CBR.COM ran an article a while back entitled: 10 Young Adult Movie Franchises That Failed After Their First Movie.

It started by saying: "If the '90s were the age of teen rom-coms, then the first two decades of the New Millennium were the era of the young adult fantasy flick. Following the massive success of film series like Harry Potter and Twilight, studios started to greenlight dozens of potential franchise-starters in search of the next big money-maker. While some film series like The Hunger Games found success, most young adult movie franchises crashed and burned with their first release. Unfortunately, this meant that the franchises failed to take off after being critically panned and poorly received by fans."

Cirque Du Freak is one of the ten listed movies, and there's certainly no denying that it deserves its place on such a list. I always reject the mistaken notion that the CDF film was, as some critics at the time sniffily insisted it was, a Twilight cash-in, as the film had been in-the-making for several years by the time Twilight became a phenomenon -- it was just happenstance that it came out in th emiddle of the Twilight success bubble. But Harry Potter was definitely an influence on the studios, who cast their nets far and wide to find something else with a similar potential. Indeed, the books were first optioned by Warner Bros, under the production arm of David Heyman, the producer of the Harry Potter films -- he tried hard for a few years to get a script written that they could press forward with, but sadly none of the writers who got attached were able to knock it into a shape that pleased the studio, and David had to reluctantly allow the rights to revert back to me in the end. (Unlike with the later Universal team, I got to meet David a few times, and got on very well with him, which is why I semi-named a character after him in my book Slawter a few years later.)

While the list doesn't shed any great insights on why the movies flopped, it's a nice, handy way of reminding us that lots of other cool books suffered the same fate as mine did, and serves as a grim testament to the fact that a great book doesn't always translate into a great movie -- well, not first time round, anyway!!! You can check out the full article by clicking here: https://www.cbr.com/young-adult-movie-franchises-failed-after-first-movie/