20 Movies That Weren't Worth The Wait

But no film on this list spent longer in development than John Carter - the mega-budget adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1912 sci-fi fantasy novel A Princess of Mars.

Before Disney finally got John Carter made in 2012, Hollywood had been trying to adapt Burroughs' series of Barsoom novels since the 1930s (!), yet until modern technology became sufficiently sophisticated, the depth and ambition of Burroughs' world was largely deemed unfilmable.

And while John Carter certainly get some points for the effort, it's ultimately a shallow adaptation that fails to do much interesting with its story or especially its title character.

Taylor Kitsch, bless him, is totally miscast here, which in conjunction with Disney's appallingly bland marketing campaign, doomed the film to flop at the box office regardless of the mediocre reviews.

And like that, all the promise of Burroughs' novels was thoroughly squandered, enough that nobody's been brave enough to try again.