“Pirates Of The Caribbean: Curse Of The Black Pearl” (2003)
Sometime around the turn of the century, long before they had Marvel and Star Wars and their mega-bucks fairy tale remakes, while their animated movies were in a serious slump and they feared Pixar might be heading elsewhere, Disney decided that their saviour would be movies based, of all the things in the world, on rides at their theme parks. It got off to a decidedly inauspicious start with “The Country Bears,” and would later also disappoint with Eddie Murphy and “The Haunted Mansion.” The film in between sounded like an even bleaker prospect: a pirate movie (pirate movies having without exception been disasters like “Cutthroat Island” for half-a-century) from the director of “The Mexican,” starring an actor who’d seemingly long ago given up on movie stardom in favor of eccentric, auteur-driven projects. But Gore Verbinski‘s “Pirates Of The Caribbean: Curse Of The Black Pearl” was a huge hit, spawning a multi-billion dollar franchise and turning Johnny Depp into the world’s biggest star. And it’s easy to forget now, thirteen years, three bloated sequels and one “Lone Ranger” later, but that first film is also kind of great. Capturing the spirit of the ride it inspired it but creating its own mythology, it’s one of the few films to successfully emulate the tone of something like “Raiders Of The Lost Ark,” rollicking, pacy fun but with actual stakes and drama too (it’s no surprise that the script came from “Aladdin” scribes Elliot & Rossio: this feels more like a classic Disney animation than many of their live-action remakes do). And while we’re exhausted by him now, Depp’s Jack Sparrow was a truly original and hugely engaging character. The experiment hasn’t been successfully repeated yet (as we’ll see below), but as it turns out, yes, theme park rides could be turned into good movies…
“Super Mario Bros” (1993)
You could make the argument that video games, as a medium, are inherently better suited to adaptation than most of the source material we’ve been tackling here. Unlike toys or rides or cards or blocks, they do have a story behind them (even if, until recently, those stories have been deeply indebted to movies). And yet, while “Warcraft” and “Assassin’s Creed” hope to change that this year, every video game turned movie has been lousy until now. Especially the first, “Super Mario Bros,” which took an already thin and plotless piece of material, ignored everything about the spirit of it, and became an almost legendary fiasco. Nintendo’s Italian plumber Mario and his brother Luigi were some of video games’ first icons: cute heroes in a day-glo world who’d sold million of copies by the time that Hollywood came calling. But the screen adaptation, directed by “Max Headroom” helmers Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, was unrecognizable aside from the red and green dungarees worn by Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo. It dropped the two lead characters into a world where mankind lives side by side with humanoid dinosaurs in a “Blade Runner”-derived dystopia, an early glimpse of the world where every franchise would get a gritty reboot. The film has the occasionally visually striking moment, but on the whole, its only real achievement (other than making you feel sorry for all the actors) is that you’re so staggered by the pointlessness of the particular approach taken here, that you forget about the pointlessness of making any kind of “Super Mario Bros” movie.
“Tomorrowland” (2015)
After the success of “Pirates Of The Caribbean,” Disney began to think even bigger with their theme-park related movie ideas, starting to think about films based around not just rides, but also areas or entire parks. Their “Magic Kingdom” movie, which Michael Chabon was writing for Jon Favreau to direct, never came to pass, but last year saw the release of a film from some very high-profile talent loosely inspired by Tomorrowland, the futuristic section of Disneyland that’s been in the parks since the first opened in 1955. Unfortunately, it didn’t come anywhere near the success of ‘Pirates,’ landing in Disney’s Hall Of Giant Flops along with “John Carter” and “The Lone Ranger,” and that’s a shame, because while it’s a deeply, deeply flawed movie, it’s a rather interesting one. Written by Damon Lindelof and directed by Pixar veteran Brad Bird, the film sees troubled science-loving teen Casey (striking newcomer Britt Robertson) find a pin that gives her a glimpse of a magical sci-fi utopia, and sets off to track down inventor Frank Walker (George Clooney), who may have the key to how to get there. It’s an ambitious film, one with a rather particular and unusual theme — about how apocalyptic-themed media is damaging for our psyches, and how optimism has seemingly become a thing of the past. And at its best, the film thrills, particularly in a terrific mid-film action sequence that’s among the best things Bird has done. But it’s a fundamentally broken story, taking forever to get going, never truly engaging, and worst of all, paintings its titular utopia as a rather sterile, unappealing place. It doesn’t work, but it feels so odd that it lands itself in the ‘interesting failure’ category rather than anywhere else.
“Transformers” (2007)
Over the past decade (with more films likely to come with even more frequency soon), the “Transformers” franchise has come to be seen as the very nadir of Hollywood blockbuster, even while the films themselves have continued to print money (the third and fourth films each made over a billion worldwide). All from a set of robo-car toys that arguably peaked in the 1980s, proving that a mix of nostalgia and explosions is still an internationally popular concern. To say that the first of Michael Bay’s four films in the series is the best isn’t to suggest that it’s a good movie — it’s still ugly, noisy, dumb, sexist and barely cohesive. But the influence of executive producer Steven Spielberg, who suggested that the film be about a ‘boy and his car,’ does give the film a certain focus and even an emotional spine, in its story of teen Sam (Shia LaBeouf), who discovers that his first automobile is in fact an alien robot whose ancient war is coming to Earth. And Bay is one of the great action directors: although he’d reach his peak with the truly spectacular closing set-piece of the third film, there’s still some good work here. The franchise had, and still has, a giant problem, in that the Transformer characters are visually interchangeable, deeply underwritten dullards, made worse by Bay’s envisioning of them, and across nearly 10 of hours of movie you have never come to care if they live or die. And yet the audience’s appetite, at least abroad (admissions for the fourth movie were half of those of the second), seems to somehow still be insatiable…
“What To Expect When You’re Expecting” (2012)
Even the movies on this list almost all have some kind of narrative spine to them, seemingly the bare minimum that you’d need to consider adapting something. “Angry Birds” has ‘pigs steal eggs from birds, birds are furious.’ Even “Super Mario Bros.” has “plumber rescues princess.” In being based on a self-help book, “What To Expect When You’re Expecting” pushes the pointlessness of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on optioning material to the limit (though it wasn’t the first: Natalie Wood/Tony Curtis vehicle “Sex And The Single Girl,” “Mean Girls,” “He’s Just Not That Into You” and “Think Like A Man” are among those who’ve gone that way before). The film fits into that curious, post-“Love Actually” sub-genre of all-star, multi-stranded romantic comedies in a Garry Marshall vein, and could have just been called ‘Having A Baby: The Movie,’ had studio Lionsgate not decided that the film would have greater value with the name of a multi-million selling pregnancy guide attached. It’s not a bad idea, had it been done with honesty and wit, but aside from a few good gags (mostly delivered by Rob Huebel’s stay-at-home-dad), director Kirk Jones and his writers give it a bland, sitcom-y sheen, stars like Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Banks and Anna Kendrick flounder in search of material to get their teeth stuck into, and the film seems torn between sappy greetings-card sentiment and something more along the lines of “Bridesmaids” (a movie it steals half the cast from). Even by the standards of the self-help adaptation, this felt cynical, and audiences agreed, with the film taking just $40 million domestically.
Fortunately, this list isn’t as long as it could be (or, frankly, will be in a few years). But there are a few other notables that we could have included, along with some we mentioned above, like the video game movies or the “Country Bears” and “Haunted Mansion” duo. Comic strips “Garfield,” “Dennis The Menace,” “Marmaduke” and “Peanuts” were all stretched to feature length to varying success, while toy/cartoon crossovers like “G.I. Joe” and “Jem And The Holograms” made it too, not to forget doll franchise “Bratz” and Adam Sandler retro-videogame-trademark-collection “Pixels.” Anything else we missed? Let us know in the comments.
