A mega-budget sci-fi action-adventure movie produced and co-written by James Cameron—and directed by Robert Rodriguez—is being released in the United States this week, and you’d barely know it. Alita: Battle Angel, a cyberpunk epic based on a popular manga with a strong pedigree behind the camera, should be an event movie, advertised and anticipated as one of the big films of the year.

Originally, that was the plan. But Fox pushed the release back from July 2018 to around Christmas—arguably an upgrade—then bumped it again to February 2019. This slot is not necessarily the dumping ground it once was; Black Panther was released at about the same time last year, and became a global phenomenon. But that movie had the Marvel hype machine firmly behind it, and rode a long blitzkrieg of marketing to its boggling success. Alita has not had such a push, at least not domestically, becoming a once-promising release since tossed into the junkyard, unable to earn its studio’s confidence. Which is a shame, though not surprising.

Alita joins a small list of blockbuster-y sci-fi/fantasy movies that have tried to challenge the superhero-Star Wars hegemony in recent years, only to be beaten back down, mishandled (or almost unhandled) by their studios and further widening the gap between Disney product and everything else. It may sound strange to mourn big corporate enterprises that tried and failed, but there is something awfully glum about how hard it has been for any attempt at non-Disney-owned world-building to gain traction—at the North American box office, at least. (Alita is currently tracking at a dismal $20 million to $30 million in its opening weekend.)

Maybe Alita will do much better overseas, where audiences seem a bit more open to the earnest appeal of new I.P., so long as it has enough monsters and gizmos and whizzing set pieces. But even if the film makes up some of its budget outside of North America, it still seems destined to join the ranks of Universal’s Mortal Engines, STX’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and Warner’s Jupiter Ascending as franchise kickoffs that badly stumbled, movies that deserved more attention—and appreciation—than they got. They’re films that flamed out because their studios gave up on them, maybe, but also because moviegoers seem increasingly wary of anything without a long tail of past branding. Which should maybe worry us some.

That’s not to say that those previous duds were all great movies. Jupiter Ascending, directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski (who also got left in the cold with Cloud Atlas), teeters on the line between good silly and bad silly. It’s a kind of grand-scale mess, but one warm with good intentions. At least it’s trying something; it’s also the only film discussed here that isn’t based on anything else. Jupiter is its own mad creation, shunted off to mid-winter, where it died a quick, ignoble death. Valerian, by Luc Besson, is a slightly different kind of belly flop into outer space. Cobbled together from financing from various investors, it had the look of a risky gamble from the beginning. (It’s the highest-budgeted French-produced film ever, by a significant margin.) It got a wide, if under-promoted, summer release and tanked. For all its flaws, there was something to love there, a space-opera styling that had an engagingly retro feel—even when the story was confused and the lead performances were less than inspiring.