On Judge Dredd: surely, surely Clint Eastwood would have been the perfect casting? Interesting how Danny Cannon has gone on to make himself a decent career to, adding fuel to the theory that he didn't do much of the directing of Dredd himself in the end...

You could only do Judge Dredd 'properly' by casting a promising unknown in the role and never show his face. A star actor would be unlikely to agree to this limitation, and it would be a waste of his salary anyway. And without a big-name star in the lead role, the project wouldn't get the funding. So I guess we'll never get a decent Judge Dredd film until someone does it in CGI... If you come at it with few expectations the movie wasn't that bad, but the scriptwriter and director seem to have spent more research time watching Lethal Weapon than they did reading 2000AD.

As a kid in the late 70s I had the Eastwood Dredd all planned out - it would have been great, but by 1982 the Star Wars goldrush was over and it no longer had a chance of being made. I personally love Cannon's Judge Dredd ; it was actually far too faithful to the visual style of the comic book and yes, it has some dreadful acting (particularly from Armand Assante, who was so good with Stallone in Paradise Alley )but it also had at least some of the savage fascist humour left (most of it had already been plundered by the creators of Robocop , who openly admit it). Apart from Young Sherlock Holmes , which I thought was good fun, I agree with most of these.

Three other films nearly made it into this list, which for various reasons I left out. The first was The Rocketeer, which I think deserved another shot, but the boxoffice takings didn't agree. Another was 'The Shadow', and the final one was 'The Phantom' with Billy Zane. But none of these was so bad (ok, maybe the Phantom was...) that they've destroyed the potential for a sequel or reboot at some point.

I was surprised The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wasn't there, nor, perhaps, V for Vendetta . On a more obscure level, how about the 1976 King Kong remake? It's generally derided, and it was 30 years before Peter Jackson rescued it with a better-received third remake.

I agree about the Hitchhiker's guide. The orignal TV series pi**ed all over the movie and it probably had about 0.01% of the budget. If you're going to count King Kong as a franchise then you could also argue that Star Wars Epiosdes 1-3 was a criminal waste of the single most gold-plated franchise opportunity of all time....

The Americanized Godzilla comes to mind - not so much for the reimagined monster, but for the sheer lack of fun that $100,000,000 didn't even bother to rent.

I concur re V for Vendetta. For me, it was the sheer audacity of portraying badly-caricatured English people (slobby, sitting in the pub all day, and anyone without a cut-glass accent says "bollocks" all the time. Oh and Stephen Fry is the token gay) then selling it back to our country and expecting us to like it. I was insulted and wanted my money back!! Utter rubbish.

you probably could call king kong a franchise.Think about it-there was the awesome original(still the best).That was followed the same year by Son of Kong,which most people dont even know exists.In the 60s there was the dire Japanese man-in-monkey-suit efforts like King Kong-vs-Godzilla and King Kong Escapes.Then in the 70s was the abysmal official remake,which some buffoon decided was worthy of a sequel,the even worse King Kong Lives.Then in the naughties we have Peter Jacksons reasonably good stab at it.I wonder who will try next?

Mission Impossible surely.These movies are crap.Tom Cruise is woefully miscast.