With the recent release of Solo: A Star Wars Story, the new trailer for Bumblebee making the rounds, and news about Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham’s movie focusing on their Fast & Furious characters slowly filtering in, movie spinoffs are a hot topic in Hollywood.
It makes perfect sense: take a popular movie, grab just one or two characters from said movie, and have them star in their own separate adventures. It has the two-pronged effect of having an already-established fanbase, and saving movie companies the money and resources of having to come up with completely new characters/settings. Another common reason for a spinoff is that an actor was still an up-and-comer and only played a small part in the original movie, but their character is given their own movie now that said actor is a bigger star.
Sometimes, it’s a successful approach. Some of the best and/or most profitable films of recent years are technically spinoffs, including Deadpool, Logan, Minions, and The Lego Batman Movie. But movie spinoffs don’t always get rave reviews and earn a billion dollars at the box office– in fact, those are pretty big exceptions to the rule. More often than not, spinoffs fail to recapture the magic of the original at best, and completely taint it at worst.
Here are 20 Forgettable Movie Spinoffs That Only Superfans Remember.
Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure
The recent Solo: A Star Wars Story is looking like the first theatrically-released Star Wars film to take a loss at the box office. It makes fans wonder if Disney/Lucasfilm is going to proceed with its rumored plans to make Obi-Wan Kenobi, Boba Fett, and Lando Calrissian stand-alone films– and if it does, what lessons it will take from Solo to not replicate its disappointing ticket sales.
All that aside, even if you have fallen on the side of being a hater of the recent Star Wars films, to truly believe that Solo or The Last Jedi or even The Phantom Menace are the worst entries in the franchise you obviously have completely forgotten about the two early-80s Ewok movies.
Star Wars was in a weird place post-Return of the Jedi. Most of the focus in the mid-80s seemed to go towards trying to make the Ewoks a brand unto themselves, with not only an animated series but two made-for-TV movies– Caravan of Courage and The Battle For Endor.
Despite the fact that Caravan earned strong enough ratings to justify a sequel, both films were seen as an affront to the franchise and also paled in comparison to similar kid-focused fantasy fare of the time. Let’s just say there is a reason why these movies aren’t on Blu-Ray, and were barely on DVD.
Supergirl
In 2018, a DC Comics-based movie is considered a failure when it “only” grosses $650 million at the world box office. How quickly we forget just how bad things used to be for comic book movies, and that no matter what you might think about the quality of Suicide Squad or Batman vs. Superman, they both look like The Dark Knight when compared to 1984’s Supergirl.
After the success of Richard Donner’s Superman movie, there was suddenly an interest in trying to make more movies about flying superheroes as it was now possible to do on film in a somewhat convincing fashion– well, convincing for 1978, anyway. With Superman III failing to make as big of a splash at the box office as the previous two films, the producers– who already owned the film rights to Supergirl– decided that changing focus to a “Super” who was a pretty blonde would be just what the franchise needed to re-invigorate the brand.
Unfortunately, 1984 didn’t have the ensuing three decades of progress– or the talents of Gal Gadot and Patty Jenkins– to properly realize a female superhero movie that led to the excellent Wonder Woman.
Supergirl, which is technically considered within the same universe as the Christopher Reeve Superman series, was a creative and commercial disaster.
It even managed to produced bad performances from reliable veterans like Faye Dunaway and Peter O’Toole, earning them both Razzie nominations for their work on the film.
Planes
Even though Pixar falls under the Disney umbrella, the movies it makes are very much separate. In fact, one of the reasons that Disney’s non-Pixar animated movies began carrying the Steamboat Willie-accompanied studio card “Walt Disney Animation Studios” was in an effort to clearly differentiate Pixar’s movies from Disney’s own in-house fare, particular Disney’s computer animated films.
This delineation makes Planes a very strange product. Marketed as a movie taking place in “the world above Cars,” and with anthropomorphic airplanes styled much like the vehicles from that Pixar franchise, all signs seem to point to it being a Pixar-created spinoff to the Cars series. In actuality, Planes is an in-house Disney movie, and while its story was conceived by Cars writer/director John Lasseter, it is not a Pixar production in any way. In fact, many members of Pixar have gone out of their way to distance themselves from the film and make sure that there is no mistaking it for one of their own– which is all the more confusing since there is a screen before the movie’s title sequence that tells audiences that the movie is part of the “World of Cars.”
There is a lot to unpack about all of this and what must’ve went on behind the scenes of Planes’ production, but all that we need to talk about today is that the movie isn’t any good. All you have to do is watch it to see that, no, this is definitely not a Pixar movie.
Ace Ventura Jr.: Pet Detective
It’s hard to imagine who could’ve possibly thought this was a good idea. Well, okay, had this been made while Ace Ventura was still a hot property, it’s easy to understand why someone would try to cash in with a quick and easy spin-off starring a child version of a pre-existing movie character, as it wouldn’t have needed to earn all that much cash to make the production worth the effort.
Ace Ventura Jr.: Pet Detective was released in 2009, a whopping 15 years after the Jim Carrey original.
In fact, prior to the release of this absolutely dreadful made-for-TV movie, the most recent addition to the Ace Ventura brand was the animated series, which ended its run in 2000.
Apparently the makers of this movie didn’t get the memo that 2003 prequel Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd just barely made its money back and wasn’t really well-liked by anyone, meaning that there wasn’t a huge market for reviving Jim Carrey comedies from the 90s over a decade later with a different actor portraying a younger version of his original character.
This followed yet another 2000s spinoff of a Jim Carrey movie from the 1990s that suffered a similar fate and felt equally misguided and unnecessary, but you’ll have to read on to hear more about that one.
Get Him To The Greek
What was it about 2000s hard-R comedies that seemed ripe for the spinoff treatment? This Is 40 was a spinoff of Knocked Up featuring Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann’s married couple navigating life and love at middle age, both written and directed by Judd Apatow and featuring a fairly consistent– if slightly more series and subdued– tone.
Going the complete opposite way was Get Him To The Greek, which took Russell Brand’s rock star character from Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Jonah Hill– playing a different character entirely– and put them together on a madcap adventure where Hill’s character has to get Brand’s character to a concert. In that case, we have to watch a realistic, honest portrayal of relationships and heartbreak morph into a goofy, slapstick comedy.
To be fair, Get Him To The Greek isn’t a terrible movie, especially if you are amused by Brand’s special brand of humor. Jonah Hill generally turns in entertaining performances even in subpar movies. But this list is specifically about spinoffs, and as a spinoff to one of the best comedies of the last ten years, Get Him to The Greek falls very short of its source material.
Honestly, we would’ve rather seen an entire movie based on Jason Segel’s vampire puppet musical than watch this formulaic, unremarkable romp.
The Scorpion King
After a few small TV roles, Dwayne Johnson– still going by Dawyne “The Rock” Johnson in those days, even in his acting career– had his first sizable role as the villain in the 2001 fantasy adventure sequel The Mummy Returns. The combination of that movie’s major box office tally plus the rapidly increasing popularity of Johnson during that time led to the release of a standalone spinoff the following year starring his character.
Indeed, The Scorpion King would serve as Johnson’s springboard into an acting career that is going strong to this day, as there hasn’t been a single year since 2002 that hasn’t seen the release of a movie featuring the mostly-former wrestler– with most years having multiple films. However, as we all know, just because a movie helps to make you a star doesn’t mean it’s a good movie.
The Scorpion King was neither a hit with critics nor a major moneymaker.
Even Johnson himself, who has since proven himself as talented an actual actor as an action star, was still finding his voice and his performance here isn’t one he likely recalls very fondly. Granted, there is only so much you can do with subpar material– but let’s keep in mind that this is a spinoff of the franchise that made Brendan Fraser a believable action lead, so it is definitely capable of bringing the best out of its actors.
Get Smart’s Bruce and Lloyd: Out Of Control
We can only assume that this spinoff went into production, or at least planning, at the same time as the main Get Smart movie and that somebody really believed that Bruce and Lloyd were going to be its breakout supporting characters. We can also only assume that things were already too far along when it turned out that, not only was Get Smart only a modest success, but nobody really cared all that much about anyone in the cast who wasn’t Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Arkin, Terry Crews, James Caan, or Terence Stamp in terms of who should lead their own film. And that isn’t even counting the many A-list cameos from the likes of Bill Murray et al.
When you have such a star-studded cast, and you are able to get Terry Crews and Patrick Warburton on board for your direct-to-video spinoff, that’s who you make the stars of that direct-to-video spinoff. Not two bumbling side characters played by a B-lister from Heroes and a guy who was on Malcolm in the Middle once.
All that said, in a rather ingenious marketing move, Out of Control was released less than two weeks into Get Smart’s theatrical run, when interest for supplemental material to the film would’ve been at its peak. As such, the lackluster movie ended up earning over $2 million in sales, likely making its money back. See, that’s when you do it– not 15 years later, Ace Ventura Jr. creator.
Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure
If you were well into adulthood by the mid-2000s you were probably only vaguely aware of High School Musical and just knew it launched the careers of Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. For kids of a certain age, High School Musical was practically a religion, being one of Disney Channel’s all-time most popular original movies and spawning not only direct sequels but albums, video games, comics, a live tour, and millions of posters on bedroom walls.
Of course, anything that huge is also inevitably going to inspire some spinoffs. In addition to two region-specific spinoffs for the Chinese and Latin American markets, High School Musical also saw its makeshift villain got her own self-titled movie. Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure starred Ashley Tisdale– who non-Disney anatics will probably know best from Scary Movie 5 or stints on Sons of Anarchy and Young & Hungry– as Sharpay Evans, who begins the movie with the oh-so-relatable dilemma of being kicked out of her million-dollar penthouse because they don’t allow dogs.
It’s all just an excuse to string together soapy drama and musical numbers anyway.
Without the rest of High School Musical’s cast, their ensemble chemistry being a large part of what made that series so popular, Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure comes off feeling like anything but. Plus, the franchise’s fans had five years of growing up to do between its debut and Adventure, so most of them had simply aged out by that point.
Son Of The Mask
At one time, Jamie Kennedy seemed to be one of Hollywood’s hottest up-and-comers, appearing in generation-defining movies like Scream and Romeo + Juliet. Then he made Malibu’s Most Wanted– which he also co-wrote– and any sympathy for whatever downward trajectory his career took after that quickly dried up.
It typically takes more than one bad movie to sink an otherwise promising career. In fact, it often takes a succession of stinkers to truly affect the overall career of an actor. However, most movies aren’t as terrible as Son of the Mask. Other Jim Carrey spinoffs/reboots that didn’t feature Carrey himself at least had the smarts to make his characters younger versions, so that there would be an excuse for the new star not to have to take on the impossible task of outdoing Jim Carrey in a Jim Carrey role. Though Kennedy’s character in Son of the Mask isn’t technically the same as Carrey’s in the original, anyone who sees it is automatically going to compare their performances– and to that end, Kennedy falls way short.
Though many of us who saw The Mask as children recall loving it, it’s actually not a very good movie. So to to say that Son of the Mask is significantly worse doesn’t speak very highly of it.
National Lampoon’s Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj
Before he was breaking box office records as the world’s favorite foul-mouthed anti-hero, Ryan Reynolds earned his dues in a lot of iffy comedies. Once such iffy comedy was National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, where Reynolds played the titular character who ruled his college, in part by having spent a few too many years there. While that movie contains one of the foulest and most gag-inducing comedy scenes ever seen in a mainstream movie, it was largely forgettable save for the performance of Reynolds, who could bring charm to and make watchable just about anything. Well, anything except for Green Lantern.
That is the main problem with Van Wilder spinoff The Rise of Taj, which focuses on Van’s sidekick Taj Mahal– yes, that is his name, just so you know what we’re dealing with here– as he sets about picking up where the now-graduated Van left off.
All due respect to Kal Penn, but he’s no Ryan Reynolds, and Taj’s stereotypical Indian shtick wears thin very quickly.
Being a National Lampoon movie set in a college, Rise of Taj has plenty of slapstick, easy substance, sexist, and frat humor. However, unlike something like, say, Animal House, that’s all it really has going for it. There are plenty of other movies to watch that have all that stuff and are also genuinely funny rather than Rise of Taj.
U.S. Marshals
Movies based on TV shows have a spotty history, with only the occasional standout like The Addams Family or Mission: Impossible making the case for Hollywood turning to the small screen for film inspiration. One of the most noteworthy examples of a TV show making for a great movie is 1993’s Harrison Ford-starring film adaptation of The Fugitive. It was not only a huge hit but was even nominated for seven Academy Awards– including Best Picture– and earned a Best Supporting Actor win for Tommy Lee Jones.
Fugitive co-star Joe Pantoliano has told the story of how his character was meant to be eliminated and that he asked the director if he could survive in case there was the sequel– to which the famously cranky Harrison Ford quipped that there wouldn’t be a sequel because he wasn’t going to do one.
Ford was half-right– there wasn’t a Fugitive sequel, but there was a spinoff called U.S. Marshals that brought back Jones, Pantoliano, Daniel Roebuck, and others, “replacing” Ford’s vacant spot in the cast with new fugitive Wesley Snipes and also adding Robert Downey Jr.
It’s debatable whether Pantoliano or Ford got the last laugh– the movie made a profit at the box office, particularly impressive given its release during Titanic’s historic run, but it didn’t get the acclaim or the longevity of The Fugitive.
Beauty Shop
2002’s Barbershop turned out to be a big word-of-mouth hit, bringing in over quadruple its budget at the box office. The ensemble featured existing stars Ice Cube, Anthony Anderson, Keith David, Cedric the Entertainer, and Sean Patrick Thomas while introducing newcomers like Michael Ealy and being one of rapper Eve’s first major acting roles. Such was the success of Barbershop that it was one of the rare comedies to be turned into a full-blown franchise, spawning two direct theatrical sequels as well as a spinoff.
That spinoff, Beauty Shop, starred Queen Latifah’s character who was first introduced in the second Barbershop movie– though given her fairly small role and billing as “special appearance by” in Barbershop 2, it seems pretty obvious that she was only there to set up an already-planned spinoff.
Just like blatant backdoor pilots on TV, forced movie spinoffs always end up feeling just a little disingenuous and rarely seem to hit as big as more organic spinoffs.
As such, even with a talented cast that also included Andie MacDowell, Alfre Woodard, Kevin Bacon, Djimon Hounsou, Mena Suvari, and Alicia Silverstone, audiences didn’t show up for Beauty Shop like they did for even the much later third Barbershop installment. It is both the lowest-grossing and also worst-reviewed film in the Barbershop franchise. As a result, it’s has stayed as one-off spinoff rather than the start of its own separate franchise.
American Pie Presents: Band Camp
“American Pie Presents” has been a series of spinoff movies of the core American Pie quadrilogy, most commonly with some Stifler relative serving as the link and usually featuring Eugene Levy.
Few quotes from the original American Pie are as iconic as “This one time, at band camp…” Not only did the ending to that quote take a surprising turn by the end of the film, but the second movie’s climax actually takes place at a band camp. When it was time for the first American Pie spinoff, where else could it have possibly been set than at a band camp?
American Pie Presents: Band Camp features Steve Stifler’s younger brother, Matt, as he yearns to enter the family business of– wait for it– making adult films. Matt then ends up at a band camp as punishment for having played a prank on a band camp, because that’s just the kind of illogical stuff that happens in movies like this.
Tiresome hi-jinx ensue, Matt eventually learns that the way to a girl’s heart isn’t through secretly videotaping her, and we all decide that we would’ve just been better off re-watching the original Americnan Pie instead. Three more spinoffs would follow, regardless.
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
Such is the state of video game movies that, even 25 years into their existence, Dwayne Johnson was super excited to tweet about Rampage becoming the best-reviewed live-action video game movie of all time on Rotten Tomatoes– with a whopping 52%, which still isn’t even certified Fresh.
Still, there is a certain so-bad-they’re-good vibe to a lot of early video game movies - or fans just remember them fondly because they were 9 at the time and have rose-colored childhood nostalgia for them. A lot of people claim to be able to enjoy the 1994 Street Fighter on that that level, especially praising Raul Julia’s to-the-rafters performance of villain M. Bison and star Jean-Claude Van Damme’s hilariously awful one-liners.
One of Street Fighter’s many problems was straining to include as many of the game’s 15+ characters as possible and have them all actually do something meaningful. So it was a smart move to conceive of single-character spinoff movies focusing on just one fighter, and who better to start with than Chun-Li?
Unfortunately, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li retained all of the origina movie’s badness, but didn’t bother to bring any of its fun or camp.
Instead, it managed to be a far, far worse movie that for some reason though it was a good idea for one of The Black Eyed Peas to play Vega and for Chris Klein to be in it at all.
Evan Almighty
Steve Carell is one of those actors who seemed to be “around” forever and was a standout performer in just about everything he was in, but never truly broke through to true headlining status until The Office. In fact, it’s easy to forget until you go back and actually re-watch movies like Anchorman or Bruce Almighty that his roles in many of his films are much smaller than we seem to remember them being, since he was always so good at stealing scenes.
Who better a candidate for single-character spinoffs movies for actors who got much bigger after the original movie than Steve Carell? While most people probably would’ve preferred a Brick Tamland movie to an Evan Baxter one, Evan Almighty is what we got. Now, well, we still wish it would’ve been a Brick Tamland movie.
It’s tough to pinpoint how a seemingly slam-dunk spinoff premise like Evan Almighty could’ve gone so badly, but nothing about the movie hit the mark. Some critics pointed out that Bruce Almighty’s spiritual message was deeper and more relatable, whereas a lazy retelling of the story of Noah’s Ark was neither of those things.
What didn’t help matters was Evan’s absurdly high budget– at $175 million, that’s more the price tag of summer blockbuster action movies than family-friendly comedies with a Christian bent. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t earn that back.
Red Sonja
Few actors had been or ever be movie stars at the level that Arnold Schwarzenegger was during his peak, and mainstream audiences were first introduced to the musclebound Austrian in his breakthrough titular role in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian. Despite the fact that many critics complained that some of his dialogue was difficult to understand, the film was a success and announced the arrival of Hollywood’s newest action star– which would be cemented when he appeared in both the Conan sequel and also The Terminator two years later.
Such was the success of Conan the Barbarian at not only bringing in audiences but at launching a new star that, in 1985, it was spun off into Red Sonja starring then-newcomer Brigitte Nielsen. Also featuring Schwarzenegger - his third time playing Conan - Red Sonja was based on another Robert E. Howard comic book creation and took place in the same fictional universe.
As it turned out, it was neither the box office hit nor the star vehicle that the Conan movies were.
Nielsen still went on to become a fairly big star in the 1980s, but it was more due to later roles in Rocky IV, Cobra, and Beverly Hills Cop II than her turn as Red Sonja. Worst of all, Schwarzenegger would later call the movie the worst he’s ever done– and he also made Jingle All The Way.
Shock Treatment
It’s not too often that a film goes from forgotten flop to full-blown pop culture phenomenon– but that’s exactly what happened with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. After initially failing at the box office, Rocky Horror gradually earned one of the biggest cult followings in movie history. Among the movie’s many accomplishments is having the longest theatrical run of any movie ever as it has continuously played in theaters since its 1975 release.
Even as early 1978, Rocky Horror’s popularity– primarily via its now-legendary midnight showings, where fans comes in costume and interact with the movie– was such that it inspired writer Richard O’Brien to create a follow-up. Initially planning a direct sequel, O’Brien was forced to retool the idea when director Jim Sharman wasn’t sold on doing something so similar, and Tim Curry wasn’t willing to play Dr. Frank-N-Furter again– and, back then at least, having anyone else play Frank simply wouldn’t have been acceptable. Instead, O’Brien took the work he had already put into the movie– primarily the songs he wrote– and instead imagined a spinoff that would see the now-married Brad and Janet living in a town that is owned by a fast food company and contained entirely within a giant television studio.
While an admittedly novel and ahead-of-its-time premise, Shock Treatment failed to recapture the magic of Rocky Horror and has barely gained a sliver of its fandom.
The Stranger/Auton
One of the shortest-serving Doctors in Doctor Who history was Colin Baker, who only portrayed the Time Lord from 1984 to 1986. Even his short tenure was somewhat contentious, not helped by the show’s declining popularity at that point– in 1989 it would begin its long hiatus as a regular series until the 2005 revival.
Baker went on to portray an unnamed protagonist who was very obviously based on the Doctor in a five-video series of early-90s short films collectively called The Stranger that paid homage to Doctor Who. The actress who played Baker’s assistant on Doctor Who, Nicola Bryant, also played a similar role in Stranger. If that weren’t enough, one of the writers on The Stranger was Nicholas Briggs, who would go on to voice various characters in the modern Doctor Who series– so clearly there isn’t any retroactive animosity towards the project.
A similar– but more official– trilogy of Doctor Who fan movies came later in the ’90s via Auton, which is named after an alien race within the official series. Nicholas Briggs contributed to these films as well, which directly served as follow-up stories to existing Doctor Who episodes and gained the necessary permissions to do so.
Both series have a very low-budget vibe– even moreso than the official series– making them hard to enjoy, especially by today’s standards.
They aren’t exactly easy to come by, but hardcore Doctor Who completists will definitely want to seek them out.
Once A Cop (aka Supercop 2)
One of legendary action superstar Jackie Chan’s most popular– and his personal favorite– series is Police Story, which you might not think you are familiar with but only because various Western releases of those movies have been renamed. What you probably know as Jackie Chan’s First Strike is actually Police Story 4: First Strike, for instance. The movie known to much of the English-speaking world as Supercop is actually the third Police Story movie, just with “Supercop” as its subtitle.
Where this all gets even more confusing is the Police Story spinoff Once A Cop starring the amazing Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Tomorrow Never Dies). In order to capitalize on what was then the most recently-localized Jackie Chan movie, it was brought over here as Supercop 2 instead of its original name. Making matters even more confusing is that in various parts of the world, Once A Cop is even erroneously referred to as Police Story IV - despite there already being a fourth Police Story movie, and a pretty famous one at that.
Okay, so now that we’ve gotten all that straightened out, how is Once A Cop as a movie? It’s fine. As a Police Story spinoff it definitely falls short, and as great as Yeoh is, she’s no Jackie Chan. Still, for fans of Honk Kong action films it’s not a terrible way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
Bartok the Magnificent
Disney has long has a tradition of direct-to-video, character-specific spinoffs to its theatrical releases, including movies centering on The Lion King’s Timon & Pumbaa, Lilo from Lilo & Stitch, and even Kronk of The Emperor’s New Groove “fame.” For a hot second in the late-90s, Fox thought it could take Disney on and briefly formed Fox Animation Studios in order to compete with the Mouse House, its first film being Anastasia.
Naturally, Fox decided that Anastasia needed a direct-to-video, character-specific spinoff as well.
Though it didn’t pull 1990s Disney numbers, Anastasia was a respectable box office success that earned solid critical praise and even had two of its songs nominated for an Oscar. It was definitely a solid start for the fledgling studio, until it was sunk by the big-budget bust Titan A.E.– the last-ever release for Fox Animation Studios. Before that came the Anastasia spinoff Bartok the Magnificent, starring the bat sidekick from the original film. The voice cast was stellar for a direct-to-video production, including Hank Azaria, Catherine O’Hara, Kelsey Grammar, Tim Curry, and Jennifer Tilly, rounding up more of the original movie’s cast than most Disney home video sequels.
Critics were pretty unanimous in that Bartok was decent, but ultimately just kind of felt unnecessary. Seeing as how Anastasia hasn’t had the staying power of more popular animated movies of the time, Bartok has fallen even further from the memories of those who actually saw it.
Did you remember any of these spinoffs? Share your thoughts on them in the comments.
