re: Spinoff thread: movies that SHOULD HAVE had sequels

Arachnophbia should have multiple sequels and at least one prequel

Saw this with my then-14 year old daughter in 2011. Surprisingly good entertaining action flick. The story is about a teenage alien on Earth fleeing other aliens who are hunting him down. It received generally negative reviews, but was a box-office success, grossing $149.9 million against a budget of $50-59 million. Plans for a sequel were cancelled due to the film's poor performance.

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I'll die on the hill that naming the movie John Carter killed it. They were going to name it John Carter of Mars and changed it for some stupid reason. Theat would have been 100x better or just went with the first novel Under the Moons of Mars.

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Yeah, I really think the movie was intentionally sabotaged.

If you remember (you may not), Disney wanted a Sci Fi franchise. This was while they were still riding the surge from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. One group wanted to develop something inhouse themselves, and the other wanted to buy Lucasfilm (they'd recently bought the MCU).

The inhouse guys got this movie made, but it's clear there were lots of shenanigans going on. The name and marketing were off... the trailer didn't show much, and the name didn't either. You had to have one or the other, or else it's just a guy's name.
Then I noted IMDB went nuts with spam... before it even was released, it was getting massacred from every angle. People were calling it derivative, ripping off Star Wars and Avatar etc. Saying the story was dumb, the effects were laughable and so on.
The "derivative" theme was pushed hard, and really didn't make sense since these books were written over 100 years ago.
The film was declared a bust before it was released.

And sure enough, that convinced the Disney executives. They bought Lucasfim a couple months later, going for the "sure thing" known property, instead of making their own.
That's the day the money guys at Disney defeated the creative team, and it's brought us to where we are now.

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I remember watching the trailer the first time, before I had ever heard of the book series, and at the end of the trailer just flashed in all caps JOHN CARTER. I legit lol'd

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To me, that's just a sad commentary on society; and I don't mean that as an insult to you personally.

I'm in my 50's, and remember my childhood from the 70's well. We had multiple Tarzan stuff (Saturday morning cartoons, there were repeats of the live series on mid-afternoons, etc) so people knew Edgar Rice Burroughs by name. My mom would take me to the library to get books to read, and there would be tons of ERB books in the fantasy section- Tarzan, John Carter, etc. Paperbacks with Frazetta artwork on the cover...

you're damn right I grabbed those. And the stories lived up to the covers
So when they announced this film with a big budget, I was pumped.

Kill Bill

Copperheads kid returns for revenge...