While narrative films ultimately exist to entertain, the commercial reality that they also exist to make money is never buried too far from the surface. In some cases the profit motive is garishly apparent. In 2013 Walt Disney Pictures released Oz the Great and Powerful, a CGI-heavy fantasy film directed by Sam Raimi. Inspired by L. Frank Baum’s series of popular children’s novels, it clearly also exploited ongoing audience affection for King Vidor’s 1939 film The Wizard of Oz – and effectively acts as a prequel to it – as well as popular Broadway musical Wicked, effectively a prequel to The Wizard of Oz in its own right.

The project’s origins are as patently transparent: in 2010 Disney released Alice in Wonderland, a CGI-heavy update of the Lewis Carroll novel and Disney animated adaptation. It was directed by Tim Burton, starred Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, and grossed somewhere in the region of a billion dollars in cinemas alone. Looking around for another property to adapt, Disney’s development teams must have found Baum’s Oz novels irresistible. They even approached Johnny Depp to play the lead character: showman and magician Oscar “Oz” Diggs, who travels by misadventure to a colourful fantasy realm also called Oz. Depp turned the project down, as did second choice Robert Downey Jr.

You can see the logic in Disney hiring Sam Raimi to direct: like Tim Burton he was a commercially successful director with a strong visual aesthetic and a demonstrated track record in franchise pictures. I assume it was Raimi that went to bat for the film’s lead actor James Franco – the two had made three Spider-Man pictures together. It was a terrible choice, one in a seemingly never-ending line of poor decisions. Franco simply does not fit the part, and transforms Oz into someone actively insincere and unlikeable. Poor scripting betrays any other actor’s attempts to convince, with the likes of Michelle Williams, Rachel Weisz, and Mila Kunis all effectively pushed under the bus.

The story feels suspiciously inspired by Gregory Maguire’s novel – and subsequent Broadway musical – Wicked. While the film does adopt its own story, it still feels deeply inspired by Maguire’s work without having the decency to option his work.

To his credit Raimi fully commits to the film’s original 3D presentation, delivering a combination of vivid colour and aggressively three-dimensional CGI backgrounds. Unfortunately these same techniques render the film as deeply artificial and visually jarring in 2D – the format in which almost every viewer today will see it. It was a hugely expensive production, yet ultimately looks cheap.

It is honestly an awkward adaptation. Baum’s Oz books share a particularly whimsical and imaginative set-up, while Vidor’s 1939 musical film translates that set-up with a deeply earnest quality. Raimi’s prequel feels cynical – not just cynically made, but weirdly reluctant to properly embrace its own source material. Its protagonist is close to an anti-hero at times. A musical routine featuring the famous Muchkins is cut short as something cringe-worthy and embarrassing. A lot of the design work – particularly the Wicked Witch of the West and the flying monkeys (now baboons) – is deliberately dark in tone and tinged with horror, yet it sits uncomfortably alongside small girls made of china (an admittedly very good Joey King) and garishly coloured landscapes.

Oz the Great and Powerful feels like a rough pitch by an accountant: copy another hit, swap out similar actors and director, make things a bit dark and creepy, build it in 3D CGI, step back and see the profits roll in. That it is as bad as it is, that’s entirely on Disney. That it still made half a billion dollars in cinemas? That part is on us.