10 Movies That Led To Other Movies Being Cancelled (And Why)
The disastrous domino effect that can see entire franchises killed in a single moment.
With budgets for studio blockbusters getting higher and higher, the amount of risk being put into these projects becomes lower and lower. If you're spending $200m on a single movie, then obviously you'd be much more inclined to play it safe and maximize the potential audience appeal.
However, that's resulted in a sense of uniformity surrounding the vast majority of Hollywood's tent-pole releases, with mediocrity and solid box office the largely-accepted norm, with very few filmmakers working in this particular sandbox willing to attempt anything fresh or exciting.
Obviously, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, the margins between success and failure can often be career-defining, and sometimes a movie comes along that fails so badly that it creates a knock-on effect that has consequences for other projects, which might not even be in the same genre or hail from the same studio.
There's been plenty of times when a lot of people have found themselves out a job thanks to the success or failure of a movie that they never even had anything to do with, with the fickle nature of the movie business causing the executives in the boardroom to panic and scrap something just on the off-chance that it suffers a similar fate.
10. Avatar Keeps Fantastic Voyage Remake Stuck In Development Hell
Fantastic Voyage is one of those movies that you can't believe hasn't been remade yet, given both the high-concept logline and a unique setting that could make the most of modern-day CGI technology. It isn't like they haven't tried, with James Cameron attached to an update of the 1966 classic for a decade before his plans for Pandora got in the way.
Cameron was toying with the idea of directing as far back as 1997, but his focus on Avatar saw him step back but still produce through his Lightstorm Entertainment banner. Roland Emmerich, Paul Greengrass, Shawn Levy and Guillermo del Toro were all linked at various stages, with the man behind Titanic and Terminator still set to have a hand in the screenplay.
Ultimately, Cameron decided to focus all of his energies on expanding the world of Avatar, and after the announcement that he apparently plans to just keep making sequels to the sci-fi epic for what looks to be the rest of his life, any and all talk of the Fantastic Voyage remake was abruptly dropped as both he and del Toro moved on to different projects.