If you’ve been paying attention to mainstream cinema in the last couple of decades, you’ll know that studios have become increasingly obsessed with brand names. It’s become so expensive to market a movie, the logic goes, that you’re better off making a movie with a title that people are familiar with than trying to sell them on something they haven’t previously heard of.
And while the producers of cataclysmic flops like “The A-Team,” “The Lone Ranger,” “Jack The Giant Slayer,” “The Man From U.N.C.L.E,” “Pan” or ‘Speed Racer” would perhaps warn them away, executives scrape the barrel further and further, not just making movies based on books or comics, but on video games, toys, or other increasingly thin, ludicrous material beyond that.
This week marks something of a watershed in cinema history, with the first app-turned-film landing: “The Angry Birds Movie,” based on the mega-selling commute-timewasting phone game. And it’s just the first in a new wave of such films: later this year will see DreamWorks Animation’s movie about Troll dolls, while 2017 will bring “Barbie,” “Power Rangers,” “Baywatch,” “My Little Pony” and, most terrifyingly of all, “The Emoji Movie.”
And yet while some of these past things have proven to be giant disasters, some such projects that sound like terrible ideas on paper proved to be pretty good movies (indeed, some of the ‘Angry Birds’ reviews have seen critics be pleasantly surprised). So, with that film heading into theaters, we’ve rounded up a list of ten movies based on idiotic material, some of which turned out well, some of which… didn’t. Take a look below.
“Battleship” (2012)
The success of “Transformers” (see below) sent other movie studios scrambling for other toy or game properties that could make the big-screen translation. The most notable result, after a long delay, much derision, and then much more derision when the film actually hit theaters, was “Battleship.” The first product of a big-money deal between toy companies Hasbro and Universal (that ultimately only resulted in two movies), it attempted to make the pen-and-pencil game, later brought into plastic-peg form by Milton Bradley, into a big sci-fi franchise, with bad-boy Naval lieutenant Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch) leading the only line of defense when five alien boats arrive to begin an alien invasion, after his brother (Alexander Skarsgard) is killed and his father-in-law (Liam Neeson) is trapped on the wrong side of a force field. Peter Berg’s vision for how to pull it off was a combination of “Independence Day” and the “Transformers” franchise, and it succeeds to some extent, in that it features CGI and things exploding. On pretty much every other front (including the finances — the $200 million movie failed to clear $70 million domestically and lost Universal a ton), the film failed at anything else, with phoned-in performances, a dunder-headed script that reaches a low with a scene where Rihanna literally re-enacts the board game, and a Michael Bay-aping aesthetic that feels as cynical as, well, the rest of the film. Fortunately, audiences resoundingly rejected it and the hoped-for franchise was firmly sunk.
“Clue” (1985)
One of the films on this list that proves that sometimes a stupid idea for a movie can pay off, “Clue” isn’t exactly a a masterpiece, but it is an extremely entertaining genre-blender that’s slowly and steadily regained a reputation as a cult classic of a sort. Based on the classic murder-mystery board game, the take, by future “My Cousin Vinny” director Jonathan Lynn (with John Landis co-writing the story) collides the classic Agatha Christie-ish murder mystery with theatrical farce, cunningly bringing the characters from the game — disgraced psychiatrist Professor lum (Christopher Lloyd), war profiteer Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull), senator’s wife Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), madam Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren), black widow Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn) and gay State Department employee Mr. Green (Michael McKean) — into a 1950s McCarthy witch hunt era, a neat move that ups the paranoia of the anyone’s-a-killer set up even further. Famously released to theaters with three different endings, something that serves as both gimmick and amusing meta-commentary on the genre, the film staggers through an opening that even Christie would find to be heavy on the exposition, before settling in to a tone that feels exactly right: not quite parody, but far from serious, and yet still with something on its mind. It had an advantage over some of these other examples — “Clue” is a game rooted in story — but the film still proved to be far more fun than it had any right to be, even if it took nearly thirty years for audiences to catch up to it (it took just $14 million at the box office).
“The Lego Movie” (2014)
On paper, “The Lego Movie” looked to sum up all that was wrong with blockbuster movie culture in the 2010s. A computer animated movie based on a toy, except this toy was the popular Danish construction blocks, so didn’t even have a mythology like “Transformers.” But it made up for it by providing an opportunity for further corporate synergy by including characters from other popular Warner Bros franchises including Batman, Superman and Harry Potter. It should have been something toxic and cynical, but in the hands of Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who’d twice before weaved gold from straw with “Cloudy With Chance Of Meatballs” and “21 Jump Street”) it became something wonderful, a delirious, deeply weird pop-culture mash-up that had its corporate cake, disassembled it and turned it into an 800-piece airship. With a story that riffed cleverly on hero’s journey archetypes, the film saw ordinary Lego man Emmet (Chris Pratt) thrust into a quest to find a MacGuffin called the Piece of Resistance to stop the evil Lord Business (Will Ferrell) from his nefarious, mysterious purposes, with the aid of a motley gang including not-a-DJ Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks), mysterious prophet Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman) and a hilariously egotistical, navel-gazing version of Batman (Will Arnett, soon to get his own spin-off). Few outside Pixar in American animated film have managed to capture the mix of spectacle, heart and gags that Lord and Miller find here, and it’s particularly good at capturing the sort of lunacy of a child’s imagination, like the opening sequence of “Toy Story 3” pulled to future length. It’s a bit frantic for some, but the level of sheer fun and invention is enough to more or less vindicate the idea that you can turn pretty much anything into a good film.
“Mars Attacks!” (1996)
Most of the attempts to turn thin material into movies have come more recently, as Hollywood became more and more franchise-crazy. Which makes “Mars Attacks!” somewhat ahead of its time, being Tim Burton’s adaptation of a selection of cult-object 1960s trading cards about an alien invasion. But what could have felt craven in 2016 felt like a gamble in the mid-90s, and while “Mars Attacks!” is many things, few of them good, it’s nothing if not an eccentric, oddly personal film from the director, even if it also proves to be an early indication of his worse impulses. Penned by Jonathan Gems, and hitting at the peak of a post-“X-Files” and “Independence Day” boom in UFO interest (though the film underwhelmed at the box office), it’s set in a world that’s not quite the present, and not quite a 1950s/1960s B-movie fantasia, following an ensemble of almost Altman-ish sprawl across an attempted hostile takeover of the planet by wrinkle-headed Martians. Jack Nicholson plays, rather pointlessly dual roles, including the President, while Glenn Close, Annette Bening, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Martin Short, Sarah Jessica Parker, Michael J. Fox, Natalie Portman, Jim Brown, Pam Grier, Jack Black and, as himself, Tom Jones, all get in on the fun, though the mood is often rather sour rather than actually enjoyable. Burton, at least, seems to be having a blast, gleefully incinerating Congress and a cow, swapping heads and throwing in a host of movie references (the best being Rod Steiger riffing on “Dr. Strangelove”), but it adds up to something uneven, underwritten and strangely unlikable whole, particularly after Burton reached such a peak a few years earlier with the similarly atomic-age-infused “Ed Wood.”
“Ouija” (2014)
It’s one thing to make your movie about a board game. It’s another to base it around a theoretically supernatural object that you got lucky and bought the trademark to at some point. But that’s what Hasbro’s second movie with Universal, “Ouija,” was — an homage to the sleepover-favorite toy that, legend has it (and has for almost a millennia in one form or another) enables you to commune with the dead. But one of the troubles with Stiles White’s long-gestating “Ouija” is that it’s material that’s been tackled by plenty of other horror pics, and virtually everything in this story — which sees a group of teens attempting to talk to a friend (Shelley Hennig) who committed suicide, only to discover that they’ve unleashed a terrible force that’s killing them off one by one. If you try, you can probably come up with a few good things about the film: lead Olivia Cooke (of “Bates Motel” and “Me & Earl & The Dying Girl”) is a winning presence, and Stiles can pull off a few effective, if utterly predictable, jump-scares. But everything else in the film is utterly generic: the story, the dull, dull characters, the look, the ‘twist,’ the lousy writing. It’s possible to find something fresh in this sort of thing — look at “It Follows” which premiered around the same time and gave the genre some substance and some flair. Sometimes, recycling the same old stuff just isn’t enough, even if you have a loose brand name attached (though that said, the film performed well and a sequel’s on its way shortly)…
