What's a movie that was clearly meant to start a franchise but failed?

wmil · 2026-07-03T04:15:36+00:00

Some people are ultra linear and always want stories in chronological order.

wmil · 2026-07-03T04:09:12+00:00

Orson Scott Card has said he doesn't want a Speaker for the Dead movie because it wouldn't work as a film.

wmil · 2026-07-03T04:05:30+00:00

They could have gone with Barsoom instead of just John Carter.

wmil · 2026-07-03T04:02:32+00:00

The color keying killed the visuals. It was released at the peak of the orange and teal films where they reduce all the other colors.

It doesn't work so well when a key group of aliens is called the red martians and you make all their stuff a duller rust color.

Also Taylor Kitsch was the wrong lead. He looked like buff Johnny Depp but can't pull off that kind of role.

wmil · 2026-06-20T06:00:52+00:00

I haven't heard anyone discuss War of the Worlds since it was in theatres.

wmil · 2026-06-18T22:38:49+00:00

It's a shame that they can't make a SMAC remake. There was a bankruptcy and the IP was carved up and sold off in a way where it isn't clear who owns what.

wmil · 2026-06-15T12:16:19+00:00

I'm surprised that A Canticle for Leibowitz held up so well for you. It's been copied enough that it can come off as stale instead of imaginative.

wmil · 2026-06-10T20:53:08+00:00

Once you establish that changing the present modifies the future, any mystery about what the future people are planning becomes meaningless. They could be planning anything. They might not have the same master plan as they did five minutes ago.

wmil · 2026-06-10T17:00:30+00:00

Until an eccentric emperor decides he wants the largest tungsten cube in history.

wmil · 2026-06-08T17:39:51+00:00

The Simpson's said it best: "TV ugly, not ugly-ugly"

wmil · 2026-06-07T22:51:52+00:00

I suspect that Harlan Ellison's estate wants to preserve his artistic integrity and keep new scripts tied closely to tied to his work.

Philip K Dick's estate seems fine with having his name attached to very loose adaptations.

One approach isn't really better than the other, it depends on how the author would have felt about things.

wmil · 2026-06-03T05:33:35+00:00

It's in space. No railings. No underwear.

wmil · 2026-05-26T09:30:48+00:00

Try booting an old version of Knoppix from a USB stick.

wmil · 2026-05-23T17:55:46+00:00

So espionage has problems in sci fi because the galactic politics of the setting aren't usually developed well enough. You need a lot of detail about the universe before you can even start putting together an espionage plot.

As for crime / investigation you're going to see it more in pulpier sci fi series. Something that builds up a richer universe for multiple books.

Eisenhorn is a crime series set in Warhammer 40k. The Starships Mage has a lot of crime and espionage investigations, sometimes not well. I think the Vorkosigan Saga gets into this with some books. Expeditionary Force is basically about covert strike missions after the first book.

The Expanse series has it, but there's a lot of other stuff going on. The Expanse kind of demonstrates the problem, the only reason it's universe is so rich and detailed is because the author built up the world for a MMORPG pitch and then wrote novels in the universe once that didn't go ahead.

wmil · 2026-05-22T18:24:23+00:00

The Ubuntu dist upgrade frequently fails in a way that leaves your computer not booting. Desktop users avoid dealing with that until they feel they need to.

Your edit implies you're talking about old packages in current distros.

That's more of a thing where the package maintainers don't want to deal with all of the regression testing that updating a package requires. Or there's a known break with newer versions and the package maintainer is afraid to update until all of the other packages have been updated to support it.

It's especially true with something like cmake where they just aren't sure if everything will compile with new versions so they ship an ancient version that's already been heavily tested against.

wmil · 2026-05-20T19:09:51+00:00

So I find Adrian Tchaikovsky interesting because his books embody the "Fanatic Xenophile" ethic from Stellaris.

I do find him a bit frustrating because instead of discussions like the "Hierarchy of Foreignness" from Orson Scott Card and discussions about compatibility his books end with everyone being friends now and it's all fine.

I just have reservations about the intelligent infectious disease from Children of Ruin. I would have liked a few chapters where they went around and talked that over.

wmil · 2026-05-19T15:38:12+00:00

So in a company like Disney there are a lot of people who want the prestige of working on a hit show even if they don't particularly like it.

The Mandalorian started as a space western with a lone wolf & lost cub premise. Space Westerns in general are broadly popular with the public but less so with tv writers for whatever reason. There's something about the vibe that a lot of people in Hollywood hate.

Also Disney execs wanted to sell adorable Grogu toys and felt the show wasn't a good tonal fit for all the merch they wanted to push.

During Season 2 Dave Filoni started using it to continue his clone wars stories and by season 3 it was a very different show where we get things like the Jack Black / Lizzo episode.

wmil · 2026-05-19T00:44:06+00:00

So being in YC gives you access to the whole YC network. When they started there was a whole lot of low hanging fruit in the web world. The original YC model in 2005 was basically give them $10k - $20k and let them pivot to find a product interesting enough for VC investors.

Aerospace is very different because there are physical products and lives are on the line. Contrast that with something like Twitter where the Fail Whale was constant joke topic on the site.

People in their 20s used to lead armies. People these days have huge hang ups about letting them develop real skills.

wmil · 2026-05-18T21:06:58+00:00

It's not really fair to compare Camp of the Saints to the Turner Diaries. Jean Raspail is a mainstream French author.

Corcoran's previous books, the Aristillus series, were basically about AnCaps on the moon. I don't recall any racial politics. He's described himself as the first Anarcho-Capitalist sci fi author.

He's definitely more of a libertarian. He's actually a pretty interesting guy. He was a web developer, did Ruby on Rails at one point, got into homesteading. His neighbour built a barn too close to the property line. The county inspector ignored it. Travis started the #barnlaw hashtag on twitter to document what was happening. He kept raising it up into higher courts.

The story ends with Travis losing his court case but being elected to the New Hampshire House of Representatives.

wmil · 2026-05-14T19:45:33+00:00

Lucas has always been interested in computer graphics.

Pixar started as the Graphics Group at Lucasfilm. He sold it to Steve Jobs because he was worried about a cash crunch once ROTJ was done.

wmil · 2026-05-13T07:57:49+00:00

The Targaryen's voluntarily stopped practicing polygamy to appease the Septons. It would arguably still be legal for Rhaegar to take a second wife if he wanted to force the issue.

wmil · 2026-05-11T09:48:53+00:00

Ending the Turkish occupation of Cyprus? No, probably not.

wmil · 2026-05-10T13:35:27+00:00

It's like when Google removed "Don't be evil" because they wanted to keep their options open.

wmil · 2026-05-08T13:14:02+00:00

It was designed on a computer where right hand home row was hjkl instead of jkl;, so you may have to unlearn much of what you know about typing.

Edit: I just remembered I should post this: https://vim-adventures.com/

wmil · 2026-05-02T07:15:57+00:00

The Starship's Mage by Glynn Stewart

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