10 Movies Everyone Remembers For The Stupidest Reasons
Which would be worse: To be remembered as a joke, or forgotten as a good movie?
There's a lot of movies. A lot. I know that sounds a pretty basic observation, but it's pretty important grounding for this article. The medium's been around for over a century now and while we're always bombarded with reports of decreasing audiences, the actual number of films is only going up - last year over 2500 were released in US cinemas, and with VOD platforms exploding that's now only half the story.
We're talking hundreds of thousands of features. It's mind-boggling, but while we have classics coming out the wazoo, there's an awful lot of movies that fall through the cracks, failing to make a long-term impact and swiftly slipping from public view.
This isn't an underrated movies list, however. This is a list looking at the films that people do actually remember, but for some of the most frankly bizarre reasons; something not about the actual film itself, but a weird piece of context that gets lodged in the collective teeth that just won't budge no matter how many opinion pieces try and floss it out. Here's ten of the strangest cases.
10. I Am Legend - The Ending It Never Got
I Am Legend came at the point when Will Smith was still a somewhat bankable star, but not quite the guarantee of a good movie. He was far too confident in his A-List status, and each of his movies felt like an attempt to extend the brand as much as provide a great piece of cinema. I Am Legend is a perfect show of this; Smith's actually rather good for much of the runtime as a tortured loner forming a life in undead-dominated Manhattan as a rare survivor of a mutant virus, it's just the film doesn't have the same deftness of touch.
Where this is most obvious is in the ending, which takes the title shockingly literally, so it's not too surprising to learn that this is the exact opposite to what was originally planned; instead of Neville killing himself and in doing so allowing Alice Braga and her kid to escape with the cure, he realises he's as much a monster to the mutants as they are to him.
The problem is that the notion of this ending is often used as a simple fix-all: to hear some peopel tell it, had Warner Bros not buckled to test audiences and switched things up I Am Legend would have been amazing. But that doesn't distract from the full-length confusion.