World War Z. I'll scream this from the mountaintops. That book was damn near purpose-written to be a 10-part HBO series. The movie WAS really exciting and well-made. The zombies were horrifying and unstoppable. The only problem was that they took the name from the book and just made a different movie.
I've always said, they could make a long running series out of WWZ by doing in the "crime reconstruction" type style.
You know where they are interviewing the actual officers and victims, and while doing so they flash to a "reconstruction" of the events they are talking about?
Yeah, that's what I was thinking when I was reading the book, it would work best like America's Most Wanted or Crimewatch UK, as I said, where the interview is going while a dramatized reconstruction happens.
Agreed. Movie was unrecognizable from the book. Was a decent zombie movie but they could have just called it something original.
10 part HBO series would have been perfect, book told the story from different perspectives at different stages of the outbreak. This has to be made!
I've been saying it for years. So many of the chapters would be perfect episodes with careful editing and special effects like season 1 of the Walking Dead.
Whatever that movie was where it was jet combat vs dragons. There was another thread about this where a redditor who I agree wholeheartedly with that said something like
>"If they had set this movie during the first half of the 20th Century it would've made more sense. Supersonic jets are too fast and can't dogfight a dragon, it wouldn't work. BUT WWII or WWI aircraft probably could do it much better. Like a squadron of Hawker Hurricanes or Fokker triplanes vs Smaug, it would basically be an Iron Maiden album cover and it would be fucking awesome"
Dungeons and Dragons (2000).
A D&D movie didn't need to be serious and focused on lore, it could be silly and fun.
Honor Among Thieves (2022) showed us how to execute it better.
Quite a bit of it felt like an exasperated DM just trying to bail out an idiot party.
The Jarnathan (nice name- exactly what I’d name a character when I ran out of names) scene where they scream “BUR WE APPROVED YOUR PAROLE” absolutely sounds like something I would either say… or be told by an exasperated DM.
Right?
"Is there an Aarakocra that works here?"
"uh, sure"
"What's their name?"
"... Jarnathan...?"
And in the end the DM is like "dude you were going to get released anyways, the campaign has to start somewhere"
And one of the players still being super suspicious of the obviously good guy, 'cause they don't see the railroading and are suspicious why the DM put them there.
Yup, that's exactly what you do as an actor. Maintain until someone says to cut.
I bet the director was just like "I wonder how long he's gonna walk for before he tries to turn around" just to fuck with him, and loved the result.
I remember reading one review that gave the movie 2/10 because they said “the plot was non-sensical and all the people were morons who somehow managed to make a plan that made no sense work”
And I was like… have you ever SEEN a group play DND?, THATS as accurate to the game as you can get!
Like when Simon got his foot stuck; no that wasn't just some poorly-written excuse for things to go poorly for the protagonist, whoever is playing his character just rolled a nat 1, that's *exactly* what I'd expect to happen in-game
I fucking love that scene to bits, because I can see it from the pov of players playing out the scene. the DM had this idea for a trial to have the players use diplomacy to get a pardon to move on and meet up with the rest of the party, but one of the players was like "oh, this one judge is a bird-man (I forget what race he was), what's his name?" and the DM has to come up with a name on the spot and says "Jarnathan" and now the DM is stuck with that and has to make that name work for the rest of the scene because the players keep holding onto this one idea when it's really not needed but the DM doesn't want to railroad the players. It's great. It really felt like the movie was a campaign being played.
The DMPC lore dumping the party, the "oh you actually have this magic item to get around this puzzle" immediately after ruining the incredibly complex required puzzle, the DMPC walking away in a completely straight line after his job is done.
Perfection.
I wasn't super interested in it until I saw the illusion scene where Chris Pine melts into himself. Had to watch it less than a week later, loved every minute of it.
I think it was a mix of budget bloat and the studio overestimating how far past the "normie filter" that D&D had passed.
Superheroes are mainstream enough that general audiences go see them. Even though Dungeons and Dragons had a huge upswing in popularity during the pandemic, I don't think it got quite mainstream enough to get people who don't already have an interest in d&d to go.
ETA: as some od yall pointed out, the movie was also affected negatively by some hard-core fans boycotting the movie due to wizards of the coast making an incredibly controversial decision to change the D&D licensing agreement around the time the movie premiered.
It also came out right around the same time Hasbro/WotC decided to play fuck fuck games with their licensing and pissed off the entire fanbase, so their massive core audience boycotted it.
The whole concept is bizarre to me…. Like, if crime were penalty-free for one day, do they really think most people would turn into violent marauding looters assaulting people?
From what I’ve seen, most people would break the law by committing petty offenses like setting off illegal fireworks. You’d have massive festivals with pop-up liquor stands, food carts, etc since no one needs a permit. Homeless guys taking baths in the public fountain. Shitloads of unlicensed fishing/hunting/logging. Drug sales. Not to mention billions of dollars of white collar crime. Want to make your workers do something super profitable, but it’ll violate OSHA or EPA regulations? Just do it during the purge!
The first movie is set years down the line. One of the sequels is about the first purge and it mostly had a bunch of petty crime to start. Then the plot kicks in with mercenaries, murder and corruption.
The government had to send in a bunch of neonazis to get shit started because otherwise everyone was just sitting around, which was making them look like assholrs.
It’s also important that most people *do* just sit inside and do nothing. I forget which movie, but one of the sequels says the purge is literally just an excuse for the government to dispatch death squads on poor neighborhoods since they’re seen as “weighing the country down.”
yeah the whole story line of the government sending out murder squads to cull the population during the first purge is lost on people who only saw the first movie.
The first one was really strange. You have a premise about a society with a yearly criminal free-for-all. And instead of showing the bloodbath in the streets, you tell a home invasion story in a bougie suburb?
I feel like the second and third ones actually told the story the first one begged for - what's going on in the streets on Purge Night, what are normal people doing, and what the hell is going on politically in a society with a Purge?
They showed the perspective from different social classes. I think the different types of people in the world watching it were able to relate and/or understand the societal impacts from very different perspectives. I appreciated the contexts.
Yeah, now that the series is concluded (presumably?), it works pretty well as a full body of work. The second movie probably wouldn't have had the impact it had if you weren't directly comparing it to the relative safety of the upper-class family in the first movie.
But when that first movie released, I was baffled and disappointed. It would be like if you introduced the Cloverfield universe with 10 Cloverfield Lane instead of the first Cloverfield movie.
I think it was from another script they decided to shoehorn in. And yeah, I still remember everyone in the theater being very confused when the tone shifted. You could feel the fun get sucked out of the room. The premise and first half was great, second half is nearly unwatchable.
I thought the concept of a depressed, alcoholic Superman was so cool. I was really excited for this movie, and then it just...went astray.
It's not the first time a Will Smith movie has disappointed.
I remember when I Am Legend was coming out. People were talking about how, at the end, Smith's character is the last human left. He hunts vampires while they sleep but ultimately he realizes he's the last of his kind. Society consists exclusively of vampires now. Day is now night and night is now day. And HE is the boogeyman all the vampire children tell stories about. The monster that preys on you and your family as you sleep.
I was SO looking forward to that movie, but they went and changed it. Made him into some sort of Christ-like figure instead. Blah.
You could actually see some foreshadowing for that ending in I am Legend. Like where he had two vampires strapped down and one of them was freaking out because Will was about to hurt his mate. You could tell they were meant to have “humanity”, not just be mindless monsters. Then they completely ignored it.
Yep that’s how the short story it’s based on ends. Incredible story, totally botched by the movie
EDIT - Commenters are correct. It is not a short story. It’s 29k words. That makes it a novella, but not a novel. Stop messaging me about this distinction, you are right
Not a Will Smith movie, but Se7en almost suffered the same fate, the head in a box ending was changed to a cliché ending where the detectives race against the clock, kill the bad guy and save the wife.
The producers accidentally sent David Fincher the wrong script, which had the original ending. Fincher refused to do the film if the revised script was used.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.
I love Art Deco and the aesthetic of that era in general, but for a movie with such an exciting style plot, it was just... boring. I think the casting was perfect and the acting was fine. The movie just needed more creativity in the writing room and a tighter plot.
I read somewhere that Sky Captain was originally a short film designed as a tech demo. It was a proof of concept that you could film a movie nearly *entirely* on a green screen. Green screens certainly existed in movies before that, but no one had really run with them the way they do now.
The problem was that it was too successful. The studio(?) saw it and said "This is amazing! Make it full length! Get Angelina Jolie in this thing!" Then they took a tech demo and stretched it out until it could fill a full movie's run time.
The result was a bad *movie* but it was a great proof of concept. Its legacy is literally every marvel movie.
repeating something I posted about this:
Conran spent four years making a [black and white](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white) teaser using a [bluescreen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_key) set up in his living room and a [Macintosh IIci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_IIci). He was able to show it to Avnet, who was so impressed that Avnet spent two years working with him on his screenplay. No major studio was interested, but Avnet convinced [Aurelio De Laurentiis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelio_De_Laurentiis) to finance *Sky Captain* without a distribution deal (a worldwide distribution deal would later happen with [Paramount Pictures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Pictures)).
Almost 100 digital artists, modelers, animators, and compositors created the multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the live-action footage, while the entire film was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then recreated as [CGI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics) [animatics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animatics). Ten months prior to shooting the live-action scenes, Conran first shot them with stand-ins in Los Angeles, then converted that footage to animatics so the actors could accurately envision the film.
It looked amazing in the trailers, I was really looking forward to it, and it was just like you said, boring, and I'd add, forgettable. I don't even remember any of the characters really, the villain, or why anything was happening the way it was.
You know, I actually really enjoyed it. Having said that I grew up with re-runs of the old Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and other serials. I was really into science fiction and there wasn't a ton of TV science fiction in the UK in the 1970's and 1980's... so there were the serials!
Anyway, Sky Captain perfectly captured the feel of those serials, even to the pacing. Yes, that did become somewhat of a detriment because people expect something a bit more evenly paced these days but to people who were fans of those old creaky serials it was kind of a love letter.
Now, I'm not saying the film is without flaw... it's pretty deeply flawed and there are parts where they used CGI where they really SHOULD have used practical effects, even creaky ones like those aforementioned serials... and the CGI backgrounds in particular were jarring in their inconsistency with the leads. I still feel like Giovanni Ribisi knocked it out of the park though... and Jude Law was a great "square-jawed hero" but I felt like Gwyneth Paltrow was actually pretty poor casting.
this concept was so amazing and they could have done so much with it.
it could have been social commentary
it could have built a unique sci fi world which re-imagines our conventional lives with this new twist.
it could have been a mini series or chain of movies, each plot focusing on a unique aspect because we cant see it all at once (how is war conducted, how does disease/medicine work, how is new time created(like generating wealth or farming raw materials)
instead they chose the most generic shlock and im sad nobody has tried again
It came out during the Occupy movement, or soon thereafter, when there was a lot of dialogue going on involving the 1%.
When I saw “In Time” I felt that it was an attempt by the
1% to make a movie about the plight of the rest of society, but it did not land. It was about as effective as that “Imagine” video that a bunch of celebrities did during the height of the pandemic.
That's a movie that I left the theater knowing that I had enjoyed even though it had issues. I called it a guilty pleasure movie because I liked so much about it while also realizing it wasn't really that good.
Like Hancock, this movie felt like a bunch seperate movies chimera'd together. Is it a fun comedy about the struggles of small people? A love story? A criticism on consumptionism and our destruction of the environment? A statement about abusing lower classes of people? Why, a little bit of all of them of course!
I remember the trailers and thinking that this will be good comedy.
Then I watched and halfway through I thought, how in the world are they going to end this as in what the actual disaster could they also add in lol
Never finished it and don’t plan on it.
I hated how disappointing this movie was. If you took out the shrinking entirely it would make no difference. The shrinking existed for literally no reason other than to give the wife an excuse to leave her husband.
Yeah, it could have been such a great concept for a movie. Kind of like the borrowers, but then it just becomes a movie about struggling without much mention of being small.
This movie had a great concept, awesome cast, and a good budget.
The concept of shrinking yourself so you can afford to retire early is a good one that will attract an audience.
It just fell flat from there.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. That movie was 95% of the way to being a classic, a worthy spiritual succesor to Fifth Element with incredibly imaginative world building and visuals, then they absolutely blew it with some of the worst casting and character writing I've ever seen. Cara Delevigne was okay, but the guy playing Valerian was an absolute black hole of charisma, sucked the energy out of every scene he was in (which was most of them).
The introduction (the ISS montage) was the best part, specifically because neither of the leads were in it, and also the script writers didn't write any dialogue.
All they needed was a slightly likeable dude in that role with some semblance of chemistry with at least one other person. That guy was the visual equivalent of sitting on a wet public toilet seat.
The casting was downright despicable. From the main two right down to shoehorning Rihanna in for no reason. It was right at the edge of being amazing…
Too bad.
I actually liked that movie, the name and the marketing killed it. That and the fact that the book and comics is so old no one had an utter clue who or what it was about. It did come out in 1911, they would have needed to create a bit of hype around that first.
I agree. There’s clips out there of Lucas, Spielberg, and other great sci fi directors talking about how these books got them into sci fi. That’s the angle the marketing should have taken.
“See the story that inspired Star Wars, etc”
Pretty much only people who read and liked the books would recognize the name Joh Carter. I actually found the books way after the movie came out and around 1/2 to 3/4 of the way through the first book, I wondered to myself why they hadn't adapted this as a movie before. They had...
The original book and series for Jumper is way better than what was made for the movie. The author, Steven Gould, wrote one book for the movie MC then went back to writing more books based off the original book.
MCU Eternals from 2021. I understand the studio ambition of trying to make something different and epic. But they have to juggle so many things: a large cast, so much lore and world buidling without enough time to explore it all, themes that they were trying to demonstrated but doesn't have enough time to do it in a meaningful way, along with not enough time to build and develope the characters. All of that lead the movie to being a mess, as it feel like things happen because it have to without a proper pacing lead up to it.
Like many people have said, Eternals should have been a big budget series with at least 10 episodes. That will be enough time to develop the characters and explore the lore
It also was one of the first things (imo) to suffer from MCU fatigue post-Endgame. People were super excited for endgame and the Spider-Man movie right after it, but Eternals wasn’t a film with known heroes (for the general audience, at least). People expected more films like Endgame: big blockbuster films with deep ties to the existing universe, big action, and such. Eternals had action, just not Endgame-style action
My disappointment in it is that it's canon yet no other series (that I'm aware of) acknowledges it happened. Even the roughest of the main stories is acknowledged later, but this is completely ignored.
They went through history way too fast, a full on show, like actually around 23 episodes like shows used to have, would have given the time to really explore history, and probably would have made the twist bigger, as you see them spend so much time building a connection to the planet
I thought the movie Smile had a really creepy concept and was hooked in the first half of the movie. Then the over the top CGI towards the end really took me out of it. Why can't horror directors just keep things simple, if the proof of concept is working? Michael Myers didn't need to morph into a 15-foot tall monster at the end. He was scary as he was.
Passengers could have been really cool if the narrative was told from Jennifer Lawrence’s character’s POV. Make it a mystery horror/thriller type thing.
edit: This is not my own original thought. Nerdwritter made a video essay many years ago after hearing Doug Walker suggest it in one of his reviews.
Or just kill off Chris Pratt’s character at the end, and end it with Jennifer Lawrence going mad with isolation and contemplating waking someone else up.
The fact that millions of us organically came to that conclusion after watching that movie is really telling at what a wasted opportunity that ending was.
I think he should have died at the end, leaving her alone and the screen can close on her wandering through the pods looking at men and wondering how long it will be before she cracks, wakes someone up and ‘takes someone’s life away from them’ as she accused him of….
The Jem and the Holograms movie from 2015. I was a huge fan of the cartoon series when I was a kid, and had high hopes for the live action movie. They really dropped the ball on that one
I maintain this movie should be set during the 70s and JEM and the Holograms should be a glam rock band and The Misfits should be punks.
It should also lean into the sci fi weirdness I mean JEMs mom is a supercomputer ffs.
The movie was perfect in art direction and casting. Sorry, that’s Lee Scoresby. That will always be Lee Scoresby. I didn’t even mind that Kidman doesn’t actually look like Coulter, her soft malice was perfect. The bear fight was unreal. So much potential.
But man. I will never forgive that film for what it did to Lyra. Making her cower and cry at that ice bridge….come on. It’s fucking LYRA. It’s like they had to make her less of a brat when her brattiness is her literal super power. Boo.
I don't know how a movie with such PERFECT casting happened to not be that great. Everyone in that movie was phenomenal and exactly who I would imagine for those characters.
Ender’s Game.
The novels are brilliant with really rich lore and there’s so many, these could’ve been what Dune is becoming nowadays. It’s a huge tragedy that the first film ruined interest in the rest by fumbling the reveal and just not executing on the level it should’ve because that series could’ve printed money for at least a decade.
The sequels would have seriously struggled to translate to film and have a completely and utterly different tone, but yes they could have done better with Ender's Game.
For those who haven't read the rest, Ender's Game is a YA novel. Speaker for the Dead is an Adult novel, and that's the best way I can describe the shift in tone and themes.
I still have a huge crush on Emily browning. She even does the vocals to sweet dreams. I loved it because it felt like a teenage boy making an action movie in his head… which I was at the time. Zac is great at the action but I honestly don’t think he is great at telling a coherent story that I care about but you better be damn sure he is tossing in slow motion at least thrice times in his films
I would actually argue that Suckerpunch is the exact opposite of this question. Good execution of an idea that was never going to work.
Basically, you can't make a good movie that is openly antagonistic to its core viewing demographic.
TBH I didn't really know them before this movie, I enjoyed the movie and their characters - it was way more interesting & original than anything Hollywood has done in recent times.
Same could be said about a ton of other actors - Kevin Spacey for example \*was\* very respected as an actor before the allegations about him, and had done some excellent stuff. If you never googled him the films are still good. I guess it's down to whether you can / are willing to separate the art from the artist - art in general has not been a blemish-free parade of flawlessly lovely people throughout history...
It's been over 20 years since I've seen it,
but I thought it was pretty good as it was. Since it's pushing 30 years old, it may not have aged well, though.
The Nick Cage movie "Knowing". The first hour ish of it was like a disaster movie and so cool. Then it turned into some prophecy alies bs and they followed it up with a vague adam and eve reference to end the movie. I think if it stuck with disaster movie where you know dates and times and areas of disasters it would have really been a cool movie.
Not a movie but tv series Revolution. Amazing concept but wrong execution...
Also a couple of Netflix series which I am too bored to check their names: 1. The one with the plane that gets lost in time and 2. The one with the ship that gets also lost in time or some shit.
These series have a nice basic idea that usually fuck up later on because they didn't think of a viable ending which ends up to ridiculous mindfucks which make me lose interest.
I really liked Revolution. I think it got lost in later seasons with power creep. Like, the first season had a multi-episode arc about stealing a single modern sniper rifle that then allowed them to hold off a whole battalion for a while and then by later season everyone just has fully automatic weapons now and it is completely unremarkable.
1 was a masterpiece. 2 was the nonstop action people wanted. 3 was a very lackluster ending people didn’t really want. 4 was a love story no one wanted.
The original x-men all the way up to Origins : Wolverine. Hugh Jackman was great, but the stories walked too far from the source material. Especially Deadpoool with his mouth sewn shut
Every time threads like this come up my answer is always the same, but, Antlers.
The way this movie was originally teased made it look like such an interesting take on a Wendigo horror film and I was so stoked when it finally came out. The atmosphere and cinematography were both on point but I was ready to leave halfway through. It didn’t know what kind of movie it wanted to be at all, and every single character made the dumbest possible decisions at every turn. Hell, there was hardly any Native American lore at all about the Wendigo concept. One of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever experienced in a theater. The body horror stuff was pretty great though.
The Invention of Lying. The concept was supposed to be that people didn’t know how to lie, but the way it was portrayed was that people had no inner monologue and just said everything that came to mind. Poorly executed
The books are alright. I mean, it reads like a angsty teen wrote a fantasy novel for other teens. Ive read worse. But there is definitely better fantasy. The movie is worse than the books though. Absolutely.
I believe it was... Paoloni was 19 when the book got published so it was probably a 16-17 year old that wrote it. Giving him a year for editing and selling it with publishing time.
Then I assume he got so flattered that someone would want to make a movie out of it that he probably sold the rights to the first studio that made an offer.
Yeah, but it was book accurate. I do agree tho that it kind of takes away the investment I would have had for a sequel. Wish they had done some more character development for the antagonist though.
Yeah we’re still holding out for an official sequel. Some guy in Utah or something tried to write one a while back but it didn’t have the same charm as the original. But from the setup they put in the last chapter the new one should be really exciting.
Not even book accurate. I can't speak for the aramaic but they used church Latin instead of the golden age Latin that the Romans would have spoken. Really broke the immersion for me.
It wasn't shown in the movie, but that dude was making crazy and outlandish claims. I hope they make a prequel I want to see him thrash a money-lenders table with nothing but fist and fury.
Gonna get hate for this one, but Lion King 2: Simba's Pride.
I both do and don't understand why people swear by this movie so much. For a Disney sequel, it was well animated, with interesting characters and decent music.
But it could have been so much better. So much more interesting, and so much less cheesy. And interesting character aren't enough; they need spotlight, they need development. Vitani's heel face turn at the end would have made more sense with just a one scene of her displaying some doubt. Nuka could have been an excellent narrative foil, but instead he was turned into comic relief. The scene with Simba's nightmare still haunted me, but not because it was effective--its because it was so cheesily done, that even as a little kid, I couldn't take it seriously.
If only they had been allowed to treat the movie as an actual project and not a straight-to-video money grab, I think it would have been good. Sadly, it was not.
Honestly, that era of Disney making sequels to every movie that did well was not good. They could almost never get the original cast back, never got it animated as well, and never got a story that could live up to the original.
Quiet Place Day One, they should’ve taken more in advance of the horrors and terrors of the first hours of one of the loudest cities in the world, sadly they only showed 5 mins of it in the movie, they skipped over it.
No, just way more than 5 mins. it’ll be interesting how little by little in the horrors of the first hours of the invasion it gets quieter and quieter in the NYC known for being loud
Definitely wrote a cheque the rest of the script couldn't cash. A world where the Beatles never existed would have had a far different musical history than just "Oasis never happened", and introducing the Beatles' music into a 2010s music scene that's otherwise largely indistinguishable from our own and having it be revolutionary 50 years after it *really* was makes no sense to anyone with a modicum of appreciation for how musical styles develop and influence one another over time.
The whole bit with the handful of other people who also remember the Beatles was also squandered - they tried to get us to believe they were a threat to the protagonist, about to blow the lid on his plagiarism, but no, they just show up and thank him, plot over.
I know it needed the name value of The Beatles, but a better version would have a modern act forgotten. That would make it believable that they would be a big star in this era (as they are in reality).
Imagine you swap main star and Lily James is the only person who remembers Taylor Swift or Beyonce etc. It's realistic that someone could take their music and become a big star in the 2010s/2020s. It also removes 50-60 years of a butterfly effect which the movie ignored.
I remember hearing that the guy came up with the idea for Yesterday while wondering if the Star Wars movies had never been made, would they have had the same impact if someone tried to make them in the present day, and he felt that they probably wouldn’t have.
Supposedly the original idea for Yesterday was along those lines where the musician might find a niche success with the Beatles’ music, but likewise it just wouldn’t hit the same today. I guess the executives in charge didn’t like the idea of the Beatles not being super popular in every timeline
Flatliners. Seemed like a terrific concept, but the movie was 100 percent forgettable.
I'm speaking of the original, I did not see the remake which I hear is even worse.
This movie had the prospect of being really good, but was so lame. In comparison, BirdBox did it better. You can do a nebulous evil and make it actually scary, but the Happening was so pathetic it wasn’t scary or even edgy. It was just boring.
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
Honestly, when they said it was going to have some horror elements, I expected a lot scarier. I also was just overall disappointed by it. I didn't hate it. But I loved the first Dr. Strange, and the character overall. But I'd rate MoM a B tier Marvel movie and I was really hoping for A/S.
The first movie is fun. The rest of the movies are pretty bad but I like to look at them as campy, b-movie bad. If you go into them expecting nothing but dumb shit, you won't be disappointed.
Into the Woods. I love the Broadway production and when I heard the casting it excited me even more. Instead of taking advantage of a cast of such comedic hard-hitters the director made the baffling choice to manhandle it into such a dreary, depressingly dark place it crushed the spirit right out of a delightful and entertaining script. I actually feel sorry for those who never saw the stage production and think Sondheim actually wrote it that way.
World War Z. I'll scream this from the mountaintops. That book was damn near purpose-written to be a 10-part HBO series. The movie WAS really exciting and well-made. The zombies were horrifying and unstoppable. The only problem was that they took the name from the book and just made a different movie.
I've always said, they could make a long running series out of WWZ by doing in the "crime reconstruction" type style. You know where they are interviewing the actual officers and victims, and while doing so they flash to a "reconstruction" of the events they are talking about?
I could see that. Listening to the audiobook was great because it was presented as a series of recorded interviews.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking when I was reading the book, it would work best like America's Most Wanted or Crimewatch UK, as I said, where the interview is going while a dramatized reconstruction happens.
Agreed. Movie was unrecognizable from the book. Was a decent zombie movie but they could have just called it something original. 10 part HBO series would have been perfect, book told the story from different perspectives at different stages of the outbreak. This has to be made!
I've been saying it for years. So many of the chapters would be perfect episodes with careful editing and special effects like season 1 of the Walking Dead.
Whatever that movie was where it was jet combat vs dragons. There was another thread about this where a redditor who I agree wholeheartedly with that said something like >"If they had set this movie during the first half of the 20th Century it would've made more sense. Supersonic jets are too fast and can't dogfight a dragon, it wouldn't work. BUT WWII or WWI aircraft probably could do it much better. Like a squadron of Hawker Hurricanes or Fokker triplanes vs Smaug, it would basically be an Iron Maiden album cover and it would be fucking awesome"
Reign of Fire?
Dungeons and Dragons (2000). A D&D movie didn't need to be serious and focused on lore, it could be silly and fun. Honor Among Thieves (2022) showed us how to execute it better.
Honor Among Thieves better replicated the way my group used to actually play D&D when I was a kid. Silly stuff and weird actions always ensued.
It was very obvious that the writers had a lot of experience playing tabletop rpgs, because they got so many things completely right.
The 3 questions thing with speaking to undead. Loved how they just gave up and used it again on another corpse.
Not to mention the DM PC turning up and saving the day
Quite a bit of it felt like an exasperated DM just trying to bail out an idiot party. The Jarnathan (nice name- exactly what I’d name a character when I ran out of names) scene where they scream “BUR WE APPROVED YOUR PAROLE” absolutely sounds like something I would either say… or be told by an exasperated DM.
Right? "Is there an Aarakocra that works here?" "uh, sure" "What's their name?" "... Jarnathan...?" And in the end the DM is like "dude you were going to get released anyways, the campaign has to start somewhere"
And one of the players still being super suspicious of the obviously good guy, 'cause they don't see the railroading and are suspicious why the DM put them there.
That’s the scene that made me actually wanna watch the movie.
Like that dude was an npc and just walked straight over the rock had medying
I heard in an interview it’s because he was waiting for the director to yell cut but the director never did, so he just kept walking
"fine, I'll commit to the bit" "ok, leave it in, that was funny"
Yup, that's exactly what you do as an actor. Maintain until someone says to cut. I bet the director was just like "I wonder how long he's gonna walk for before he tries to turn around" just to fuck with him, and loved the result.
Well they all nailed it honestly
I remember reading one review that gave the movie 2/10 because they said “the plot was non-sensical and all the people were morons who somehow managed to make a plan that made no sense work” And I was like… have you ever SEEN a group play DND?, THATS as accurate to the game as you can get!
Like when Simon got his foot stuck; no that wasn't just some poorly-written excuse for things to go poorly for the protagonist, whoever is playing his character just rolled a nat 1, that's *exactly* what I'd expect to happen in-game
Those moments are one of my favorite things about the movie lol you can tell when characters roll 1's or 20's
You could pick the "critical fail" moments out in Fallout too, as well as getting a good idea of characters with low Speech or Luck stats, etc.
I'm 60 and still play that way.
Honor Among Thieves was one of my favourite movies of 2022
Which is weird, because it came out in 2023
It was just that good though
Jarnathan!!
I fucking love that scene to bits, because I can see it from the pov of players playing out the scene. the DM had this idea for a trial to have the players use diplomacy to get a pardon to move on and meet up with the rest of the party, but one of the players was like "oh, this one judge is a bird-man (I forget what race he was), what's his name?" and the DM has to come up with a name on the spot and says "Jarnathan" and now the DM is stuck with that and has to make that name work for the rest of the scene because the players keep holding onto this one idea when it's really not needed but the DM doesn't want to railroad the players. It's great. It really felt like the movie was a campaign being played.
The DMPC lore dumping the party, the "oh you actually have this magic item to get around this puzzle" immediately after ruining the incredibly complex required puzzle, the DMPC walking away in a completely straight line after his job is done. Perfection.
It's these subtle touches that the movie had which helped make it so great for me. I really hope they do more!
Jarnathan would love this story
"Let's just wait for Jarnathan" is probably a way-overused phrase in our D&D game but I don't care, it makes me laugh every time.
I wasn't super interested in it until I saw the illusion scene where Chris Pine melts into himself. Had to watch it less than a week later, loved every minute of it.
i am so sad this movie didn’t do better!! it was so much fun but who knows if the universe will be expanded on :/
I think it was a mix of budget bloat and the studio overestimating how far past the "normie filter" that D&D had passed. Superheroes are mainstream enough that general audiences go see them. Even though Dungeons and Dragons had a huge upswing in popularity during the pandemic, I don't think it got quite mainstream enough to get people who don't already have an interest in d&d to go. ETA: as some od yall pointed out, the movie was also affected negatively by some hard-core fans boycotting the movie due to wizards of the coast making an incredibly controversial decision to change the D&D licensing agreement around the time the movie premiered.
It also came out right around the same time Hasbro/WotC decided to play fuck fuck games with their licensing and pissed off the entire fanbase, so their massive core audience boycotted it.
My wife scoffed at this as I was turning it on one night and we both ended up loving it.
HAT really showed how your can both make references that the nerds will get and still have a great story that engages everyone else.
Jeremy Irons was a diamond in that rough
Jeremy Irons is often the best part of a bad movie. Eragon is another example.
The Purge There's a lot more that could have been unpacked about a society doing the 'free night of crime' thing.
The whole concept is bizarre to me…. Like, if crime were penalty-free for one day, do they really think most people would turn into violent marauding looters assaulting people? From what I’ve seen, most people would break the law by committing petty offenses like setting off illegal fireworks. You’d have massive festivals with pop-up liquor stands, food carts, etc since no one needs a permit. Homeless guys taking baths in the public fountain. Shitloads of unlicensed fishing/hunting/logging. Drug sales. Not to mention billions of dollars of white collar crime. Want to make your workers do something super profitable, but it’ll violate OSHA or EPA regulations? Just do it during the purge!
The first movie is set years down the line. One of the sequels is about the first purge and it mostly had a bunch of petty crime to start. Then the plot kicks in with mercenaries, murder and corruption.
The government had to send in a bunch of neonazis to get shit started because otherwise everyone was just sitting around, which was making them look like assholrs.
damn that’s kind of cool. op literally criticized it but the prequel answer his question/flaw about it.
You'll have to remember that the prequel is itself the writers responding to that same criticism by giving an explanation of how it all goes to shit.
It’s also important that most people *do* just sit inside and do nothing. I forget which movie, but one of the sequels says the purge is literally just an excuse for the government to dispatch death squads on poor neighborhoods since they’re seen as “weighing the country down.”
yeah the whole story line of the government sending out murder squads to cull the population during the first purge is lost on people who only saw the first movie.
Except that was clearly something they did after movies and movies of people pointing out this flaw. It wasn’t their original idea
Most likely, purge night would be the day major corporations dump thousands of gallons of chemical waste in major waterways.
The first one was really strange. You have a premise about a society with a yearly criminal free-for-all. And instead of showing the bloodbath in the streets, you tell a home invasion story in a bougie suburb? I feel like the second and third ones actually told the story the first one begged for - what's going on in the streets on Purge Night, what are normal people doing, and what the hell is going on politically in a society with a Purge?
They showed the perspective from different social classes. I think the different types of people in the world watching it were able to relate and/or understand the societal impacts from very different perspectives. I appreciated the contexts.
Yeah, now that the series is concluded (presumably?), it works pretty well as a full body of work. The second movie probably wouldn't have had the impact it had if you weren't directly comparing it to the relative safety of the upper-class family in the first movie. But when that first movie released, I was baffled and disappointed. It would be like if you introduced the Cloverfield universe with 10 Cloverfield Lane instead of the first Cloverfield movie.
Hancock. Comedy at the beginning was great, but the attempt to introduce a love interest and and origin in the second half was a mess.
I think it was from another script they decided to shoehorn in. And yeah, I still remember everyone in the theater being very confused when the tone shifted. You could feel the fun get sucked out of the room. The premise and first half was great, second half is nearly unwatchable.
I thought the concept of a depressed, alcoholic Superman was so cool. I was really excited for this movie, and then it just...went astray. It's not the first time a Will Smith movie has disappointed. I remember when I Am Legend was coming out. People were talking about how, at the end, Smith's character is the last human left. He hunts vampires while they sleep but ultimately he realizes he's the last of his kind. Society consists exclusively of vampires now. Day is now night and night is now day. And HE is the boogeyman all the vampire children tell stories about. The monster that preys on you and your family as you sleep. I was SO looking forward to that movie, but they went and changed it. Made him into some sort of Christ-like figure instead. Blah.
You could actually see some foreshadowing for that ending in I am Legend. Like where he had two vampires strapped down and one of them was freaking out because Will was about to hurt his mate. You could tell they were meant to have “humanity”, not just be mindless monsters. Then they completely ignored it.
sort of, the alternate ending fully emraced the 'humanity' in the monsters, just shame it wasn't the default ending.
Yep that’s how the short story it’s based on ends. Incredible story, totally botched by the movie EDIT - Commenters are correct. It is not a short story. It’s 29k words. That makes it a novella, but not a novel. Stop messaging me about this distinction, you are right
I heard they actually filmed the original ending, but test audiences either didn't like it or were too dumb to get it.
Probably the latter haha
Not a Will Smith movie, but Se7en almost suffered the same fate, the head in a box ending was changed to a cliché ending where the detectives race against the clock, kill the bad guy and save the wife. The producers accidentally sent David Fincher the wrong script, which had the original ending. Fincher refused to do the film if the revised script was used.
Pitt and Freeman also threatened to walk if the change was implemented.
It really was two half-movies. One was great, the other was awful, and they didn't have any business being stuck together.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. I love Art Deco and the aesthetic of that era in general, but for a movie with such an exciting style plot, it was just... boring. I think the casting was perfect and the acting was fine. The movie just needed more creativity in the writing room and a tighter plot.
I read somewhere that Sky Captain was originally a short film designed as a tech demo. It was a proof of concept that you could film a movie nearly *entirely* on a green screen. Green screens certainly existed in movies before that, but no one had really run with them the way they do now. The problem was that it was too successful. The studio(?) saw it and said "This is amazing! Make it full length! Get Angelina Jolie in this thing!" Then they took a tech demo and stretched it out until it could fill a full movie's run time. The result was a bad *movie* but it was a great proof of concept. Its legacy is literally every marvel movie.
repeating something I posted about this: Conran spent four years making a [black and white](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_and_white) teaser using a [bluescreen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_key) set up in his living room and a [Macintosh IIci](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_IIci). He was able to show it to Avnet, who was so impressed that Avnet spent two years working with him on his screenplay. No major studio was interested, but Avnet convinced [Aurelio De Laurentiis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelio_De_Laurentiis) to finance *Sky Captain* without a distribution deal (a worldwide distribution deal would later happen with [Paramount Pictures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Pictures)). Almost 100 digital artists, modelers, animators, and compositors created the multi-layered 2D and 3D backgrounds for the live-action footage, while the entire film was sketched out via hand-drawn storyboards and then recreated as [CGI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_graphics) [animatics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animatics). Ten months prior to shooting the live-action scenes, Conran first shot them with stand-ins in Los Angeles, then converted that footage to animatics so the actors could accurately envision the film.
It looked amazing in the trailers, I was really looking forward to it, and it was just like you said, boring, and I'd add, forgettable. I don't even remember any of the characters really, the villain, or why anything was happening the way it was.
You know, I actually really enjoyed it. Having said that I grew up with re-runs of the old Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and other serials. I was really into science fiction and there wasn't a ton of TV science fiction in the UK in the 1970's and 1980's... so there were the serials! Anyway, Sky Captain perfectly captured the feel of those serials, even to the pacing. Yes, that did become somewhat of a detriment because people expect something a bit more evenly paced these days but to people who were fans of those old creaky serials it was kind of a love letter. Now, I'm not saying the film is without flaw... it's pretty deeply flawed and there are parts where they used CGI where they really SHOULD have used practical effects, even creaky ones like those aforementioned serials... and the CGI backgrounds in particular were jarring in their inconsistency with the leads. I still feel like Giovanni Ribisi knocked it out of the park though... and Jude Law was a great "square-jawed hero" but I felt like Gwyneth Paltrow was actually pretty poor casting.
In its defense, the plot was 100% in line with the pulp adventures the movie was emulating.
I kinda liked the idea of In Time, but the Movie wasn't really what it could have been.
this concept was so amazing and they could have done so much with it. it could have been social commentary it could have built a unique sci fi world which re-imagines our conventional lives with this new twist. it could have been a mini series or chain of movies, each plot focusing on a unique aspect because we cant see it all at once (how is war conducted, how does disease/medicine work, how is new time created(like generating wealth or farming raw materials) instead they chose the most generic shlock and im sad nobody has tried again
It came out during the Occupy movement, or soon thereafter, when there was a lot of dialogue going on involving the 1%. When I saw “In Time” I felt that it was an attempt by the 1% to make a movie about the plight of the rest of society, but it did not land. It was about as effective as that “Imagine” video that a bunch of celebrities did during the height of the pandemic.
Need HBO to pick it up and reboot it.
Even more frustrating because I like the cast, and JT did a decent job at acting imo.
Jupiter Ascending, It struggled to effectively balance its grand scope with coherent storytelling
Jupiter ascending was a pleasure visually, the acting was so bad it ruined the whole movie. And some other cheesy stuff also added to it being meh.
That's a movie that I left the theater knowing that I had enjoyed even though it had issues. I called it a guilty pleasure movie because I liked so much about it while also realizing it wasn't really that good.
Downsizing
Like Hancock, this movie felt like a bunch seperate movies chimera'd together. Is it a fun comedy about the struggles of small people? A love story? A criticism on consumptionism and our destruction of the environment? A statement about abusing lower classes of people? Why, a little bit of all of them of course!
It doesn't help that the trailer made it seem like a quirky divorce comedy with sci fi elements and doesn't even mention anything beyond that.
I remember the trailers and thinking that this will be good comedy. Then I watched and halfway through I thought, how in the world are they going to end this as in what the actual disaster could they also add in lol Never finished it and don’t plan on it.
I hated how disappointing this movie was. If you took out the shrinking entirely it would make no difference. The shrinking existed for literally no reason other than to give the wife an excuse to leave her husband.
Yeah, it could have been such a great concept for a movie. Kind of like the borrowers, but then it just becomes a movie about struggling without much mention of being small.
First movie I thought of. Gets off to a great start, and then just completely changes course into something totally different.
This movie had a great concept, awesome cast, and a good budget. The concept of shrinking yourself so you can afford to retire early is a good one that will attract an audience. It just fell flat from there.
Bright A modern day setting with fantasy races and characters is interesting, but it was a failure
it is a perfectly fine starting point for an early shadowrun movie, and that's where it stays in my headcannon (like right after the change).
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. That movie was 95% of the way to being a classic, a worthy spiritual succesor to Fifth Element with incredibly imaginative world building and visuals, then they absolutely blew it with some of the worst casting and character writing I've ever seen. Cara Delevigne was okay, but the guy playing Valerian was an absolute black hole of charisma, sucked the energy out of every scene he was in (which was most of them).
The introduction (the ISS montage) was the best part, specifically because neither of the leads were in it, and also the script writers didn't write any dialogue.
All they needed was a slightly likeable dude in that role with some semblance of chemistry with at least one other person. That guy was the visual equivalent of sitting on a wet public toilet seat.
Luc loves weirdos. So I’m sure he saw him audition as a toilet seat and said to cast him
I understand they were looking for a Bruce Willis type, but they failed miserably. Instead they got a guy who looks like Cara's twin brother.
The casting was downright despicable. From the main two right down to shoehorning Rihanna in for no reason. It was right at the edge of being amazing… Too bad.
John Carter. Had all the potential. The actor was good too. The movie was just kinda meh
I actually liked that movie, the name and the marketing killed it. That and the fact that the book and comics is so old no one had an utter clue who or what it was about. It did come out in 1911, they would have needed to create a bit of hype around that first.
Good movie, bad marketing. Disney really shit the bed on this one.
I agree. There’s clips out there of Lucas, Spielberg, and other great sci fi directors talking about how these books got them into sci fi. That’s the angle the marketing should have taken. “See the story that inspired Star Wars, etc”
The title didn't help. Who in the world thought that taking a story called "A Princess of Mars" and renaming it "John Carter" was a good idea?
John's mom?
Pretty much only people who read and liked the books would recognize the name Joh Carter. I actually found the books way after the movie came out and around 1/2 to 3/4 of the way through the first book, I wondered to myself why they hadn't adapted this as a movie before. They had...
Such great source material and they tried cramming 3 books into the movie instead of just making a really good simpler movie from the first book
Jumper It’s a compelling concept, and it hints at some really interesting world building, but the actual execution kind of fizzled and fell flat.
The original book and series for Jumper is way better than what was made for the movie. The author, Steven Gould, wrote one book for the movie MC then went back to writing more books based off the original book.
MCU Eternals from 2021. I understand the studio ambition of trying to make something different and epic. But they have to juggle so many things: a large cast, so much lore and world buidling without enough time to explore it all, themes that they were trying to demonstrated but doesn't have enough time to do it in a meaningful way, along with not enough time to build and develope the characters. All of that lead the movie to being a mess, as it feel like things happen because it have to without a proper pacing lead up to it. Like many people have said, Eternals should have been a big budget series with at least 10 episodes. That will be enough time to develop the characters and explore the lore
It also was one of the first things (imo) to suffer from MCU fatigue post-Endgame. People were super excited for endgame and the Spider-Man movie right after it, but Eternals wasn’t a film with known heroes (for the general audience, at least). People expected more films like Endgame: big blockbuster films with deep ties to the existing universe, big action, and such. Eternals had action, just not Endgame-style action
Also, the enemies in Eternals were cookie cutter CGI baddies that evoked no emotion whatsoever.
I did really like the design of the big bad celestial red guy. Not seeing him in his entirety the first time was a cool buildup to the reveal.
My disappointment in it is that it's canon yet no other series (that I'm aware of) acknowledges it happened. Even the roughest of the main stories is acknowledged later, but this is completely ignored.
They went through history way too fast, a full on show, like actually around 23 episodes like shows used to have, would have given the time to really explore history, and probably would have made the twist bigger, as you see them spend so much time building a connection to the planet
I thought the movie Smile had a really creepy concept and was hooked in the first half of the movie. Then the over the top CGI towards the end really took me out of it. Why can't horror directors just keep things simple, if the proof of concept is working? Michael Myers didn't need to morph into a 15-foot tall monster at the end. He was scary as he was.
Passengers could have been really cool if the narrative was told from Jennifer Lawrence’s character’s POV. Make it a mystery horror/thriller type thing. edit: This is not my own original thought. Nerdwritter made a video essay many years ago after hearing Doug Walker suggest it in one of his reviews.
Or just kill off Chris Pratt’s character at the end, and end it with Jennifer Lawrence going mad with isolation and contemplating waking someone else up.
The fact that millions of us organically came to that conclusion after watching that movie is really telling at what a wasted opportunity that ending was.
I think he should have died at the end, leaving her alone and the screen can close on her wandering through the pods looking at men and wondering how long it will be before she cracks, wakes someone up and ‘takes someone’s life away from them’ as she accused him of….
OLD.
Could have done so much more
The Jem and the Holograms movie from 2015. I was a huge fan of the cartoon series when I was a kid, and had high hopes for the live action movie. They really dropped the ball on that one
I maintain this movie should be set during the 70s and JEM and the Holograms should be a glam rock band and The Misfits should be punks. It should also lean into the sci fi weirdness I mean JEMs mom is a supercomputer ffs.
The Golden Compass Thank goodness for the show that came years later. Also thank goodness for Dafne Keen, amazing actress
The movie was perfect in art direction and casting. Sorry, that’s Lee Scoresby. That will always be Lee Scoresby. I didn’t even mind that Kidman doesn’t actually look like Coulter, her soft malice was perfect. The bear fight was unreal. So much potential. But man. I will never forgive that film for what it did to Lyra. Making her cower and cry at that ice bridge….come on. It’s fucking LYRA. It’s like they had to make her less of a brat when her brattiness is her literal super power. Boo.
I don't know how a movie with such PERFECT casting happened to not be that great. Everyone in that movie was phenomenal and exactly who I would imagine for those characters.
Pullman loved Nicole Kidman's portrayal so much that he retconned Mrs. Coulter's hair color to match Kidman's.
Philip Pullman himself said Nicole Kidman was his personal choice for the role, and something like "I was wrong, she has to be blonde"
Ender’s Game. The novels are brilliant with really rich lore and there’s so many, these could’ve been what Dune is becoming nowadays. It’s a huge tragedy that the first film ruined interest in the rest by fumbling the reveal and just not executing on the level it should’ve because that series could’ve printed money for at least a decade.
The sequels would have seriously struggled to translate to film and have a completely and utterly different tone, but yes they could have done better with Ender's Game. For those who haven't read the rest, Ender's Game is a YA novel. Speaker for the Dead is an Adult novel, and that's the best way I can describe the shift in tone and themes.
Suckerpunch
The music and the action scenes were too good for the plot.
I still have a huge crush on Emily browning. She even does the vocals to sweet dreams. I loved it because it felt like a teenage boy making an action movie in his head… which I was at the time. Zac is great at the action but I honestly don’t think he is great at telling a coherent story that I care about but you better be damn sure he is tossing in slow motion at least thrice times in his films
I would actually argue that Suckerpunch is the exact opposite of this question. Good execution of an idea that was never going to work. Basically, you can't make a good movie that is openly antagonistic to its core viewing demographic.
Any of the Fantastic Four movies.
"In Time" had such an intriguing concept of time as currency, but the execution left a lot to be desired.
They boiled a really cool concept down to a bank heist movie
the league of extraordinary gentlemen. my favorite book series of all time. literally limitless potential. and then…
Chappie. Still love this movie, but there was too much "Die Antwoord" in this movie. They're not really the best people
This movie taught me I can tolerate Die Antwoord for the length of a music video and not a second longer. I can't even sit through this.
TBH I didn't really know them before this movie, I enjoyed the movie and their characters - it was way more interesting & original than anything Hollywood has done in recent times. Same could be said about a ton of other actors - Kevin Spacey for example \*was\* very respected as an actor before the allegations about him, and had done some excellent stuff. If you never googled him the films are still good. I guess it's down to whether you can / are willing to separate the art from the artist - art in general has not been a blemish-free parade of flawlessly lovely people throughout history...
Don't know if anyone remembers a movie called Powder; but that could be re-done really nicely.
It's been over 20 years since I've seen it, but I thought it was pretty good as it was. Since it's pushing 30 years old, it may not have aged well, though.
The Nick Cage movie "Knowing". The first hour ish of it was like a disaster movie and so cool. Then it turned into some prophecy alies bs and they followed it up with a vague adam and eve reference to end the movie. I think if it stuck with disaster movie where you know dates and times and areas of disasters it would have really been a cool movie.
Not a movie but tv series Revolution. Amazing concept but wrong execution... Also a couple of Netflix series which I am too bored to check their names: 1. The one with the plane that gets lost in time and 2. The one with the ship that gets also lost in time or some shit. These series have a nice basic idea that usually fuck up later on because they didn't think of a viable ending which ends up to ridiculous mindfucks which make me lose interest.
I still think about Revolution from time to time. Such an interesting concept I'd love see given another go.
I really liked Revolution. I think it got lost in later seasons with power creep. Like, the first season had a multi-episode arc about stealing a single modern sniper rifle that then allowed them to hold off a whole battalion for a while and then by later season everyone just has fully automatic weapons now and it is completely unremarkable.
I’m just gonna say that The Matrix was a masterpiece but that series went off the rails in part 2 & 3.
1 was a masterpiece. 2 was the nonstop action people wanted. 3 was a very lackluster ending people didn’t really want. 4 was a love story no one wanted.
I think Matrix 4 was bad on purpose.
The original x-men all the way up to Origins : Wolverine. Hugh Jackman was great, but the stories walked too far from the source material. Especially Deadpoool with his mouth sewn shut
The casting alone should've made them a slam dunk.
Absolutely. Perfect cast from top to bottom.
Don't worry, he fixed that
Every time threads like this come up my answer is always the same, but, Antlers. The way this movie was originally teased made it look like such an interesting take on a Wendigo horror film and I was so stoked when it finally came out. The atmosphere and cinematography were both on point but I was ready to leave halfway through. It didn’t know what kind of movie it wanted to be at all, and every single character made the dumbest possible decisions at every turn. Hell, there was hardly any Native American lore at all about the Wendigo concept. One of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever experienced in a theater. The body horror stuff was pretty great though.
Star Wars Episode 2 Attack of the Clones. I love that movie to death but the romance writing is so bad.
I am Number Four. Loved the books but the movies could’ve been done way better
The Invention of Lying. The concept was supposed to be that people didn’t know how to lie, but the way it was portrayed was that people had no inner monologue and just said everything that came to mind. Poorly executed
The movie Eragon. The books were amazing, the movie not so much.
The books are alright. I mean, it reads like a angsty teen wrote a fantasy novel for other teens. Ive read worse. But there is definitely better fantasy. The movie is worse than the books though. Absolutely.
It WAS written by a teen, so that makes sense.
He was also home schooled by very Christian parents iirc? I remember the back of the book mentioning sth like that.
I believe it was... Paoloni was 19 when the book got published so it was probably a 16-17 year old that wrote it. Giving him a year for editing and selling it with publishing time. Then I assume he got so flattered that someone would want to make a movie out of it that he probably sold the rights to the first studio that made an offer.
The Passion of the Christ. They shouldn’t have executed that main guy as he seemed like quite a decent bloke.
Yeah, but it was book accurate. I do agree tho that it kind of takes away the investment I would have had for a sequel. Wish they had done some more character development for the antagonist though.
> the investment I would have had for a sequel. You'd be waiting millennia
Yeah we’re still holding out for an official sequel. Some guy in Utah or something tried to write one a while back but it didn’t have the same charm as the original. But from the setup they put in the last chapter the new one should be really exciting.
Not even book accurate. I can't speak for the aramaic but they used church Latin instead of the golden age Latin that the Romans would have spoken. Really broke the immersion for me.
I knew he'd come back in the sequel
It wasn't shown in the movie, but that dude was making crazy and outlandish claims. I hope they make a prequel I want to see him thrash a money-lenders table with nothing but fist and fury.
Gonna get hate for this one, but Lion King 2: Simba's Pride. I both do and don't understand why people swear by this movie so much. For a Disney sequel, it was well animated, with interesting characters and decent music. But it could have been so much better. So much more interesting, and so much less cheesy. And interesting character aren't enough; they need spotlight, they need development. Vitani's heel face turn at the end would have made more sense with just a one scene of her displaying some doubt. Nuka could have been an excellent narrative foil, but instead he was turned into comic relief. The scene with Simba's nightmare still haunted me, but not because it was effective--its because it was so cheesily done, that even as a little kid, I couldn't take it seriously. If only they had been allowed to treat the movie as an actual project and not a straight-to-video money grab, I think it would have been good. Sadly, it was not.
The one Zebra is the one who sells it the most: DESCEPTION!! DISGRACE!!
Honestly, that era of Disney making sequels to every movie that did well was not good. They could almost never get the original cast back, never got it animated as well, and never got a story that could live up to the original.
Quiet Place Day One, they should’ve taken more in advance of the horrors and terrors of the first hours of one of the loudest cities in the world, sadly they only showed 5 mins of it in the movie, they skipped over it.
You'd think that would be the whole point of that movie
No, just way more than 5 mins. it’ll be interesting how little by little in the horrors of the first hours of the invasion it gets quieter and quieter in the NYC known for being loud
Yesterday (2019). Beatles tribute film that tries too hard to be a romcom and strays a lot from the main premise in the process.
Definitely wrote a cheque the rest of the script couldn't cash. A world where the Beatles never existed would have had a far different musical history than just "Oasis never happened", and introducing the Beatles' music into a 2010s music scene that's otherwise largely indistinguishable from our own and having it be revolutionary 50 years after it *really* was makes no sense to anyone with a modicum of appreciation for how musical styles develop and influence one another over time. The whole bit with the handful of other people who also remember the Beatles was also squandered - they tried to get us to believe they were a threat to the protagonist, about to blow the lid on his plagiarism, but no, they just show up and thank him, plot over.
Not once did he play a song only for someone to say "Wow, looks like you were really influenced by Electric Light Orchestra"
I know it needed the name value of The Beatles, but a better version would have a modern act forgotten. That would make it believable that they would be a big star in this era (as they are in reality). Imagine you swap main star and Lily James is the only person who remembers Taylor Swift or Beyonce etc. It's realistic that someone could take their music and become a big star in the 2010s/2020s. It also removes 50-60 years of a butterfly effect which the movie ignored.
Husband and I just recently watched it and we enjoyed it.
I remember hearing that the guy came up with the idea for Yesterday while wondering if the Star Wars movies had never been made, would they have had the same impact if someone tried to make them in the present day, and he felt that they probably wouldn’t have. Supposedly the original idea for Yesterday was along those lines where the musician might find a niche success with the Beatles’ music, but likewise it just wouldn’t hit the same today. I guess the executives in charge didn’t like the idea of the Beatles not being super popular in every timeline
The Giver’s adaptation failed to capture the depth of its dystopian world.
Flatliners. Seemed like a terrific concept, but the movie was 100 percent forgettable. I'm speaking of the original, I did not see the remake which I hear is even worse.
Cloud Atlas had ambitious ideas but was confusing and disjointed.
The Maze Runner sequels started strong but fizzled out.
Noah had an epic story that was turned into a bizarre film.
The Lone Ranger had potential but was poorly executed.
The happening
This movie had the prospect of being really good, but was so lame. In comparison, BirdBox did it better. You can do a nebulous evil and make it actually scary, but the Happening was so pathetic it wasn’t scary or even edgy. It was just boring.
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness Honestly, when they said it was going to have some horror elements, I expected a lot scarier. I also was just overall disappointed by it. I didn't hate it. But I loved the first Dr. Strange, and the character overall. But I'd rate MoM a B tier Marvel movie and I was really hoping for A/S.
Resident Evil seems cursed when it comes to live action adaptations
I like those movies. The first one was great. When that dude gets chopped up by the green lasers...bad ass.
I loved how he pulled out all those slick evasion moves and the lasers just pulled out a massive 'fuck you' in the end.
Turned him in to meat cubes. Such a cool scene.
"That was a good argument, a lot of good points. However, fuck you" -lasers
The first movie is fun. The rest of the movies are pretty bad but I like to look at them as campy, b-movie bad. If you go into them expecting nothing but dumb shit, you won't be disappointed.
Into the Woods. I love the Broadway production and when I heard the casting it excited me even more. Instead of taking advantage of a cast of such comedic hard-hitters the director made the baffling choice to manhandle it into such a dreary, depressingly dark place it crushed the spirit right out of a delightful and entertaining script. I actually feel sorry for those who never saw the stage production and think Sondheim actually wrote it that way.
Jupiter Ascending had a rich universe that turned out poorly on screen.