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Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 12/13/2025

Promised but Never Delivered

Movie studios have been trying to build franchises out of almost every major special effects spectacle since the 80s. It's the Star Wars and Indiana Jones influence. One film's box office gold is supposed to lead to another and another until everything just runs out of gas. And so, Hollywood is littered with purported starts to franchises that failed to go past the first entry. The Rocketeer, Lost in Space, The Dark Tower, they all ended with promises of further adventures that never came to be.

However, there are two over the past roughly fifteen years that hold special places in my heart, a pair of films so different from each other that are both considered huge box office bombs (one, the largest ever for a time) that I still yearn for sequels to. Now, just to make this clear...I do not think these sequels will ever materialize. One may...have a 1% chance of happening if lightning strikes the same spot fifteen times in a row, but otherwise, no. I don’t think these sequels will ever get made. The franchises are dead, and they will probably never be resurrected.

Those are: John Carter and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Both were big, wildly expensive spectacles based on tales old before any of the creatives were born. The first, based on the first of the Barsoom novels, A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the second a mishmash (let's be honest, every telling of King Arthur is a mishmash) of Arthurian legends. And I just...jive with them. I kind of love the former, and I really like the latter, and I've seen far worse films get sequels.

Box Office Failure

Let's get this out of the way: the tale of two studios spending way too much money on movies that they shouldn’t have spent too much on.

John Carter was the first live action feature film directed by Andrew Stanton, the PIXAR director who made Finding Nemo and WALL-E. Disney wanted a franchise to compete with the likes of Star Wars, so they gave Stanton, trusted creative, carte blanche to make a wildly expensive sci-fi adventure based on the granddaddy of sci-fi adventures. But...everything went wrong.

Stanton, with no experience in live-action films, essentially filmed the movie twice, making the film wildly, wildly expensive when it should have just had one wildly, at most. Months before the release of the film, Disney acquired the Marvel rights and were already talking to George Lucas about buying Star Wars, so the need for a boys’ adventure sci-fi series died out (and then they put Kathleen Kennedy in charge, which is another thing altogether). Stanton was given control of the marketing, and he approved some of the worst trailers for the film, selling the movie as some sort of somber experience without any real build up within the trailers themselves. Taylor Kitsch's miscasting (I think he’s...fine in the role, but he doesn't have the easy charm John Carter probably should have) became a central reason for critics to crap all over the film. And then the film is based on the granddaddy of sci-fi pulp, the kind of old story that has DNA is most modern sci-fi and fantasy today, making it decidedly old fashioned and feeling derivative.

Honestly, it doesn't surprise me that it was a box office bomb, but I fought the idea for weeks after its release, hoping against hope that there would be some great resurgence of interest in the property several weeks after release and everyone knowing it was a giant failure. My hopes were not answered.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a contrasting tale of failure, though, starting with the fact that the trailers for the film are actually really good. I think they sell it well, making it look exciting and fun without any sort of misdirection towards the audience. Guy Ritchie, the director, had a history of bringing his hyperactive style to historically set films in his two Robert Downey Jr. starring Sherlock Holmes films, a connection which the trailers promote. And, it failed to make its production budget back, sources saying that Warner Bros. Lost $150 million on the movie. That's a lot of money, so the planned six film series was canceled after only one.

I think the explanation for King Arthur’s failure largely stems from the fact that mass audiences don't seem that interested in medieval fantasy films. There is one major exception in The Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit), but medieval fantasy in general just doesn't seem to be a natural fit with mass audiences. They tend to eschew them rather them embrace them. The Chronicles of Narnia films, the first released right alongside The Lord of the Rings, steadily died out after three films. Eragon, based on a popular novel, was a huge bomb. Solomon Kane, based on the Robert E. Howard character, made no money. You can point back to the 80s and films like Excalibur, but that only made $35 million (a profit for the $11 million film, granted). The 80s were probably the height of the medieval fantasy genre's popularity across the board, and not even Conan the Barbarian hit $100 million (the modern telling, released in 2011, made about $60 million off of a $90 million budget).

I mean, I really like medieval fantasy. I jive with it. But mass audiences don't seem all that keen on it.

The Future that Never Was


So, what would have been? What if Disney hadn’t been buying Star Wars and had decided to back John Carter completely? What if Stanton had managed his set better and spent half as much money? What if audiences had just decided to give King Arthur a shot? What would we have seen?

Well, the easy one to answer is John Carter's supposed sequels. John Carter follows the basic plot of A Princess of Mars quite closely. There are additions, like the Therns gain a lot more prevalence in this early story than in Burroughs' series, and some specifics around transportation between Earth and Barsoom gets created, but in the larger plot points. It's A Princess of Mars. So, what would the second movie have been? Well, largely The Gods of Mars, the tale of what John Carter does when he returns to Barsoom ten years later. It would tell of the fight against Iss, the self-proclaimed goddess of Mars, the Black Pirates, the Therns, and Zondanga with Carter reconnecting with his friend Tars Tarkas, his wife Dejah Thoris, and meeting his son, Cathoris, as recklessly brave as his father. And then, the planned sequel would have seen the adaptation of The Warlord of Mars which sees John Carter becoming ruler of the entire planet.

I'm sure Stanton would have kept the basic narrative bones and rearranged a lot of details, but it's not hard to imagine where that series would have gone, and it would have entertained me greatly.

The more interesting question, though, is around King Arthur. As I said, any tale of King Arthur at this point is a mishmash of legend, Romance, and history, so there's no "true" telling of it. Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory disagrees in many details with Geoffrey of Monmouth's sketches in Historia Regum Britanniae. And it's a tale that’s been told by many, many people over more than a thousand years. Ritchie turning it into a cross between Conan the Barbarian and Ritchie's own low-level gangster movies was a definite creative choice to push Arthur in a new direction, but he also barely scratched the surface of the established tales while adding his own twists.

We only see Merlin once, in a flashback, and we don't even see his face. The character called Mage was originally written as Guinevere, but any mention of her being Arthur's future wife were scrubbed out of the edit and through ADR, so they could still re-introduce her. Morgan le Fay is never even mentioned. There is a character called Mordred in the beginning, killed in the prologue, but that doesn't preclude the introduction in a later edition of the traditional Mordred (Arthur’s son/nephew by way of Morgan le Fay). In terms of the Knights of the Round Table, we only get Bedivere, Percival, and Tristan. So, no Lancelot, no Gawain, and no Galahad (there are dozens more in the legends over the centuries). Really, sequels were wide open.

And the first sequel I would have liked to see might have gone something like this: Merlin and Morgan le Fay are in combat in the north, a war of mages far from Camelot. Lancelot comes from France to challenge the knights at a tourney (being a Guy Ritchie film, there would be bare-knuckle boxing). Lancelot is big, strong, and arrogant, and he is also the only man who could be Arthur’s equal in combat. They bond over beating each other up, but Lancelot has a secret that even he doesn’t know: he’s being manipulated by Morgan le Fay into acting as a distraction. Merlin sends Mage (not Guinevere) to ask for help. The second act is breaking Lancelot's spell. The third act is a big fight, ala Shadows of the Colossus where Arthur and Lancelot in particular have to climb a giant forest creature, his head and shoulders populated with trees since he's from the earth, to fight Morgan or some heavy at the top. One big, expensive action setpiece later, the knights have added a figure (maybe even Galahad in tow), and we're ready for movie #3.

Never Happening


Really, the two original films I just really enjoy watching. Patrick H. Willems described what he called "vibe movies", movies less about plot and more about just being in the world created by the filmmakers (his central film in his video was Christopher Nolan’s Tenet). And that's kind of how I feel about John Carter and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword in very different ways.

John Carter is a big, earnest, sometimes goofy, old-school adventure film. Its big heart it wearshu unironically on its sleeve as it tells the story of a rootless man finding something to fight for once more. It’s told with color and energy, and I just get on its wavelength and enjoy the somewhat silly ride.

King Arthur's Conan the Barbarian influences (its first shot is of a temple that resembles Thulsa Doom's temple in Milius' film alongside a tower that looks a lot like the Serpent's Tower in the same film, and there’s a lot of snake stuff overall, including a giant snake in the end) mixed with Ritchie's low-level gangster stuff is a weird mix, but it's something I really enjoy. The film is imperfect (the mix is sometimes not that great, a lot of the CGI is fun but feels wasteful and indulgent, and there's an emotional bit for Vortigern, the bad guy, late in the film that's just poorly established), but I still just find myself bobbing my head back and forth to Daniel Pemberton's soundtrack anyway. Structurally, it's actually surprisingly sound, even if Ritchie is throwing things in a blender within individual sequences.

And both movies, I feel, artistically deserved sequels. Mostly because, well, I liked them. And I'd rather have Hollywood spend money to entertain me than making another Fast and Furious movie.

But it was never meant to be. My tastes were always going to be more niche, and that's just the world I live in.

What movies that promised sequels that never materialized do you sometimes still yearn for?
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Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Benedetta

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Forever Amber (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "This isn’t good. It’s mostly just kind of...dull." [YouTube]

Where the Sidewalk Ends (Rating 4/4) Full Review "I mean...finally, Preminger works from a script by Ben Hecht. It’s what he needed. " [Plex]

Angel Face (Rating 3/4) Full Review "I think it's solidly good, undone by some late stage choices that grind things to a halt. However, the line on characters, the production itself, and the noirish coat of paint all make Angel Face a compelling drama that Preminger manages well, even if Howard Hughes had hired him to torture Jean Simmons." [Library]

River of No Return (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "The overall world feels deeply incomplete, and the story itself feels underserved but with some nice payoffs to things set up earlier. It's not good, but it's surprisingly interesting in the end." [Hoopla]

Carmen Jones (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's an odd duck that way, much like a good portion of Preminger's filmography. However, so much is so right that it stands near the top of his work." [Library]

The Man with the Golden Arm (Rating 3/4) Full Review "Adapting work from other mediums, Preminger is finding composed, solid success, although I feel a certain limitation on his ability to push the medium to its fullest potential." [Amazon Prime]

The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (Rating 1.5/4) Full Review "Preminger...frustrates me." [YouTube]

Saint Joan (Rating 1/4) Full Review "I...did not like this film." [YouTube]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.
My next thread will be on 1/3 and it will discuss the directing career of Otto Preminger.