The box office wasn't quite as horrible as the critics' reaction might have predicted - it was No. Audiences were confused, and critics howled. (But not in, like, a cool "jumper" way.) It also doesn't help that Christensen and Max Theriot, the actor who plays the younger version of his character, look. The movie had been plagued by troubles on set, and you could tell: Liman's movies are usually tight and focused, but this one has a non-sensical plot and characters that seem to vanish and reappear at random. It also didn't help that Christensen was wearing some sort of trench coat on the poster, which made Jumper look less adventurous and visionary than it like some sort of low-budget, gas-station knockoff of The Matrix. One thing Liman hadn't accounted for was that by the time the movie actually came out, Hayden Christensen was less a "movie star" after his time in the Star Wars universe and more "a guy everyone was ready to start dumping on." The knives were out for him, and his film, from the get-go. So we planned the story out over three movies and then we sliced it up in such a way as to leave room for the other two movies." A producer said before release: "The ideas got so large, that they really couldn't fit into, you know, one or two movies, they needed to evolve over at least three movies. How could this thing possibly miss? Look out for those sequels. Steven Gould's initial novel Jumper was published in 1992 and was an immediate hit, leading to a series of equally successful (you guessed it) sequels, including Reflex in 2004, which was to be part of the next movie series. And the problem was simply Jumper itself.Īnd don't forget the books themselves. Heck, that novel already had its own sequel! This thing was ready-made to be a franchise. Smith), a hot movie star ( Hayden Christensen, not quite yet fully meme'd), and a beloved science-fiction novel with a killer hook that fans had been clamoring to be made into a movie for nearly two decades. It had a star director (Doug Liman, fresh off the smash Mr. Jumper was a film that had everything going for it. People will not want two of your films if they don't like the first one.Įnter Jumper. Sometimes, when you are trying to plan on several films at once, you forget to concentrate on the one you're making. (There was no next film.)īut those are the perils of using your film to set up a franchise without any certainty that there will, in fact, be anyone that wants it. Heck, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ends with a teaser for the next film. The Green Lantern movie rushed a character's transformation into the superhero's greatest villain because Mark Strong's Sinestro was clearly meant to be the baddie in Green Lantern 2, which was never made. Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world's greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.ĭo you remember that Jon Hamm was in the A-Team movie? He only appeared in a post-credits stinger supposedly setting up a series of sequels that, well, never happened.
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