Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Look, we’re going to have to agree to disagree here, but we think the latest reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn’t that bad. Sure, the original look of the Turtles was whack and curious to say the least, but the movies were a helluva lot of fun – especially the second one, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.
At the end of the day, they’re about teenage turtles who fight ninjas and eat tons of pizza; you can’t expect the storyline to address something deeper like the Rwandan genocide. Nonetheless, audiences had Michael Bay-phobia and pretty much avoided the second film, hence the cancelation.
Maybe we’re overestimating the franchise’s potential in this day and age, and it’ll never reach the same levels of Turtlemania like it did in the late 80s and early 90s. Still, it’s a pity, as these were definitely fun popcorn flicks.
Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events
It’s not difficult to see what 2004’s Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events was trying to achieve. It wanted to be the next big children’s series in the same vein as Harry Potter, and it had all the right ingredients to do so.
Even though it’s 13 years old, it’s still a good movie and certainly deserved more than one sequel. Its biggest obstacle, though, ended up being the studio, Paramount Pictures, which went through several corporate shakeups while the project got lost in piles of papers and cocaine. By the time the possibility of a sequel was mooted, the original cast had grown up (as the law of nature dictates) and were too old for their roles.
Ultimately, it was canceled, but the story did receive a reboot in the form of a TV series, with the first season now available on Netflix.