In Theaters 27 Years Ago, The ‘Sausage King of Chicago’ Starred in a Box Office Bomb Based on a Fan-Favorite Cartoon Series
27 years ago, a flop family comedy from the star of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off proved that live-action adaptations of classic cartoons weren’t a foolproof recipe for success at the box office. The box office failure of Disney’s live-action Moana remake came as something of a shock, since 2024’s animated sequel Moana 2 was a huge success upon release and its predecessor, 2016’s original Moana, was the most streamed movie on Disney+ at one point in the streaming service’s history.
However, while Moana’s remake failure might delay Frozen’s live-action reimagining as Disney pivots its strategy, the underperformance should not have come as a complete shock. Back in the ‘90s, a string of family comedies rebooted classic cartoons from earlier decades as live-action movies, but this trend came to an untimely end when its box office success proved inconsistent, to say the least. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off star Matthew Broderick was one victim of this craze’s dwindling popularity with his 1999 flop, Inspector Gadget.
Matthew Broderick’s Inspector Gadget Was A Box Office Flop
The Inspector Gadget franchise began in 1983 with the animated TV comedy of the same name, a goofy kids’ show about the eponymous well-meaning but gormless cyborg cop. Aided by his hyper-competent niece Penny and his aptly named dog Brain, who were the real heroes of the story, Inspector Gadget bumbled his way through endless misadventures as he repeatedly went up against the nefarious Dr. Claw, the mad scientist who ran the appropriately acronym’d crime syndicate M.A.D.
In a decade full of epic sci-fi movies like RoboCop, Inspector Gadget was an early, kid-friendly parody of the cyborg policeman trope. The original show spawned a 1992 Christmas special, Inspector Gadget Saves Christmas, a spinoff series named Gadget Boy and Heather, a second spinoff titled Gadget Boy’s Adventures in History, and an educational spinoff series called Inspector Gadget’s Field Trip. The success of Brendan Fraser’s live-action George of the Jungle movie then emboldened Disney to invest a whopping $75- 90 million in a movie adaptation of the ’80s cartoon show, and that’s where everything went wrong.
Released on July 23, 1999, Inspector Gadget was a box office flop that earned execrable reviews. Starring Broderick as the titular hero, the movie cast the late child star Michelle Trachtenberg as the long-suffering Penny and Rupert Everett as the super villain Dr. Claw. Cacophonously loud, visually garish, and stuffed with weak gags, Inspector Gadget found few defenders among reviewers and earned only $134 million despite its huge budget.
Inspector Gadget Hurt The ‘90s Live-Action Cartoon Reboot Trend
This signalled a death knell for the ‘90s trend of rebooting cartoons as live-action standalone movies, although the writing had been on the wall for a while before Inspector Gadget’s failure. 1994’s The Flintstones was a big hit, and George of the Jungle was both a critical and commercial success in 1997, but none of the subsequent live-action re-imaginings of classic cartoons managed to match their shared popularity.
1999’s Dudley Do-Right was a financial failure that couldn’t recoup even half its $22 million budget despite boasting Fraser in the title role, while 2000’s The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle cost $75 million and earned a disastrous $35 million. To make matters worse, unlike Disney’s misunderstood classic The Black Cauldron, few of these ‘90s movies based on children’s cartoons have since been reclaimed as secret cult classics.
