The 15 Worst Movies Based on TV Shows

Based on: Land of the Lost (NBC, 1974-76)

The first of several Will Ferrell films on this list, this 2009 sci-fi comedy adventure from director Brad Silberling (Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events) is very loosely based on Sid & Marty Kroftt's beloved, dinosaur-filled 1970s children's series. Replacing the original show's stop-motion animation and puppetry with unimpressive CGI, and seemingly holding the series in little regard, the film was inexplicably (if inconsistently) aimed at older audiences rather than young kids, though its humor is far from mature. The result is a $100-million misfire so bad that the Kroffts (credited as producers on the film though little involved) spent the ensuing years apologizing for the film.

"Lame sketch comedy, an uninspired performance from Will Ferrell and an overall failure of the imagination turn Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost into a lethargic meander through a wilderness of misfiring gags." —Kirk Honeycutt, The Hollywood Reporter

Based on: The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955-56)

Though it originally ran for just 39 episodes across a single season, reruns of the Jackie Gleason-led sitcom The Honeymooners were a permanent fixture in syndication throughout the decades that followed, building the show's mystique to the point where it became firmly established in the pantheon of all-time great TV comedies. With that context, it's almost surprising that it took 50 years for Honeymooners to make the jump to film, but jump it did with this 2005 comedy from little-known director John Schultz (Drive Me Crazy).

Featuring Cedric the Entertainer and Mike Epps in the roles of Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton originated by Gleason and the great Art Carney—plus Gabrielle Union and Regina Hall as Alice and Trixie—the film and its stars were always going to suffer in comparison to the original series. But it didn't help that the cast was given a terrible (and terribly unfunny) script, according to reviewers, and audiences wisely steered clear.

"At least The Honeymooners is not one of those remakes that looks bad compared to the original. It's just bad, period." —Chris Kaltenbach, Baltimore Sun

Based on: CHiPs (NBC, 1977-83)

Michael Peña and Dax Shepard star as California Highway Patrol officers Ponch and Jon in the sole film adaptation of NBC's long-running motorcycle cop drama series. Also written and directed by Shepard, the offbeat 2017 action-comedy is set in the (then-) present day and features a cameo from original Ponch portrayer Erik Estrada. But modern moviegoers weren't drawn in by the CHiPs brand—nor were they attracted by mostly negative reviews calling out the film's overall stupidity, excessive raunchiness, and generic plot.

"Given the alternative between the big-screen CHIPS and an antiquated, low-stakes episode of the original TV series, we'd pick the latter in a heartbeat." —Katie Rife, The A.V. Club

Based on: The Flintstones (ABC, 1960-66)

Somehow the 1990s brought us not one but two live-action adaptations of the classic 1960s cartoon series The Flintstones. But while 1994's The Flintstones was merely awful, its follow-up hit, well, rock bottom. Conceived as an origin-story prequel to both the earlier film and the series, family-friendly rom-com Viva Rock Vegas found the original film's entire cast replaced with lesser-known (if not lesser, period) talent, including Mark Addy and Stephen Baldwin (taking over for John Goodman and Rick Moranis) as Fred and Barney.

Also starring Jane Krakowski, Alan Cumming (in two roles, including a Mick Jagger parody), Joan Collins (!), and Harvey Korman in his final film appearance, the garish and overly wacky Viva Rock Vegas somehow had nearly twice the prior film's production budget despite its B-list cast, and it wound up losing tens of millions of dollars upon its release. The silver lining: No more Flintstones films.

"This movie is a business decision, and about as diverting to watch as someone reading the Universal fiscal report." —Robert Horton, Film.com

Based on: Sex and the City (HBO, 1998-2004)

And just like that, Carrie, Samantha, Miranda, and Charlotte returned for the final of two film spinoffs from the long-running HBO hit comedy Sex and the City. (And don't forget the fifth character ... uh ... Abu Dhabi?) Scoring 26 points lower than the already-not-so-great first movie released two years prior, SATC2 follows the foursome through a series of vignettes, including a culture-clash trip to the Middle East. Critics found the result garish, insulting, tone-deaf, and far too long.

"Thanks to writer-director Michael Patrick King, I now have a fair idea how it might feel to be stoned to death with scented candles." —Cliff Doerksen, Chicago Reader

Based on: Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975-present)

Well, now you have "What Is Love" stuck in your head. Sorry. (It could be worse: At least we didn't mention the Kars4Kids jingle or "Baby Shark.") Longtime TV director John Fortenberry's 1998 feature finds SNL's Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan reprising their TV roles as hapless clubgoing brothers Doug and Steve Butabi, aka "The Roxbury Guys." The first leading film role for both actors, Roxbury also featured other familiar TV faces from SNL (Molly Shannon) and beyond (Mark McKinney, Richard Grieco, Dan Hedaya, Loni Anderson). Unsurprisingly, the basically one-joke TV sketch fared poorly when stretched out to feature length, and the film made little noise at the box office.

"Running a mere 83 minutes, A Night At The Roxbury still feels like an eternity spent in bad high-concept-movie hell." —Nathan Rabin, The A.V. Club

Watch on Max

Based on: Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975-present)

A recurring Tim Meadows character on SNL in the late 1990s, "Ladies Man" Leon Phelps would dispense unhelpful and outmoded romantic advice (often involving Courvoisier) as the host of a call-in television show. Like Courvoisier, it was fine in small doses, but much less so in excess. Directed by Reginald Hudlin (Boomerang, House Party) and co-written by Meadows, this 2000 feature adaptation finds Phelps pursued by a group of revenge-motivated husbands (led by Will Ferrell) united in their anger after he seduced their wives. The box-office bomb had a few funny moments, but reviewers were mostly bored with the result.

"The story sinks, along with any deeper laughs, under boringly formulaic motivations and plot twists." —F.X. Feeney, L.A. Weekly

Based on: Fantasy Island (ABC, 1977-84)

Revived for the small screen multiple times, ABC's soapy Aaron Spelling-produced anthology series starring Ricardo Montalban and Hervé Villechaize has to date received just one feature film adaptation: a 2020 Blumhouse-produced prequel that turned Fantasy Island into a zombie-filled survival horror tale, with Michael Peña in the Montalban-originated role of Mr. Roarke. Critics were neither scared nor amused—and hated the film's final twist. But Blumhouse had the last laugh: Fantasy Island, released just a month before the pandemic shut down theaters, was a modest box office hit.

"Everything that made the original series so memorable and successful - its heart, its weird wit, its adherence to the morality play model - is completely lacking." —Richard Whittaker, Austin Chronicle

Watch on Starz

Based on: Avatar: The Last Airbender (Nickelodeon, 2005-08)

For the first half of his career, director M. Night Shyamalan received a lower Metascore with every successive movie. At some point he had to reach a nadir, and that low point came with this 2010 live-action adaptation of the massively popular Nickelodeon animated fantasy series. (The surprise twist at the end: He started making decent movies again less than a decade later.)

The rare action film to center on child protagonists*, The Last Airbender grossed just under $320 million worldwide, which seems like a lot but ultimately wasn't when compared to a combined production and marketing budget likely pushing $280 million. That—and terrible reviews criticizing the silly dialogue, poor performances, and cheap-looking effects (exacerbated by a misguided decision to convert the completed film into 3D)—made it an easy decision for Paramount to cancel the final two chapters in what was intended to be a film trilogy.

Of the child actors here, Dev Patel would go on to the greatest fame, while lead star Noah Ringer would only make one more film. Airbender, of course, would go on to get a second live-action adaptation 14 years later—one that is an improvement over Shyamalan's film though far from the unequivocal success fans were hoping for. And an unrelated animated film adaptation is due in theaters in 2026.

"The Last Airbender makes the cartoon version with its ratchet-jawed characters and clunky animation seem like a Pixar classic." —Steve Persall, Tampa Bay Times

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Based on: Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975-present)

How do you successfully turn a six-minute SNL sketch into a feature-length movie? Really—we're asking, because it hasn't been done yet, at least according to critics, who have yet to assign a score of 61 or higher to any SNL-based movie. But of all the failed attempts, this is the worst.

If It's Pat proves anything, it's that spending more than six minutes with Julia Sweeney's androgynous and intentionally annoying character does not make for a good time—especially if the added minutes feature misguided storylines about multiple people (!) criminally stalking Pat to determine their gender. Not even an uncredited screenplay touch-up by Quentin Tarantino (!!) could save the film, and it performed so poorly during its opening weekend (grossing just $31,370 in its first three days) that it was immediately pulled from theaters.

"It's Pat is not only one of the most ill-conceived premises to get the big-screen treatment, it's also genuinely unpleasant to watch." —Andy Hoglund, Entertainment Weekly

Based on: McHale's Navy (ABC, 1962-66)

ABC's Ernest Borgnine-led naval sitcom received a pair of film adaptations (with much of the show's cast) while still on the air in the 1960s. For reasons lost to time, someone (specifically, former Universal head turned independent producer Sidney Sheinberg) thought it would be a good idea to make another film 30 years later—and with Tom Arnold in the lead role.

Spoiler alert: It wasn't a good idea. One of just three films (all dreadful; this one was the "best") directed by Bryan Spicer, the 1997 action-comedy was lambasted by critics for its sophomoric humor and lackluster action. Fortunately, few people other than critics had to see it: McHale's tiny $4.5 million gross (against a $42 million production budget) made it one of the year's biggest flops.

"If the '60s sitcom McHale's Navy was a poor man's Sergeant Bilko, the new big-screen McHale is a poverty-stricken, starving-to-death, brain-dead person's answer to last year's not-so-hot Steve Martin movie, Sgt. Bilko." —Steven Rea, Philadelphia Inquirer

Based on: Mister Magoo (syndication, 1960-62)

The bumbling slapstick adventures of a near-blind, obstinate, elderly man? It may be funny when it is in cartoon form (especially if you are a young kid). But as a live-action, big-screen comedy? Not so much—and not even when that man is played by Leslie Nielsen, fresh off his successful run of Naked Gun movies.

The critical and commercial receptions were so poor that Disney gave up any hopes of turning Magoo into an ongoing franchise, though the film remains the answer to a trivia question: What's the only English-language movie directed by Hong Kong martial arts filmmaker and frequent Jackie Chan collaborator Stanley Tong?

"Mr. Magoo is transcendently bad. It soars above ordinary badness as the eagle outreaches the fly. There is not a laugh in it. Not one. I counted." —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Watch on Disney+

Based on: The Mod Squad (ABC, 1968-73)

The second of just two films directed by Scott Silver—who continues to work as a screenwriter, most notably on Joker and its upcoming sequel—1999's Mod Squad attempted to update the late-Sixties counterculture cop drama for the modern era. What it accomplished instead was becoming (arguably) 1999's worst film and biggest box office bomb (though the latter title is probably shared with another lousy TV-to-film adaptation, Wild Wild West). Its biggest sins were wasting the talents of young stars Claire Danes, Omar Epps, Giovanni Ribisi and being "torturously boring" in the words of New York Times critic Lawrence Van Gelder—a sentiment shared by multiple reviewers.

"Add another one to the scrap heap of trendy, nostalgic, 60's and 70's TV shows reduced to cinematic rubble by the inspiration starved minds in Hollywood." —Tom Meek, Film Threat

Based on: The Avengers (ITV, 1961-69)

No, not those Avengers. Adapted from the stylish British spy series that ran throughout the 1960s, this 1998 action-comedy was a significant money-loser despite a big-name cast that featured Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman in the roles of John Steed and Emma Peel (played originally—and rather famously—by Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg), plus Sean Connery as the film's chief villain. A mess to begin with (according to reports of unsuccessful test screenings), The Avengers became even more convoluted when Warner Bros. trimmed over 25 minutes from the film (against the wishes of director Jeremiah Chechik), and the result was an incoherent spectacle lacking any of the charm of the show.

"The film flails incoherently from set to set, trying to be kicky and madcap and pop, but with no sense of the show's casual acceptance of the absurd." —Charles Taylor, Salon

Based on: Car 54, Where Are You? (NBC, 1961-63)

Nothing says "box office gold" more than a big-screen musical based on a thirty-year-old, black-and-white New York cop comedy. Apparently, distributor Orion Pictures also sensed that the film was a bad idea because, after keeping the film on the shelf for four years, they stripped out almost all of the music (to the frustration of director Bill Fishman of Tapeheads fame) before finally releasing Car 54 to the public. So it's Cop Rock without the rock.

Featuring a mix of now-miscast musicians (David Johansen, Tone Loc, Mojo Nixon, and members of the Ramones), comedy actors (John C. McGinley, Fran Drescher, Jeremy Piven, and Rosie O'Donnell, plus Nipsey Russell and Al Lewis returning from the original series), and C-tier Baldwins (Daniel), the non-musical comedy grossed all of $1 million during its forgettable theatrical run.

"Car 54, Where Are You? makes the other recent big-screen adaptations of old TV series seem like episodes of 'Masterpiece Theater' in comparison." —David Kronke, The Hollywood Reporter

Now that you have seen the worst TV-to-film adaptations, it's time to move on to the best ...