15 Movies That Poisoned Entire Genres

The Internet lost its collective mind when the first Cats trailer dropped in 2019. It's easy to see why… everyone in Cats just looks, well, wrong. But it was too late to stop that particular Tom Hooper-directed train from leaving the station and the massively budgeted Broadway musical adaptation hit theaters later that year. To the shock of no one, it proved to be a box-office flop.

That should've been a sign for Hollywood, but all the studios wanted a piece of the action that The Greatest Showman received in 2017. Instead, major adaptations of other Broadway smashes like West Side Story, In the Heights, and Dear Evan Hansen went ahead without a care in the world. Then each and every one of them lost money, regardless of their overall quality, and Hollywood figured out it might be better to leave Broadway musicals to the experts.

Though 2020's Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga and 2021's America: The Motion Picture prove the parody film isn't truly dead, we are far from the genre's heyday. For years, the parody film was kept alive and well by Mel Brooks, the master of the genre, and the team of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, responsible for Airplane!, Top Secret!, and Hot Shots!. Every once in a while, you'd get a Galaxy Quest or Austin Powers that found comedy gold, but the parody film was never really at the forefront of the social consciousness. 

Then 2000's Scary Movie changed everything. It grossed nearly $300 million, and the parody film boom was in full swing. No one was as prolific as Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer during this time as they released critically-reviled films like Date Movie and Epic Movie on a yearly basis. 2008's Disaster Movie signaled the end of the genre as it struggled to make money at the box office and garnered a sizzling 1% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. Heralded as “one of the worst movies of all time” upon release, even Kim Kardashian is appalled by her appearance in it.

Ah… remember the halcyon days of the late-2000s/early-2010s, when every single studio in Hollywood was trying to find its next big moneymaking franchise by adapting every YA novel series on the shelves at Barnes & Noble? This was the time period when Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games were basically printing dollar bills on a yearly basis. Tinseltown big-wigs are known for chasing trends, and YA novel adaptations were all the rage. 

This is how we ended up with all-but-forgotten movies like Inkheart, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, I Am Number Four, Eragon, and The 5th Wave, among many others. 20th Century Fox's Percy Jackson series got close but petered out after two movies. Then there is the Divergent series, which had two bonafide hits in 2014 and 2015 before the third film crashed so hard in 2016, it killed the series and all its future projects. In the years since, Hollywood has shied away from massive YA projects. Nowadays, YA adaptations are of the smaller variety, like To All the Boys I've Loved Before and Love, Simon. 

Gladiator returned the sword & sandals epic back to the forefront of Hollywood production schedules for the first time in decades after being a box-office triumph and awards season darling. With some of the biggest movies in Tinseltown history being this kind of production - think of Ben-Hur and Spartacus, for example - it seemed Hollywood was set for a golden age of historical epics that would transport viewers back to a different time and place entirely. Though many historical epics followed, like Troy, Kingdom of Heaven, and The Last Samurai, none of them lived up to Gladiator's hype.

One of the biggest blunders that signaled the swift downfall of the new sword & sandals boom was 2004's Alexander. With Academy Award-winning firebrand Oliver Stone behind the camera and Colin Farrell, Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, and many more in front of it, Alexander should've been a no-miss prospect. Of course, giving Stone over $150 million to work with made that dicier than it should've been and, well, it didn't make its money back. So much for that kind of gargantuan movie. It even took Colin Farrell years to get over the disappointment. 

Hollywood executives are always trying to chase the latest trends. Disney is making a ton of money with animated films in the 1990s? Well, everyone needs their own animation studio now! The MCU is lighting up the box office? Surprise, surprise, every studio feels the need for their own “cinematic universe”! In the late-'80s, Die Hard became the latest go-to trend for Hollywood, with seemingly every studio following suit with their own “Die Hard-on-a-blank" movie. Under Siege was Die Hard on a battleship. Cliffhanger was Die Hard on a mountain. Speed was Die Hard on a bus. The list goes on and on.

1998's Hard Rain proved to be the end of that particular trend. This Christian Slater-starring thriller is Die Hard in a flooded Midwestern town, and yeah… that descriptor proves they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel with the “Die Hard-on-a-blank” subgenre of action filmmaking. Despite an all-star cast of Slater, Morgan Freeman, Minnie Driver, Ed Asner, Randy Quaid, and Betty White, Hard Rain struggled to justify its massive budget and flopped at the box office. 

One of the oddest trends in the lengthy history of Tinseltown was the 1970s disaster film heyday. During that decade, classics like Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Earthquake were the closest thing to the modern idea of the “Hollywood blockbuster” before Jaws and Star Wars came along and rewrote the rules. Audiences were treated to multiple disaster films on a yearly basis up until 1980, when Airplane! lampooned the whole genre and When Time Ran Out… lost a ton of money.

When a movie starring Paul Newman, Jacqueline Bisset, William Holden, Alex Karras, Burgess Meredith, Ernest Borgnine, and Pat Morita fails disastrously at the box office, you know it's time to hang it up. The disaster film was dead and buried, only to be revived in the mid-'90s with Twister.