There are those times when it feels as though a movie is good enough to continue after the credits have rolled by turning it into a TV show, which is what’s happened quite a few times over the last few decades. The problem with this is that a lot of the movies that have been given this treatment didn’t exactly make the jump in a successful or even popular manner. Some movies are better off being left as they are, either as the beginning of a big-screen franchise, or a standalone movie that people can enjoy for decades to come. There are a lot of movies that have been turned into TV shows over the years and only a fraction of them have ever done much more than annoy the fans since the honest truth is that movies are something special, while TV shows come and go so often that it’s hard to notice all of them before they’ve been canceled or left in the metaphorical dust, relegated to late-night TV that’s only watched by those with insomnia or who like to stay up late on a regular basis. Plus, taking an idea that was great in the theater and trying to make something of it on the small screen is, at times, like trying to condense a novel into a short story. It’s definitely possible, but it doesn’t always work out the way people want.
With that in mind, here are a few great movies that were turned into awful TV shows.
5. Barbershop
When you put Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer together, along with several other notable and very talented actors that have proven their worth more than a few times, you end up getting something that’s both heartfelt and funny at the same time. The movie was a lot of fun since it dealt with very real issues and showed the plight of a small business trying to compete with a bigger, more lucrative business moving into the same neighborhood. At the same time, it dealt with the personal issues of several of the cast members. The show only lasted one season and the reason why is simple, it didn’t have the same vibe.
4. Dirty Dancing
Really, HOW in the WORLD was anyone going to top Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey’s performance, and why did anyone think it was possible to concoct a story that had the same title? Had the title stuck and the characters changed that might have been okay, but trying to pick up where things had been left, that was something a lot of fans weren’t going to stand for. The movie was so iconic that even the follow-up movies that did feature other locations and characters didn’t do nearly as well. Why is that? Because if you’re going to follow a movie like this then you make sure you know what you’re doing, instead of just pulling some random idea out of the corner.
3. 10 Things I Hate About You
It’s amusing that some folks believe that they can recapture the same magic that made a movie work at one point when in truth they might as well clear the drawing board and start again if they’re going to attempt the same idea. This show is one example of how Hollywood has become insanely lazy over the years and isn’t always willing to provide the audience with something new since they have so much lying around that they can toss together in the hopes that it will work.
2. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
One season. That’s all it took for people to realize that you simply can’t take the same idea, at least not all the time, and make it great for a prolonged period of time. One might have thought that someone would have realized this earlier, but Ferris Bueller was a great standalone movie that had everything it needed, including an ending point. Plus, no offense to Jennifer Aniston, but she wasn’t nearly as effective as Jennifer Grey since she had a very different temperament and wasn’t even close to being as convincing as she needed to be. Sorry to say, but Bueller was better off being left alone.
1. Uncle Buck
This story didn’t suffer just one attempt, but two, and with the attempt to make Mike Epps out as Uncle Buck in the 2016 version, which a lot of people had plenty to say about. Both versions only lasted a single season before they were canceled thankfully since Uncle Buck is another movie that was meant to be left alone, even if it did leave things open. Just because there’s an opening for another project though doesn’t mean that a director or a producer or a studio should think that it’s perfectly okay to waddle right in and start tinkering with the main idea. If nothing else, Uncle Buck was another in a long line of John Candy classics.
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