27 Films That Need A TV Spin-Off

The Krays (1990)

The Film: Solid gangster biopic centred on the notorious Kray twins, starring pop star siblings Gary and Martin Kemp.

The Cast: James and Oliver Phelps. Don’t make that face – the Potter franchise is finished, and they were consistently the best thing in it. The switch from light relief to sinister drama would be the making of them.

Ghostbusters (1984)

The Film: Supernatural comedy from the Saturday Night Live school that made Bill Murray a star and made an enormous amount of money.

Wall Street (1987)

The Film: Oliver Stone’s iconic power-suited capitalist juggernaut, that encapsulated the greed-is-good eighties and has spawned an imminently-arriving sequel.

Lon (1994)

The Film: Touching, verging-on-taboo tale of a lone assassin who adopts a young girl when her family is killed, and trains her how to be a professional killer.

Casino (1995)

The Film: Martin Scorsese’s last mob epic, a glittering look at the mafia control of the gambling trade in Vegas in the glamorous heyday of the seventies.

Fight Club (1999)

The Film: Searing end-of-millennium satire adapted from Chuck Palahniuk’s book, about the disconnected softness of modern living and a generation of angry young men channelling their vitriol into fighting and terrorism.

Starship Troopers (1997)

The Film: Paul Verhoeven’s bawdy genius sci-fi propaganda, based on Robert A. Heinlein’s novel. It’s an intergalactic bug hunt, with the world transformed into a military war machine to fight our alien enemies.

The Thin Red Line (1998)

The Film: Terrence Malick’s first movie for 20 years was a beautifully shot super-ensemble piece, with the finest male leads in Hollywood queuing to appear in the introspective and thoughtful war film.

La Haine (1995)

The Film: Urgent and powerful black and white drama set during a series of riots in the estates surrounding Paris. Towerblock kids turn over cars and confront police as our three heroes travel across the city.

Monsters Vs Aliens (2009)

The Film: Dreamworks’ best animated film yet – a tribute to the Universal monsters of the golden era with a giant woman, a swamp thing, a cockroach and a blob doing battle against an evil mastermind alien.

Boogie Nights (1997)

The Film: A grand-sweep piece of storytelling which tracks the changes to the porn industry in the late seventies with the emergence of VHS, starring Mark Wahlberg as the rising and falling Dirk Diggler.

The Damned United (2009)

The Film: Biopic of the unique genius/mad egocentric football manager Brian Clough showing his years at Derby before his torrid spell at Leeds.

Brick (2005)

The Film: Hammett-strength hard-boiled detective thriller set in a middle-class high school and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt

Withnail & I (1986)

The Film: Cult comedy classic set in 1969 London, with two out-of-work and on-the-sauce actors deciding to take a holiday in the country.

28 Days Later (2002)

The Film: Danny Boyle’s brutal apocalyptic super-zombie horror, with a handful of survivors creeping through deserted streets avoiding the now mostly psychotic ex-population.

The Third Man (1949)

The Film: All time great British thriller starring Joseph Cotton as the American writer looking for his mysterious friend Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, in post-war Vienna.

The Birds (1963)

The Film: The nearest Hitchock came to making a supernatural thriller, this adaptation of a Daphne Du Maurier short story has man coming up against the chaotic horror of nature, as birds start freaking the heck out for no reason.

The Omega Man (1971)

The Film: The best adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend has Charlton Heston as the last man on earth, roaming empty streets by day and barricading himself in against the mutant hordes at night.

The Lord Of The Rings (2001)

The Film: Peter Jackson’s mammoth fantasy trilogy that did full, unexpected justice to Tolkien’s classic books.

Aliens (1986)

The Film: James Cameron’s retooling of what had been a straight horror film into what remains the gold standard for off-world action movies.

LA Confidential (1997)

The Film: The accomplished adaptation of James Ellroy’s dark 1950s-set tale of Hollywood vice and police corruption.

James Bond

The Film: You may have heard of this British-based spy series before – long story short, it features a fancy ex-naval type travelling the world on Her Majesty’s Service and generally either killing people or being super smooth.

Shaun Of The Dead (2004)

The Film: The zombie apocalypse comes to middle-class thirtysomething suburbia, as Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright come up trumps with a British comedy classic.

Mulholland Drive (2001)

The Film: David Lynch’s twisting strip of Hollywood dreams and nightmares, with an amnesiac mystery at its core that wraps around itself rather than unfurling to a solution.

Children Of Men (2006)

The Film: Intelligent near-future dystopia in which mankind has inexplicably stopped producing children and the end of humanity looms large.

Inception (2010)

The Film: Christopher Nolan’s tightly conceived and highly stylish maze of dream heists and executive crime.

Trainspotting (1996)

The Film: Era-defining work surging with drugs and youth and energy that tells the story of a group of friends taking heroin and living life in low-rent Edinburgh estates.

The Total Film team are made up of the finest minds in all of film journalism. They are: Editor Jane Crowther, Deputy Editor Matt Maytum, Reviews Ed Matthew Leyland, News Editor Jordan Farley, and Online Editor Emily Murray. Expect exclusive news, reviews, features, and more from the team behind the smarter movie magazine.