The remains of ambitious fantasy and horror series that reached for the stars but came tumbling down to earth and earned a reputation as a legendarily colossal commercial disaster are scattered around the elephant graveyard of box office failure. Although such a destiny has often been wholly merited, could streaming provide many of them a chance to regain notoriety?
When you stop to think about it, the alarming number of blockbuster bombs that are all made of the same material have one thing in common: they all try to accomplish too much in a single feature film, bombarding the audience with exposition and lore that is so dense and unyielding that interest begins to wane, if it ever existed at all.
The various players in the streaming wars have demonstrated a soft spot for rebooting popular franchises that didn't perform well the first time around, and Redditors are now arguing that fanciful flops should be given the same treatment. When you stop to consider it, there are literally dozens of opportunities with enormous unrealized potential that would be well worth examining.
The conversation begins with the underwhelming creature film Deep Rising by Stephen Sommers and the cult favourite Event Horizon, while the latter does exist somewhere in the ether of Prime Video's development hell. If they were dusted off and reworked for television, Alex Proyas' Dark City, the vampires vs. werewolves Underworld saga, John Carpenter's They Live, the highest-grossing video game adaptation of all time, Warcraft, Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, Karl Urban's Dredd, and even the evil Paul Bettany duo Priest and Legion, would all be more than capable of delivering the goods.
It's up to you whether or not you agree with each and every one of the aforementioned candidates, but the argument itself is difficult to refute.
