One of my biggest pet peeves in all of entertainment: when studios take a grounded, gritty, serious earthbound franchise to space, pretty much without exception turning them into a joke. It’s a well-accepted truth at this point that when you (randomly) take a franchise to space, you’ve officially given up and are out of ideas. It’s what you do when you’re desperately trying to hang onto the rights and/or get a sequel made.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t good space movies/games, of course there are. Star Wars (OG trilogy), Alien, Interstellar (Nolan is an auteur), Riddick movies, etc. and Dead Space and Mass Effect for gaming. The problem is when they take franchises that have no business being in space to space. Franchises with no otherworldly or sci-fi tethers whatsoever.

They’ve done this to more than a few horror franchises to (unsurprisingly) less-than-flattering results. Jason X, Leprechaun 4, Hellraiser: Bloodline, etc. Even F9 finally cashed in on that meme by taking a car to space. Also, Amityville actually went to space, believe it or not. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say they had to have been on crack when they pitched and actually got a studio head to fund that. Or Dracula in space. Yes, that actually happened, too.

Or, going to our favorite hobby, gaming, remember Dino Crisis 3? The game that gave us fucking dinosaurs in space? Yes, they actually gave us that game after 2 contemporary classics (and ignored DC2’s cliffhanger to boot), one survival horror, one pure dino-stomping/slaying action and, to nobody’s shock, it was terrible (and not just because of the stupidity of mutant dinosaurs in space) and ended up killing the franchise. We still haven’t gotten a new game almost 2.5 decades later. It’s also the only DC game that hasn’t been ported to modern consoles.

The only time I didn’t grit my teeth (too much) was when they went to space in Leprechaun 4 because those movies were already b-horror shlock. Nobody goes into those expecting a legit good movie, c’m’on. And Critters 4 because the titular creatures already came from space.

Jason X is fantastic in the "so bad its good way". Certainly much more enjoyable than a bunch of the Friday13th movies that came before.

I thought it was trash then, and I think it's trash now lol. Jason in space? I mean, come on. That's like Freddy in pre-school. Like something a ten-year-old kid would come up with haha.

This trope works much better in gaming IMO; it was awesome when Mario went to space in Super Mario Galaxy and when Wolfenstein went into space in The New Order.

Moonraker is one of the worst James Bond films.

The only thing more embarrassing for the franchise was Bond dressing as a clown in Octopussy.

It's the more blatant version of "jumping the shark", basically.

The Jason comics in space are pretty good.

I agree that Jason X was better than couple previous films. And so was Leprechaun 4 (in the "so bad it's good" kind of way).
But those and the whole going to space thing tends to mean going almost full comedy, even more than the series has been. And you can't go much further from there (though Leprechaun 5 did pull it off), nor you can go back to being serious, except by full reboot. So yeah, space is a series dead end.

I reckon the first 3/4 of the film is pretty good. But yeah, it gets a bit stupid when they go to space.

Or Amityville in Space. Only reason I can think of for why anybody would come up with that: