There are few things worse and more frustrating for film fans than seeing ideas that sound (and very often look) awesome on paper being turned into crushingly disappointing movies, with the creative minds behind the projects in question interpreting the famed saying the other way around by turning chicken salad into chicken sh*t.
Of course, anything franchise-related or based on a recognizable IP is always capable of being rebooted, reinvented, remade, reimagined, or any other of the current industry buzzwords, but the real stinger is when a one-and-done offering comes along that boasts all of the potential in the world – only to not only drop it, but see it shatter into a thousand pieces in front of audiences everywhere.
With that in mind, the cinephiles of Reddit have been naming and shaming the titles that came burdened with the weight of expectation based on nothing more than a fascinating, intriguing, outlandish, or altogether awesome logline, only to unleash a pile of uninteresting cinematic goop on an unsuspecting world.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence’s sci-fi romantic drama Passengers packed plenty of star power and made a decent amount of money, but any uniqueness was squeezed out as the story began devolving into formula. Similarly, 2010’s horrendous box office bomb Repo Men revolved around a a shady organization literally hunting down medical patients to reclaim organs they’re unable to pay for – something loaded with rich thematic subtext that was turned into a bland and banal shoot ’em up.
Monster mash Van Helsing had enough action to fill three blockbusters but forget to stop and take a breath, In Time‘s logline of time literally equating to life is phenomenal in practice but mediocre in execution, and while it might be controversial to say – did Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice really deliver as promised?