4) Superman Returns
As he is such a perennially popular character, it is odd to think that Superman disappeared from cinema screens for a huge 19 year period before 2006’s aptly-titled Superman Returns. Directed by Bryan Singer – the man who launched the mega-successful X-Men franchise – the Big Blue Boy Scout looked set to come back with a bang.
Unfortunately, though, Superman Returns was a strangely pitched movie. While its faithfulness is charming, the idea to set it within the timeline of a film series that had been dead for two decades was a probably a bad move. It means Brandon Routh’s Superman is put directly under the huge shadow of Christopher Reeve’s beloved performance and never has a chance to stand on his own.
The movie was not the big hitter that Warner Bros. were hoping for and so Supes vanished once again… until Man of Steel rebooted him in 2013.
3) Terminator Salvation
The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day are widely seen as two of the best films of their kind. Unfortunately, this winning streak was broken with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines – which eschewed the thrilling action and drama of previous entries for dumb moments like putting Arnold Schwarzenegger in comedy glasses.
The fourth movie, Terminator Salvation, was meant to take the series in a completely different direction – no longer about the time travel, it was a future-set war movie with Christian Bale as a grizzled John Connor.
In the event, many felt that – despite being a slight improvement on the third movie – Salvation ended up being pretty pedestrian. The film did decent business but didn’t make a lasting impression and the rest of the trilogy it was meant to start never transpired.
That didn’t put studios off, though, as another Terminator film did eventually arrive…