10 Movies ONLY MADE In Response To Film Critics
These films only exist because of the critics.
Movies are made for many, many reasons - usually for money, sometimes for the sheer love of the art, and occasionally because the people involved want to deliver a swift cinematic response to critics.
Most of these 10 movies were born out of frustration, the filmmaker exasperated by the critical response to one of their prior movies and ultimately using their new project as a mouthpiece to vent their anger.
This can be a director subtly allegorising their experiences with critics, making a film which directly addresses the criticisms levelled against their previous work, or perhaps abandoning all subtlety and literally making the big, bad film critic a villain in their new movie.
The results, unsurprisingly, have varied: some films were perceptive enough to be embraced by reviewers, while others came across as petty or childish.
In a few cases the filmmakers simply made their movie as a response to their detractors rather than pointedly calling them out, even if the subtext is nevertheless completely obvious.
For better or worse, these films only came into existence because those involved wanted to send a message to critics...
10. Jon Favreau Vented His Iron Man 2 Frustrations - Chef
After releasing three blockbuster films between 2008 and 2011 - two Iron Man films and Cowboys and Aliens - director Jon Favreau decided to take a break from big-budget filmmaking to work on a smaller, more personal project.
The result was Chef, an $11 million dramedy in which Favreau plays a chef who, after a public altercation with a food critic, loses his job at a popular restaurant and decides to run his own food truck.
The film's narrative and themes are very clearly inspired by Favreau's own experiences working in Hollywood, particularly during production of 2010's Iron Man 2.
Though the superhero sequel was broadly praised by critics, it was almost universally accepted to be inferior to the 2008 original, with some commentators suggesting that Favreau had basically lost his voice amid the demands of a growing tentpole universe.
This was backed up by post-release reports that the film began shooting with only a rough script in place and Favreau was a constant victim of executive meddling throughout production.
And so, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that Chef is basically film-as-therapy for the director - he gets to cathartically vent about Iron Man 2 in a thinly-veiled allegory set in the restaurant industry.
Fittingly, Chef received rave reviews, and Favreau's career only skyrocketed in the years that followed.