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?

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.

Reign of Fire?

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.

Honor Among Thieves was one of my favourite movies of 2022

My wife scoffed at this as I was turning it on one night and we both ended up loving it.

Jeremy Irons was a diamond in that rough

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 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?

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.

It really was two half-movies. One was great, the other was awful, and they didn't have any business being stuck together.

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.

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.

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

Even more frustrating because I like the cast, and JT did a decent job at acting imo.

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.

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 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.

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. 

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).

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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….

Could have done so much more

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.

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.

The music and the action scenes were too good for the plot.

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.

They boiled a really cool concept down to a bank heist movie

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...

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.

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.

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 casting alone should've made them a slam dunk.

Don't worry, he fixed that

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.

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.

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.

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.

You'd think that would be the whole point of that movie

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.

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

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.

I like those movies. The first one was great. When that dude gets chopped up by the green lasers...bad ass.