We’ve been living in an age where any IP with even the slightest hint of name recognition and marketability is being adapted, franchised, sequelized, rebooted, or remade in perpetuity, but Dragonball Evolution remains such an unmitigated catastrophe that even the most ardent of the source material’s supporters don’t want Hollywood anywhere near it.
That’s completely understandable when director James Wong’s wretched fantasy took everything that people loved about the original and flushed it down the toilet in a hail of miscast characters, unconvincing digital effects, tedious action scenes, and woeful dialogue, with the end product bearing almost no resemblance to its inspiration bar some iconography shoehorned in so people would know it was Dragon Ball-related.
The $30 million feature couldn’t even make it to $10 million at the domestic box office, while star Justin Chatwin was inexplicably signed on a three-picture deal, almost the perfect definition of false hope. Writer Ben Ramsey described his own work as “flat-out garbage,” so a suggestion floated on Reddit that the property would benefit from being given the Marvel Cinematic Universe treatment has unsurprisingly gone down like a lead balloon.
It’s popular as enough as it is, with new content being churned out on a regular basis that actually appeals to those with a vested interest in the latest goings-on, and history has already shown there’s worryingly high probability that another live-action version would simply repeat the mistakes of the past by turning out as one of the worst genre films ever made, so it’s easy to see why the merest mention of the dreaded “shared mythology” has left so many aghast.