10 Exact Moments Recent Movies Lost Us
CGI Egon was a step too far for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
It's extremely important for any movie to get the audience's attention in its opening moments, and then continually offer up enough entertainment to sustain interest through to the end.
It's certainly much harder said than done, though, and there are a virtually unlimited number of things which might cause viewers to start flagging and tune out.
Perhaps an aspect of the story falls flat, maybe there are some ghastly technical issues, the casting of a certain character isn't quite right, or the setups for future movies end up leaving a sour taste.
A film can drive itself headlong off a cliff countless ways, no matter how promising its establishing scenes might be. These 10 recent films all ended up losing a large swath of viewers due to one overpoweringly misguided decision.
In some cases viewers were already at the end of their tether and simply waiting for one last straw to send them over the edge, while in others it's a cinematic sin so egregious as to undo some genuinely solid work leading up to that point.
Whatever the reason, these 10 scenes irreversibly derailed these movies...
10. The "Thieves" Have Sympathetic Motives - Home Sweet Home Alone
Now admittedly, Home Sweet Home Alone lost a lot of people the second the direct-to-Disney+ reboot of the beloved comedy franchise was announced.
But its patent misunderstanding of the original's appeal was proven beyond any doubt as soon as the film introduced us to the reboot's new thieving duo.
Rather than simply re-do the beloved Wet/Sticky Bandits (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern) from the first two Home Alone movies, Home Sweet Home Alone re-imagines the thieves as Jeff and Pam McKenzie (Rob Delaney and Ellie Kemper), a nice couple who have simply fallen upon hard times.
They soon discover that a unique doll in their possession is valuable enough to let them keep their home, and when it goes missing they suspect that a young boy who visited their house, Max (Archie Yates), has stolen it.
Now, while it obviously transpires that Max didn't steal the doll, it's incredibly easy to accept their suspicions and thus sympathise with their desperate attempts to pay him a visit and get the doll back.
Was trying to break into Max's home wrong? Sure, but it's certainly not an act worthy of the violence they're subjected to by Max's traps throughout the film.
While there was definitely potential in flipping the original concept on its head, that clearly wasn't the filmmakers' intent, and so this is ultimately just a case of a remake that probably should've stuck to rehashing the original.
Given that audiences are more likely to cringe than laugh at these basically good people being repeatedly injured, it just doesn't work conceptually or tonally.