hardly stellar $169 million.

Perhaps more pressingly, as Ghost in the Shell's 'whitewashing' scandal indicated, public opinion seems to be turning against American adaptations of foreign properties which don't cast actors of the correct ethnicity. Given Alita: Battle Angel has no prominent Asian actors, it's likely to meet the same complaints.

Then, of course, there's the simple fact that, based on the trailers, Rosa Salazar's title character with her weird CG eyes just looks a bit too creepy to be the hero...