The elephant graveyard of box office disaster is littered with the bones of a ambitious fantasy and horror franchises that shot for the stars, only to come crashing down to earth and secure a place in infamy as a legendarily titanic commercial catastrophe. In many cases such a fate has been entirely deserved, but could streaming offer many of them a way back into the limelight?
When you think about it, a recurring theme across the alarming number of blockbuster bombs cut from a similar cloth is that they all try to do too much in the span of a single feature film, spamming the audience with exposition and lore so dense and unyielding that interest begins to wane – if it was ever there at all.
The various combatants in the streaming wars have shown a soft spot for reinventing recognizable properties that didn’t fare too well the first time around, with Redditors now stating the case for which fantastical failures should be deemed worthy of the same treatment. When you think about it, there are literally dozens that have vast untapped potential which would be more than worth exploring – and hopefully realizing.
Stephen Sommers’ undercooked creature feature Deep Rising and cult classic Event Horizon kick off the discussion, although the latter does exist somewhere in the ether of development hell at Prime Video. Alex Proyas’ Dark City, the vampires vs. werewolves Underworld saga, John Carpenter’s They Live, highest-grossing video game adaptation ever Warcraft, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, Karl Urban’s Dredd, and even the diabolical Paul Bettany duo of Priest and Legion would all be more than capable of delivering the goods were they to be dusted off and rejigged for the small screen.
Whether or not you agree with every single one of those aforementioned candidates is up to you, but the argument itself is hard to disagree with.
