The Death of ‘Austin Powers’ (And Six More Hobbled Franchises Worth Putting Down)

After the unfortunate reception for The Love Guru, it’s just too easy to write off New Line’s prospective Austin Powers revival (which Mike Myers is reportedly working on for New Line with former series collaborator Mike McCullers) as yet another ill-advised folly belching the black smoke of Myers’s career. In fact, taken as merely a part of the larger phenomenon we at Defamer like to call The End of Ideas, the Powers franchise is but a speck of the shit on Hollywood’s collective bathroom wall — a tableau diligently studied today by the haz-mat crew at Entertainment Weekly.