Eight years ago, Warner Bros. acquired the rights to adapt Five Nights at Freddy’s, a viral-friendly horror videogame where haunted animatronics haunt a night-time employee of a Chuck E. Cheese-esque restaurant. Then, only a year after its release, the game had hype that WB hoped to capitalize on. Five Nights at Freddy’s was not compelling because of its narrative, but despite the gimmicky nature of its thrills, it enjoyed a longer-than-most longevity that was propelled by the YouTube/Twitch gameplay industry where players can exaggerate their scared reactions. But creative roadblocks came during the adaptation process, with multiple drafts, directions and directors being announced and abandoned up until filming commenced in February 2023 (also, the release of multiple non-licensed horror films riding Five Nights at Freddy’s coattails). The film is finally out this week. While it’s definitely good to know that Jason Blum can still pulp out a buzzy horror movie in under a year, Five Nights at Freddy’s gestation period means the movie missed the hype on a game that took the internet by storm nearly a decade ago. It wouldn’t be the first time Hollywood was slow off the mark, though.
Here are the 10 biggest movies that missed the hype:
1. Masters of the Universe (1987)
A little bit of free market He-Man history: Even though toy sales were strong up until 1987, the market had become saturated with ugly derivations of fan-favorite toys and waves of new characters. The cartoon had ended in 1985, the intrusion of Transformers and especially Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles later in the ‘80s meant that the exact conditions of unregulated child marketing that created Mattel’s initial He-Man success dried up pretty quickly. Cannon Films had a perfect set-up to bomb the franchise with a slap-dash film that stumbled into cinemas and bore little resemblance to the stories beloved by kids—even Mattel had so little faith that they didn’t pay the arranged production costs on time. It may have only missed the hype by a couple years, but in Reaganist terms that’s a fatal mistake.
2. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie (1987)
A clear case of not just missing the hype but also the point: The Garbage Pail Kids Movie has a reputation for being the most unwatchable movies released by Hollywood. Based on the Topps trading cards parodying the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls (to the point of being sued by the company they were parodying), the best time to make a weird kids movie based on this nasty, cartoon artwork was never; the second best time was the moment they became popular and not a millisecond after. The cards were only originally available for three years—they are the dictionary definition of a fad, one that loses its natural hype as soon as studios invest $1 million into asserting how relevant and cool they are.
3. Borderlands (2024)
This is slightly cheating because the movie has not been completed or released yet, but we need to take this opportunity to explain how doomed this videogame adaptation will be. You know you’re onto some missed hype gold dust if the “Production” tab on Wikipedia for an still-unreleased film begins with “In May 2015…” This may go down as one of the most troubled Hollywood productions in recent memory, with reshoots with a different director (Tim Miller) and eight additional writers contributing to the script, including Sam Levinson and Craig Mazin, the latter of which has chosen to be credited under a pseudonym. The kicker? Borderlands hype has cooled off since the release of Borderlands 3 in 2019. A great example of production delays worsening a movie’s relevancy before it’s even out.
4. The Lone Ranger (2013)
You remember The Lone Ranger TV series? The Western serial from the literal ‘50s with all the queasy Native American representation? Well, at least the show cast an actual Indigenous person in the role of Tonto, despite Jay Silverheels being Indigenous Canadian and not Native American. (Tonto has been from one of three different Native tribes—either Tonto Apache, Comanche or Potawatomi—just to demonstrate how thoughtfully writers considered and still consider Native representation.) Anyways, Johnny Depp is not Indigenous in any way, and is paired with Armie Hammer in this oversized Gore Verbinski blockbuster for a dynamic duo of scumbag leading men. The Lone Ranger is a victim of its own scale; if this film was made in the ‘80s alongside other ‘50s nostalgia-driven projects, it wouldn’t have cost $400 million before it opened, and they’d have a much easier job convincing contemporary audiences to give a damn about the property—maybe because they’d know what it is?
5. Mortal Engines (2018)
If Mortal Engines had gone into production soon after Peter Jackson acquired the rights to Philip Reeve’s 2001 fantasy novel in 2009, the film would have probably enjoyed some success in the Hunger Games-driven YA dystopia boom of the 2010s. Also, that probably would mean that Jackson wouldn’t have had to take over Hobbit directing duties from Guillermo del Toro, which would have been a better deal. Visual effects weren’t quite advanced enough when the book was published, but 15 years later is still too long to wait on adapting a book that had a more muted reception compared to other superbook series like Harry Potter and Twilight. Every minute you wait to adapt a former hot-button fantasy novel that isn’t set in Middle-earth or Narnia, the less people will care about its big-screen adaptation.
6. Dark Phoenix (2019)
Another film subject to delays, this official, standalone adaptation of the iconic Jean Grey comic storyline came out a staggering 39 years after writer Chris Claremont and artist John Byrne launched it in Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men comic. One of the biggest examples of how superhero movies really don’t care about the stories they’re cribbing for aesthetic and promotional purposes, this bomb comes after the Jean Grey hype had been thwarted in two prior attempts to explore her antihero character in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) and X-Men: Apocalypse (2016). Take a hint, Fox! We don’t care anymore! Thank God there’re no X-Men adaptations on the horizon anytime soon…
7. Ben-Hur (2016)
This 2016 flop should have been retroactively subtitled: Who Gives a Shit? to really hammer home its misjudged assumption of audience interest in the swords-and-sandals epic. When your biggest star power is a 79-year-old Morgan Freeman, it might be time to go back to the drawing board. It’s not that Ben-Hur is too untouchable a classic to remake, but it’s just too large a movie to half-ass—instead of riding the Ancient Adventure wave that was sweeping Prestige TV at the time, Ben-Hur should have come during the Genuinely Well-Made swords-and-sandals revival in the early 2000s post-Gladiator. Incomparable levels of nobody caring.
8. The Disaster Artist (2017)
The Room enjoyed a good spell of organic cult hype as one of the best bad movies of the modern age, despite it being nothing like the B-movies that filled the contemporary Bad Movie Canon. Its uniqueness made its cult even stronger, and grew to the point that studios backed an all-star cast dressing up as their favorite characters from the film to act out a pantomime version of The Room co-lead Greg Sestero’s dark and fascinating memoir. Seeing millions of dollars go into a recreation of the film’s troubled production made us realize that, actually, it was time to move on from Tommy Wiseau’s cinematic misfortunes, and the whole affair felt suddenly labored and creaky. The Disaster Artist didn’t just miss the hype of The Room, it killed it.
9. Black Widow (2021)
You are not allowed to refuse to give compelling or thoughtful character development to your leading female character in a Cinematic Universe, kill her off and then afterwards make a standalone prequel to retroactively insist that, actually, she did have thoughtful characterization. Black Widow came a couple years after Natasha Romanoff was killed off in the MCU, meaning it wasn’t just COVID delays that made this Civil War-era adventure feel past its expiration date—it kicked off Phase 4’s clumsy and beleaguered movie slate. In MCU terms, four years too late is like a death sentence (not that that’s ever stopped characters from coming back).
10. John Carter (2012)
The correct time to make John Carter a movie was one hundred years ago. I’m dead serious. I don’t care about waiting for technology to catch up, not making this planetary romance serial into a film in the year of our lord 1922 was a massively unforced error from Hollywood. Nobody cares about John Carter after millions of other movies have cribbed off its look, and feel, and characters, and themes. Nobody wants to see something with a 2010s minimalist title like John Carter! They want to be in Prohibition-era America, having their little flapper eyes popped out of their skulls watching the most primitive compositing and color-grading that Jasoom has ever seen. If the past 10 years have shown us anything, it’s that we should stop letting classic Pixar directors make what they want and that Star Wars should have come with an index of key influences that we’re never allowed to see direct adaptations of.
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.