19 dreadful TV-to-movie adaptations—and the flaw that doomed them

Fatal flaw: Trying to make a conventional action movie out of Aeon Flux.

Peter Chung’s Aeon Flux began as an odd, wordless, futuristic adventure with a half-naked female spy trying to find ... something. At the conclusion of the original shorts, she accidentally steps on a tack and falls to her death, so when MTV wanted more, Chung got weirder, having her die in every subsequent short. Then came an order for full-length episodes, which spelled out the story a bit more: Aeon, a spy from the nation of Monica, simultaneously loves and hates Trevor Goodchild, the dictator of bordering Bregna. As they foil each other’s plots and occasionally have kinky, fetishistic make-out sessions, the series continuity, as before, remains highly malleable.

Any accurate movie adaptation ought to have leaned into the weirdness, but the Aeon Flux movie did not, to the point that creator Peter Chung said his character does not appear in it. Though director Karyn Kusama tried to make it odd and artsy, Paramount strongly disagreed, re-editing it into a relatively dull action movie with a reincarnation subplot.

Fatal flaw: Misunderstanding what works about Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy.

You probably know Sacha Baron Cohen from his successful Borat and Brüno movies, in which he adopted fake “foreign” personas while interacting with real people and public figures, often provoking them into saying something stupid or bigoted. Before they were movie characters, however, they appeared on Da Ali G. Show, alongside Cohen’s prior persona Ali G. That one got a movie as well, but you might not have heard of it, because unlike the others, Ali G. Indahouse placed the character in a completely fictional story, in which the semi-phony gangster runs for office and nearly ignites a global crisis.

When it wasn’t well received, Cohen’s subsequent films opted to present his characters in an undercover manner similar to the TV show, and that approach caught on.

Fatal flaw: R-rated for the wrong reasons.

There were only two reasons to watch Baywatch back in the day. The most obvious one was to watch actress-models like Pamela Anderson and Gena Lee Nolin run in slow-motion while wearing tight bathing suits. The other was to enjoy the slightly outdated, hammy, hairy-chested heroics of square-jawed and square-behaving David Hasselhoff, who played it like he was an old-fashioned TV-PG hunk in the age of martial-arts action heroes.

Fans might have expected that an R-rated Baywatch movie would mean somebody taking off their swimsuit, but not so much. Instead it allowed Dwayne Johnson, who’s almost the antithesis of Hasselhoff, to unleash a string of F-words, and expose a dead man’s penis. A couple of jokes about slo-mo showed that somebody understood the show’s appeal, and yet the rest of the movie thoroughly missed the point.

Fatal flaw: Recycled too much TV stuff.

Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean character is a taste not everyone acquires, nor are they necessarily meant to. He’s not especially likable, and his mostly dialogue-free mime-based humor, while easily accessible to kids, can simply play as frustrating to adults.

His 1997 big-screen debut, Bean, proved extra-frustrating, as it recycled a lot of his best gags in new settings. Sure, it’s a bit like going to a concert to hear the same hits you have at home, but an acclaimed comedian like Atkinson should have come up with more new material. When he did so for the sequel, Mr. Bean’s Holiday, the result was a much-improved movie, using healthy doses of Jacques Tati for inspiration.

Fatal flaw: Too-meta script about the making of a remake of Bewitched.

Maybe the real lesson here is not to cast Will Ferrell in remakes of family shows, though in theory, he ought to have been reasonably appropriate for Darren, the eternally stressed-out husband who has to deal with his wife Samantha, a real witch whose family has supernatural powers. Nicole Kidman seems like a pretty good Samantha, too.

Unfortunately, they’re not playing those characters in the Bewitched movie, they’re playing actors cast to play them who fall in love with one another. Only Kidman’s character is actually a real witch. There may be shows that merit this level of deconstruction, but Bewitched isn’t one of them. People want to see Darren mug and do pratfalls, as he and Sam outwit his conceited, magical mother-in-law, Endora. It needn’t be—and shouldn’t have been—more complicated.

Fatal flaw: A Rocky and Bullwinkle movie without Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Following the success of 1989’s Batman and 1990’s Dick Tracy, every producer tried to crank out a comic or cartoon-inspired movie to get in on the craze. But not all of them had the same access to funding as Disney and Warner Bros. A live-action/animation hybrid Rocky And Bullwinkle movie, featuring believable moose and squirrel characters, was years away from happening—instead, the more affordable Boris And Natasha: The Movie cast Dave Thomas and Sally Kellerman as the cartoon’s human villains, Boris and Natasha.

Unlike Joaquin Phoenix decades later in the Batman-less Joker, Boris And Natasha did not set the box office afire. In the movie’s ultimate insult to fans, its two human agent characters are revealed to be codenamed “Moose” and “Squirrel.” Still, when Universal finally made a big-budget Rocky And Bullwinkle movie in 2000, with Jason Alexander and Rene Russo as Boris and Natasha, it didn’t exactly catch on either. Maybe there was never a way to do it right.

Fatal flaw: Half nature documentary and half B-movie was a recipe for all-bad.

Steve Irwin, the self-proclaimed Crocodile Hunter, was a beloved nature show host, known for his exclamations of “Crikey!” and up-close interactions with deadly animals. His show wasn’t exactly tailor-made for the movies, but that didn’t stop his collaborator John Stainton from trying.

Rather than simply do a feature-length version of the show, however, which could have been like Jackass with more animals, the 2002 movie, Collision Course, features cinematic scenes involving the CIA, George W. Bush (played by That’s My Bush’s Timothy Bottoms), and a missing satellite beacon swallowed by a crocodile, intercut with TV aspect-ratio footage of Irwin talking directly to the camera as he handles real animals. It’s a mix that serves neither format, despite the best efforts of David Wenham and Magda Szubanski in supporting roles.

Fatal flaw: Tim Burton thought the source material was camp.

Running from 1966 through 1971, Dark Shadows began as a moody daytime soap that really took off when it began introducing supernatural elements, like the vampire Barnabas Collins. Unlike so many daytime dramas aimed at housewives, it crossed over to a teen audience, spawned a hit single, and even two reasonably successful movies starring the show’s original cast members. Much like Star Trek, it generated an intense fandom that still populates dedicated conventions.

Like any daytime soap filmed live, Dark Shadows also had its share of gaffes and mistakes captured on camera, and that, apparently, was what appealed to Tim Burton when he helmed the dreadful big-budget 2012 version. He told Indiewire, “I grew up on that show and the weird thing about it is it had a cult following but it was actually pretty bad. It had the weirdest tone. I always found the tone, even though it was deadly serious, quite comedic.” He hasn’t been welcome among the fans since.

Fatal flaw: Not involving the Krofft brothers more.

Like many of the surreal kid shows made by Sid and Marty Krofft in the ’60s and ’70s, Land Of The Lost, about a hidden world of dinosaurs and lizard-like Sleestaks, had a psychedelic vibe that made adults think of drug trips, while kids just thought it was fantastical fun. When it came time for Universal to do a movie remake, they ran with the former interpretation, changing Holly from Marshall’s daughter into his love interest, and adding hard PG-13-rated adult humor. (The Kroffts themselves have always denied any drug influence, with Marty once saying, “Maybe I ought to admit it so I get more work, even if it’s not true.”)

Will Ferrell, likely cast because Kevin Smith had previously cast him as “Marshall Willenholly” in Jay And Silent Bob Strike Back, did his Will Ferrell shtick. The movie had some laughs, but an incoherent plot. The Kroffts apologized for the movie afterward, blaming the ballooning budget for Universal not being willing to hear their feedback. They’ve been trying to do an independent remake ever since.

Fatal flaw: They gave it to M. Night Shyamalan.

The Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender takes place in a world inspired by Asian mythology, and divided into nations based on the four primal elements: earth, air, water, and fire. Only 12-year-old Aang, the Avatar who can “bend”—or mentally control—all four elements, can maintain harmony. But he must also evade exiled Fire Nation prince Zuko, who seeks to redeem himself by capturing the Avatar.

When moviegoers think of epic fantasy, they don’t think of M. Night Shyamalan, whose best movies are intimate suspense films that might involve a couple of supernatural elements, but rarely any large-scale effects. The Last Airbender threw him completely out of his depth, and a hasty 3-D conversion didn’t help matters. If the studio at least hoped that Shyamalan, being of South Asian heritage, would cast with appropriate diversity, they were wrong—he was accused of whitewashing lead roles that ought to have gone to East Asian or Inuit performers.

Fatal flaw: Nobody wanted a parody of Ninjago.

The Lego Movie was a surprise critical and commercial hit. The Lego Batman Movie, which featured a superhero multiverse before they were everywhere, often tops fan lists of favorite Batman movies. But lightning didn’t strike thrice—The Lego Ninjago Movie elicited mainly shrugs and raised eyebrows.

Unlike Batman, Ninjago was a specifically Lego property and an existing CG cartoon series mostly known to kids and Lego collectors. Rather than give fans of the show a movie that actually represented the show, however, the movie played as a parody of the series, ignoring existing continuity in favor of dysfunctional family jokes.

Who, exactly, was that for? Audiences unfamiliar with Ninjago didn’t get the concept, and fans of Ninjago wondered why the movie strayed so far from the show’s blend of action and comedy into pure spoof.

Fatal flaw: They gave it to Rob Zombie.

Whatever anyone thinks of Rob Zombie, he has a comfort zone that generally works for him. He likes his movies to look like ’70s grindhouse, he’s fond of serial killers, crazy rednecks, evil clowns, and his wife/collaborator Sheri. Generally, he makes hard R-rated films, but his music and his rock videos showcase just as many influences from classic horror—White Zombie being the most notable.

The title of Zombie’s 1998 song Dragula was inspired by the car in The Munsters, which may have made him seem like the guy to do a movie version of the show. He wasn’t. Ignoring most actual Munsters lore, he tried to make a kid-friendly monster movie full of bad puns, but there’s a problem; Rob Zombie doesn’t have kids, and doesn’t particularly like them, so it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that his notion of a movie for them talks down to the audience, and abrasively so.

Fatal flaw: Christopher Lloyd played it more “Martian” than “Favorite.”

My Favorite Martian is less visible in pop culture than similar “magical relative” sitcoms like I Dream Of Jeannie and Bewitched, probably because it doesn’t co-star a beautiful woman. But the original TV series, about an Earthling named Tim O’Hara (Bill Bixby) who shelters a humanoid alien (Ray Walston) by pretending it’s his Uncle Martin, was a star-making vehicle for both actors, and it depended on the warm, human, and yet eternally miscalculating dynamic between the two.

Jeff Daniels and Christopher Lloyd weren’t bad choices for the My Favorite Martian movie, but the over-the-top alien CGI combined with Lloyd playing Martin as utterly inhuman missed the point, as did the omission of their usual antagonist Detective Brennan. Walston himself plays the Man in Black on their case, and when he reveals himself to be a Martian too, it shows all of us, including Lloyd, how it should have been done the whole time.

Fatal flaw: Tried to take the material seriously.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was never a show created with the highest of artistic ambitions. Reusing footage from Japanese action shows, it added in U.S.-set scenes of fully grown “teenagers with attitude” fighting monsters in obviously fake costumes. Nonetheless, it became a phenomenon among kids, who made the toys the hottest must-haves of its first holiday season. And it’s stayed one, with ever-changing casts but a simple good-versus-evil formula. The campy elements that were initially a result of cheapness feel integral to the concept a couple of decades later.

So when a 2017 movie reboot tried to take all the ridiculous concepts seriously, fans revolted. The shows, with their rotating casts, remained in the same continuity—but the film made villain Rita Repulsa beautiful, the costumes less like spandex, and the Rangers more like troubled teens, which did not work for older fans, nor did it attract new ones.

Fatal flaw: Bringing back Captain Kirk just to kill him off.

Paramount got greedy with Star Trek: The Next Generation, rushing the cast into movies as quickly as they could after the show ended, rather than allowing fans to miss them as they had the original crew before that cast made a movie. The first hook, however, sounded strong: Star Trek Generations would unite the old and new crews in a big-screen team-up.

Except that didn’t happen. Writers Ron Moore and Brannon Braga really only wanted to see Kirk meet Picard, with the rest of the classic crew only appearing in a prologue. Leonard Nimoy outright refused, with only James Doohan and Walter Koenig saying “yes” to glorified cameos. Worse still, Moore and Braga decided to kill Kirk, and not in any particularly glorious way—he falls off a bridge, and for his dying line, cribs George Takei’s signature “Oh my” line.

Fatal flaw: Is it or isn’t it the TV show?

Fun fact: you don’t need to buy TV show rights to make an entertaining action movie about a SWAT team. The paramilitary division of law enforcement is a real thing that exists; like movies about police, they’re fair game as a topic. Clark Johnson’s 2003 movie, supposedly based on the 1975 TV series, has characters with the same names as the principals on the show, and yet ... they can’t be them, because these characters have actually watched the show, as evidenced by the fact that they sing the TV show theme as a self-referential joke. Since they know of the show and it exists in their world, doesn’t it creep them out that they all have exactly the same names as those characters? With a meta-Truman Show twist, maybe ... nahhh. That still would have sucked.

Fatal flaw: It isn’t Thunderbirds without the creepy marionettes.

Thunderbirds, along with other Gerry Anderson sci-fi shows like Terrahawks or Joe 90, was best known for its use of marionettes and controlled lip-sync dialogue, alongside practical effects like water and steam. It allowed for the sort of spaceships and sci-fi action not possible with full-size actors and sets on TV in the ’60s, but those puppets also looked weird and creepy. Perhaps that was part of the appeal. A 1966 feature film version, while meeting with mixed reviews, generated a sequel.

In 2004, however, a live-action adaptation was possible. It just wasn’t an especially good idea. Even with Star Trek’s Jonathan Frakes directing and Ben Kingsley as the villainous Hood, it just didn’t look like Thunderbirds to fans, and it didn’t look like much of anything to anybody else. In a particular irony of timing, that same year gave the world Team America: World Police, which revived Anderson’s “supermarionation” technique and worked as an adult parody of both Thunderbirds and Jerry Bruckheimer action films.

Fatal flaw: They killed Optimus Prime! Those bastards!

Though The Transformers: The Movie deserves more credit for its animation than it usually gets, its concept was especially cynical. Using leeway they didn’t have on a kids’ TV show, the movie would kill off many of the current line of toy characters and introduce replacements that the little ones would presumably want upon exiting the theater.

They underestimated the attachment children had to the actual cartoon personalities, rather than just the toys. In particular, Peter Cullen’s Optimus Prime stood out in ’80s toy cartoons as a heroic, John Wayne-meets-Adam West leader, with the actor clearly taking the role more seriously than so many other voice actors at the time. So when the movie killed him off, and he delivered his last words like they were Shakespeare, kids were devastated to the point that parents complained. Hasbro quickly moved to revive Optimus in the TV cartoon, and has made his death a running gag, usually easily reversed, and still (mostly) voiced by Cullen.

Fatal flaw: Not waiting till the series ended.

The X-Files, a show about FBI agents investigating unusual or unexplainable phenomena, had two sorts of episodes. In the most common version, Agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) would investigate a monster of the week. In others, the show’s larger mythology would build to tease out a large conspiracy involving the government working with aliens and UFOs. The first X-Files movie tried to have it both ways, as Mulder and Scully investigate aliens who’ve been around since caveman times, and tie in to the grand plan.

Unfortunately, since it took place between seasons of the show, fans knew in advance that it wouldn’t resolve the long-running mystery. It couldn’t, or there wouldn’t be a show left. And it didn’t. It gave Mulder definitive visual proof of aliens, but nothing lasting that anybody else could see. A second movie that was a stand-alone and came out after the series ended (the first time) did even worse with fans and at the box office.