They Can’t All Be Winners, Kid: Seven once-hopeful film franchises that never took off

The Last Airbender

To say the least, no one was really looking forward to an M. Night Shyamalan movie following the release of Lady in the Water, which is probably why he tried to hide under a big-budget adaptation of a children’s cartoon. Stripped of its original title because James Cameron had to go and make a huge fucking blockbuster with the same name a year earlier, this take on Avatar: The Last Airbender pissed off every single fan by whitewashing the whole cast, and shat upon every moviegoer with eyes with its miserable post-converted 3D. It was a terminally weird cast, too — full of weirdly-placed comedians, garbage child actors, and tossed-off Twilight cast members — and it didn’t help that Shyamalan didn’t have any flair for action on an epic scale. Needless to say, talk of a sequel or any other continuation of the movie’s story was tossed out after the reviews and the first box office receipts hit the street and the shit hit the fans.