This new video examines movies that were meant to launch big-budget franchises but failed. Movies like Battle: Los Angeles (2011), Super Mario Bros. (1993), and John Carter (2012) (which I thought was not that bad), are among those that made the list.
Some of these movies ended in a way designed to lead to a second film that — fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your viewpoint — never came. Check it out.
What is your favorite failed movie franchise? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Chimesfreedom recently reported on an upcoming new Johnny Cash album release called Out Among the Stars. The album features unreleased tracks from recording sessions at Columbia Records in 1981 and 1984. The video for the earlier announcement featured a snipped of one of the songs discovered by Cash’s son John Carter, “She Used to Love Me a Lot.” But now you may hear the song in its entirety.
The song is available for listening below. As Rolling Stone reports, the song sounds like vintage Johnny Cash. I like it. The album Out Among the Stars will hit the shelves and Internet on March 15, 2014.
One interesting point that the articles about the new song do not mention, is that another country icon released a version of “She Used to Love Me a Lot” in the 1980s. David Allan Coe had a hit with the song in 1985. The song — written by Dennis Morgan, Charles Quillen, and Kye Fleming — appeared on Coe’s 1984 album Darlin’, Darlin. Check out his version.
What do you think of “She Used to Love Me a Lot”? Leave your two cents in the comments.
The $250-million-film John Carter (2012) has made news recently as being a big bomb. The Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure film about a Civil War veteran who ends up on Mars in the middle of a war there and falls in love with a princess reportedly will lose an estimated $200 million on its U.S. release. Commentators note a number of reasons the film did not do will, with a lot of blame going to poor marketing and a generic title. Unfortunately, sometimes the fact that a film is expensive and called “the $250-million John Carter” leads to bad press when the film is not making back the money spent. The bashing of such films is okay if you are talking about bad business decisions, but if you are talking about the quality of the film, the fact that a movie lost a lot of money should not scare you away.
There are a number of famous bombs that are decent movies and of equal if not better quality than other similar films that got better press. As Kevin Costner’s post-apocalypse Waterworld (1995) became more costly in production the bad press started even before the film was released. Then it did not do well. But it is a decent science fiction film. Director Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate (1980) is famous for costing so much money it brought down United Artists. But if you give the movie a chance and go into it with modest expectations, it is an entertaining, albeit long, film about Wyoming’s Johnson County War with excellent actors and nice cinematography. Are these movies great? No, not by a long shot. But they are as good or better than a lot of decent movies.
One such bomb cost me a job years ago when I was on a job interview. The job had nothing to do with film, but during the interview the subject of favorite movies came up. I asked the person in charge what his favorite film was, and with a smile on his face he said, “Ishtar.” They asked me what I thought of the 1987 movie starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, and I answered honestly that despite all of the bad press because it was so expensive, the movie entertained me when I saw it in the theater and was not as bad as a lot of other comedies. The interview continued, and the next week I found out I did not get the job.
The rejection letter made me realize that when the boss brought up Ishtar, he was testing me to see if I had the guts to disagree with him. To test me, he picked the most ridiculous favorite movie he could think of. So from his viewpoint, I failed the test because I did not stand up to him and tell him that Ishtar was a horrible movie. Little did he know though, that while he really believed Ishtar was one of the worst movies of all time, I did disagree with him on that point. But because he said the opposite of what he thought, he missed the real chance to test me. So I will disagree with him here. I was right. Wherever you are, you were wrong.
So now I will conclude this review of John Carter that does not talk about John Carter with my point: John Carter, starring Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins, is a fun movie if you are only paying the price of a ticket and not the $250 million production costs.
What did you think of John Carter? Leave your two cents in the comments.
