Waterworld. At the time the most expensive movie ever made and the most spectacular flop of all time.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2025
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I "think" John Carter beat it, but yeah.
Neither of those movies were really all that terrible. I enjoyed John Carter. But clearly they didn't connect with audiences.
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I must be on my own. I know John Carter flopped phenomenally, but I really liked it. Thought it was a great movie. Was very annoyed when I found out that there may never be a 2nd. Even if there was, at this stage it is very unlikely to be the same cast. IIRC, a lot of the blame was on Disney marketing. But IDK about these things.
Don't worry brother, I still go back and watch waterworld. I like oceanscapes and post apocalyptic settings. Esthetic can be enough for me.
It would have been a great Sci Fi miniseries, and eventually a movie. They didn't prep the groundwork for the franchise and casted very poorly
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'Live action' remakes of animated classics, or any remake of an already good film.
Remake the ones that had potential. but failed in the execution.
All those Disney live action remakes are sooo bad. People just don't have the expressiveness of cartoon characters. The Lion King was the worst. The characters were animated and still wooden
I think Christopher Robin and maleficent were good. As long as they're telling a new story it's fun to see the old characters. When it's just the exact same plot but a little darker and live action over animation it's so dumb. Our CGI just ain't good enough to justify that.
They're remaking Moana already, and still a new movie, relative.
Moana is all about the musical performances. I love the whole movie but what is on the screen just kinda punctuates and gives context to the music for me. Frozen is the same way. And they're thinking they are going to remake all that music and have it be just as good?
It would be like trying to remake The Blues Brothers with Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham just because the original is 40 years old.
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You actually wrong about this one. Those movies make bank. Suburban moms ruin everything.
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Battleship. It's just such a bizarre license for a movie, and certainly one nobody ever asked for. (Well, outside Hasbro execs clearly desperate for another Transformers-level hit.)
Oddly watchable in a big dumb fun kind of way, at least. And hey, it has Jesse Plemons not playing a total sociopath, so that's neat.
I'm still waiting for the film adaptation of Checkers.
Like the Queens Gambit but checkers would be hilarious
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The Last Jedi.
I left the theatre angry that they spent enough money to take mankind back to the moon on something that stupid.
I can't leave it at that. I have to add some details.
Both the empire and the rebels repeatedly made tactical decisions so stupid a five-year old would know better. The opening battle involved sending unprotected bombers against a ship with anti-bomber defences and keeping the enemy commander talking on the phone to delay his response. That works in a Mel Brooks movie, not in Star Wars.
They killed a fan-favourite character off-screen. What, was the puppet too old to reprise its role?
The empire's main guy decided to chase the rebels down instead of destroying them immediately. For fun, I guess.
Phasma's a badass. Except that she capitulates at the first sign of personal danger.
All Holdo had to say was "yes, there's a plan. Not telling you what because of operational secrecy". Instead she expected Poe to blindly follow orders when he'd already shown he couldn't do that.
"Oh no, the sacred texts!" ...that you attempted to burn a moment ago.
That works in a Mel Brooks movie
Good. Our first laugh of the day.
My favorite bit:
Leia gives Rey a pendant and tells her that she can use that to track them wherever they go.
In the SAME SCENE, with NO CUTS, they are tracked by the first order and shout "THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!"
You just described, IN THE SAME SCENE, how it is, in fact, possible.
Bonus: Putting a tracker in the Falcon was how the Death Star found Yavin IV in the very first movie.
I highly highly recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuuDTnMPMgc
I think you'll like it a lot. I realized that bathos is what I hated about the Last Jedi. They killed so many truly deep moments to have stupid jokes. They couldn't let anything just be serious. It ruined the tone of the movie, couldn't decide if they wanted to be a comedy or a drama, and so they did neither.
All Holdo had to say was “yes, there’s a plan. Not telling you what because of operational secrecy”. Instead she expected Poe to blindly follow orders when he’d already shown he couldn’t do that.
Well, he did fine following orders in the first movie, and then they changed the entire character in the second movie but kept the same name. I have no idea why they did that.
It's the movie equivalent of trolling.
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The Hobbit trilogy. It's hard to understand how Peter Jackson could mess up movie after movie after movie like that.
Simple:
He and his crew had 2 years of prep for Lotr, storyboards, finding locations, making props and sets, etc.
New Line Cinemas forced him to do that same prep in 6 months for the Hobbit. Allegedly they didn't even fully finish the script and had to cut in Del Toro scenes.
The forced trilogy structure also really hurt it. When the Hobbit film adaptation was initially announced (at the time just two movies, even), I thought that it didn't make any sense to adapt a book shorter than any of the individual LotR installments into multiple movies. When they revealed it would be a trilogy, I knew it was some studio decision to milk it for money and didn't have high hopes.
There is actually a fan edit floating around online somewhere called "The Hobbit: Extended Edition" which, contrary to what the name might imply, cuts down the trilogy into a single movie of comparable length to the LotR Extended films. Still not perfect, but a huge improvement in quality just from cutting out all of the extra garbage that didn't need to be there.
There are a few different edits, but my fave is the M4 Book Edit. It only follows what was covered in the book and cuts out all the additions like the Kili/Tauriel love story (and Tauriel is cut out completely along with Azog until the end), the Dol Guldur stuff, and Gandalf's escapades outside the party. It cuts the trilogy down to 4hr18min. Aside from a few unavoidably janky transitions, it's great.
I absolutely adore it for 2 reasons: One, I really dislike the trilogy as a whole, but that's because of the bloat, which M4 gets rid of. Two, the older I get the harder it is to go through LOTR as often as I like. I usually do an LOTR rewatch once a year, and tried to add in the Hobbit, but usually stopped after the first. It's just too much time for not enough payoff. With the M4 edit, I'll get stoned and watch it 5 or 6 times a year.
For as much flack as Jackson gets the for The Hobbit movies, he did a phenomenal job where it counts. There really is a wonderful, true-to-source Hobbit adventure scattered throughout the 8hr52min bloat that is the trilogy.
For funsies, if you like the other bits there's another fan edit called Durin's Folk and the Hill of Sorcery that's 1hr8min that covers Gandalf's adventure after he fucks off from the party at Mirkwood.
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Ohh i forgot another one of my favorite. Ghost in the Shell live action. I love that movie because of Scarlett Johansson, but if you watch the original anime, everything just feels better, and the live action is simply unnecessary.
Borderlands. How did they spend that much money and none of the decision makers stop and think "nope this is crap"
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There's a distinction to point out between "absolutely no business getting made" vs "the final product turned out to be shit". I can't really think of anything that belongs to the former... I haven't actually seen most of the films mentioned here so far, except the SW sequels... which turned out to be shit, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have made SW sequels at all: they just shouldn't have made them shit.
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Cats
The moment they announced Cats I knew it wasn't going to work.
First, the story sucks. A bunch of cats prancing around and learning not to be a dick to that one cat.
Second, Cats is a spectacle. The reason you go see Cats in a theater is for the spectacle. Everyone is dressed up and dancing around. It's meant to be an experience. You can't translate that to film.
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