3 Cult Sci-Fi Flops That Should Have Started Franchises

Some sci-fi flops deserve to crash and burn at the box office, but others are uncommonly intriguing stories with plenty of potential that should have spawned entire franchises. The sci-fi genre is an unpredictable beast at the box office, to say the least. Cyberpunk sci-fi was a massive literary movement in the ‘80s, but Blade Runner, director Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s seminal cyberpunk book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, was a box office failure upon release.

Only a few years later, Robocop’s Paul Verhoeven directed a loose adaptation of Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” and the resulting sci-fi thriller Total Recall was a huge success. As such, the creators of flops like Dredd, Southland Tales, and Annihilation can at least take solace in the fact that no one ever knows what will succeed and what will fail in the genre. That said, this trio of cult classics all deserved to be franchise-spawning hits upon their original releases.

Dredd

Directed by Vantage Point’s Pete Travis, Dredd was technically the second screen adaptation of the 2000 AD comic strip of the same name. However, this ultra-violent, brutal siege thriller had little in common with the campy Sylvester Stallone vehicle released in 1995, except for the fact that both movies were box office disappointments. With a script from 28 Days Later/Ex Machina scribe Alex Garland, Dredd was the story of Karl Urban’s titular law enforcer, an unstoppable killing machine tasked with cleaning up the blood-soaked streets of Mega-City One.

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With a stacked cast including Lena Headey, Olivia Thirlby, future Ex Machina leading man Domhnall Gleeson, and Karl Urban as Dredd himself, Dredd was a fast-paced barrage of bloody action set almost entirely in one chaotic, bullet-ridden high-rise. However, the movie had the unique misfortune of arriving shortly after The Raid, another brutal action thriller involving heroic cops raiding a tower block infested with heavily armed drug dealers, and this might explain how Dredd earned a mere $41.5 million on a budget of over $30 million.

Southland Tales

The world was Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly’s oyster after the success of his ambitious, surreal, and moody debut sci-fi drama, and viewers were eager to see what surreal trip he would take them on next. Unfortunately, where Kelly wanted to go, very few readers or critics could follow. Set in the then-extremely near future of 2008, Southland Tales was released in 2007 after a disastrous Cannes debut that was followed by a tortured 18-month post production process.

A sprawling, incredibly ambitious sci-fi satire, Southland Tales starred Dwayne Johnson as an amnesiac action star tasked with saving the world. Seann William Scott plays two twin brothers on opposite sides of a civil war, while Sarah Michelle Gellar plays an adult actor turned reality star, Jon Lovitz is a murderous cop, and Justin Timberlake is a military veteran who also narrates the movie.

From Bai Ling, Wallace Shawn, and Mandy Moore to Saturday Night Live alumni Amy Poehler and Cheri Oteri, Southland Tales has no shortage of talent and ambition. However, the movie’s chaotic story felt absurdly cramped despite its gargantuan runtime, making Southland Tales a rare sci-fi movie that needed a sequel just to make sense.

Annihilation

Until the Star Wars franchise releases a horror movie, sci-fi horror will always be a gamble at the box office. For every success story like the Alien and Predator franchises, there are high-profile flops like Event Horizon, Sunshine, and Pandorum. Writer/director Alex Garland’s Annihilation is another similar case. The plot sees Natalie Portman’s former soldier Lena and a group of other female researchers enter a bizarre quarantined zone that has been taken over an alien presence.

As Lena searches for her missing husband, the trippy effects of the zone’s extraterrestrial invaders begin to alter her fellow researchers. Based on the novel of the same name by author Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation was intended to be the first film in a quadrilogy based on the Southern Reach books. Sadly, the sci-fi horror’s many unanswered questions prove that this story was crying out for a follow-up.