20 franchises that were adapted too late

Five Nights at Freddy’s is an undeniable success as a video game franchise, having been released on numerous platforms. As so often in Hollywood, however, it took the game series quite a while to get a movie adaptation, which was released in 2023. The movie version suffers from coming out at a moment when the games’ ubiquity has faded somewhat, and it doesn’t help that it is largely a paint-by-numbers horror flick. It’s the kind of film that never quite seems to know what to do with itself and who it wants to appeal outside of the core fandom, though, at the very least, it did manage to attain at least some financial success. 

The success of HBO’s Game of Thrones led many studios and streamers to try to find their own successful franchise. Some were more successful than others, and one unfortunate casualty was The Shannara Chronicles, based on the bestselling series by fantasy giant Terry Brooks. The series drew on several of the books in the series, but it was a victim of corporate reshuffling — it switched networks between its first and second season — and a bit of waning of interest in the fantasy genre on television. It was ultimately canceled after just two seasons, and there are no other plans to adapt the series again as of yet.

As soon as Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy was concluded, fans were asking whether they would also get the director’s take on Tolkien’s The Hobbit. It would take several years, but it would finally see theaters in 2013, having been turned into a trilogy. In this case, the franchise was the victim of its own success. In addition to getting dinged for expanding Tolkien’s slender volume into three different movies, many drew negative attention to the surfeit of special effects, many of which drew away from the simple story Tolkien had told. Sometimes, when it comes to franchises, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

At first, it seemed as if The Chronicles of Narnia was fated to be the next Lord of the Rings, particularly since the first installment, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was a success. The moment for the big-budget fantasy epic seemed to pass quite quickly, however, and each subsequent installment, including Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, saw decreased returns. It was a series that ended up being the victim of its own success, and it remains to be seen whether the recently-announced adaptation helmed by Greta Gerwig will manage to breathe some fresh life into the saga.

Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time  remains one of the best-loved children's novels ever written. In 2018, it got the big-budget Hollywood spectacle treatment with Ava DuVernay at the helm. It's an undeniably ambitious film, and it manages to capture at least some of the simple magic of the original novel. However, in other ways, it came too late, in the sense that it was burdened with the kind of CGI special effects that had become a necessary part of blockbuster filmmaking in 21st-century Hollywood. It ultimately feels like just another piece of standard Hollywood fare that missed its moment.  

Rick Riordan brought the world of ancient myth into the present with Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which has the distinction of having been adapted to movie and TV versions, the latter of which has already been renewed for a second season. Though the Disney+ adaptation is undeniably more faithful than the film versions, it still feels like a series a bit out of time. Though Riordan continues to publish books in the series, they aren’t nearly as much a part of the zeitgeist as they were when the first few volumes were published in the mid-2000s.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials remains one of the most beloved of children’s series, acting as a secular humanist counterpart to C.S. Lewis’ stridently Christian The Chronicles of Narnia. After one failed cinematic adaptation in the mid-2000s, the franchise got another chance in 2019 with a television series that stayed much truer to the books. While it was a rich and textured adaptation, it never became quite the phenomenon it would have had it been released a few years earlier. This didn’t keep it from getting a third season that finished adapting the series, but it’s hard not to wonder what would have happened had the series managed to be released at a more opportune time.

The 2010s were very much a mixed bag for Disney. While they hit it out of the park with movies like Frozen, they also laid a few eggs with misfires like The Lone Ranger.  The choice to adapt this franchise into a new tentpole is a bit baffling, and the effort was notable for, among other things, attempting to elevate relative newcomer Armie Hammer to stardom. However, this was a franchise that was woefully out-of-date, and it’s a film that betrays the datedness of its premise and the clunkiness of its writing. It’s no wonder that it failed at the box office. 

Luc Besson has always been a director willing to take big risks with his sci-fi films, and in 2017, he brought his unique imagination to Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The sprawling space opera is based on the series of comics Valérian and Laureline. The film is undoubtedly an ambitious effort, and it cost the director a great deal of his personal money. However, despite its majesty and expense, it never really got off the ground, and its datedness, as well as the hefty price tag, essentially ensured that it was going to be a box office bomb. 

There’s no question Harry Potter is one of the most successful Hollywood franchises, and at first, it seemed as if the success of the first eight films would continue with the spin-off, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. However, each subsequent entry in the new series focusing on Newt Scamander and his involvement in the fight against Grindelwald demonstrated that the moment for this particular franchise had passed. The last installment, The Secrets of Dumbledore, landed with a bit of a thud, and it seems more likely than not that this is one element of the franchise that doesn’t have much of a future.

Willow is one of those fantasy films that could only have come out in the 1980s, and there’s an innocence to its fantasy approach that feels very dated from the viewpoint of 2024. This is what makes the release of the 2023 series such a strange phenomenon, for while it’s an undeniably fun show, it never quite managed to overcome the feeling that the franchise was getting a bit old in the tooth. This perhaps explains why Disney ended up precipitately canceling the show and shuffling it into oblivion. 

Mortal Kombat is one of those video game franchises that has had a particularly long run, with the most recent game being released in 2023. It has also been made into a number of films, both animated and live-action, and the most recent of the latter came out in 2021. It struggled at the box office due in part to the fact that it was released on streaming at the same time as it was pushed out to theaters. However, its struggles were also due in part to the datedness of the franchise, which doesn’t exert the same hold on the cultural imagination as it did during its heyday during the 1990s.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is one of those films that takes a delightfully light-hearted and irreverent take to the fantasy genre. It’s filled with delightful performances from the likes of Chris Pine, Hugh Grant, and Michelle Rodriguez, and it has a story that is as funny as it is exciting. Despite this, it struggled at the box office. Part of this was, no doubt, lingering theater and franchise fatigue, but it’s also due to the time factor. However strong the film,  Dungeons & Dragons as a franchise simply doesn’t have the same cultural relevance as it did even a decade ago.

For a time, Angry Birds was one of the most popular games for the iPhone, but it soon expanded beyond that into various other video game consoles. Given its seeming ubiquity, it was probably inevitable it would eventually be made into a film, which it was in 2016. It was an undeniable success at the box office, but it certainly suffered from making a narrative out of a game that is somewhat limited in that regard. Moreover, it was one of those films that seemed to come out just a bit too late to capitalize on the game’s enormous popularity fully, and it was quickly forgotten.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower series is a sprawling and thought-provoking series that has become something of a franchise of its own. In addition to the original novels, there have been several graphic novels and a film adaptation, and there are continued rumors that it might also come to the small screen. The unfortunate reality, however, is that this franchise faces a number of challenges, not the least of which is that it concluded some time ago. The only film adaptation so far released was far from a success, and it certainly seems as if any future adaptations will face even greater challenges. 

On paper, Ender’s Game looks like it should have been a success. After all, it was based on a beloved and bestselling series by Orson Scott Card, one of the most prominent fantasy and sci-fi authors of the late 20th century. However, by the time the film was released, the series on which it was based was no longer hugely popular. More pertinently, Card became more (in)famous for his various inflammatory political rants throughout the early 2000s, which came back to haunt the franchise when it was adapted in the 2010s. It was ultimately too late before it ever really began.

Disney certainly sunk a great deal of money into John Carter, which cost a staggering amount. What makes this a particularly puzzling choice on the studio’s part is the fact that Carter isn’t exactly a household name or a well-recognized piece of IP, and the original stories hailed from the early 20th century. This datedness, combined with the messiness of the publicity for the film, essentially guaranteed that it would never make back its money, which proved to be the case. It ended up being one of the most costly failures for the studio of the 2010s. 

This seems to be when Hollywood is voraciously seeking out video game franchises to adapt to television. In Borderlands,  they found rich material, and the various games in the series have an adventure and episodic structure that lends itself to TV adaptation. A big-screen adaptation is due to be released in a few months. While it boasts an undeniably talented cast, which includes the likes of Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this adaptation, like others of its kind, might well come out too late to capitalize on the games’ moment of greatest popularity. 

Halo was one of the biggest games of the early 21st century, and it was a crucial part of Microsoft’s reputation as a purveyor of high-profile video games. Though it has been popular in other media, it has taken a surprisingly long time to make its way to a prestigious TV drama. In fact, it went through a lengthy development process throughout the 2010s, and by the time it was released it seemed as if it had been teleported in from another decade entirely. Nevertheless, it has at least gained strong reviews for its second season.

On paper, it must have seemed as if the 2020 film version of Artemis Fowl, based on the novel of the same name by Eoin Colfer, would have made for a success. After all, it was directed by noted maestro Kenneth Branagh and included a number of big names such as Colin Farrell and Judi Dench. Unfortunately, it was one of those cases where the film adaptation was a little too late to make the impact that its makers surely intended — the novel was published in 2001 — and the problems were exacerbated by both a muddled script and tragically sloppy direction.