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

Fatal flaw: They gave it to M. Night Shyamalan.The Nickelodeon animated series 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. 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. was a surprise critical and commercial hit. , which featured a superhero multiverse before they were everywhere, often tops fan lists of favorite Batman movies. But lightning didn’t strike thrice— 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 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 , 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.” is less visible in pop culture than similar “magical relative” sitcoms like and , 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 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. 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 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: 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. , supposedly based on the , 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- twist, maybe … nahhh. That still would have sucked.

Fatal flaw: It isn’t Thunderbirds without the creepy marionettes. , along with other Gerry Anderson sci-fi shows like or , 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 , while meeting with mixed reviews, generated a sequel. In 2004, however, was possible. It just wasn’t an especially good idea. Even with ’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 , 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  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.