10 Movies Ruined By Listening To The Fans
The Rise of Skywalker is an exercise in runaway fan-service.
The key to a movie's commercial success is simple: give the people what they want. Sending audiences home happy and satisfied is how billion-dollar films happen, but it's also fair to say that studios and filmmakers can end up listening too intently to what fans apparently want.
Though recent films like Sonic the Hedgehog and Zack Snyder's Justice League have shown what can be achieved when studios keep their ear to the ground, there are far more cases where an attempt to address fans' complaints has resulted in a grotesque over-correction.
The inherent problem is that the most vocal fans rarely represent the interests of the wider viewer base, and so pandering to them with absolute spinelessness risks alienating those who actually liked what came before.
These 10 films, each of them entries into phenomenally successful franchises, were undone by bending to the whims of fans who, not being screenwriters themselves, clearly didn't know what truly benefitted their favourite IP.
By cynically kotowing to fans who craved soulless instant gratification above all else, these movies were all the worse off, and sometimes derailed their respective franchise for years in the process...
10. Alien: Covenant
Alien: Covenant is what happens when a filmmaker bows to the most unadventurous quarters of a fanbase.
Though Alien prequel Prometheus was generally well-received by critics, the fan response was far more divisive, with many decrying not only some of its flimsier writing but also the near-total absence of Xenomorphs throughout.
Ridley Scott's response was to basically sack off the original planned sequel to Prometheus - which would've seen Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) visit the Engineer homeworld - in favour of a more typical Alien movie which jettisoned many of Prometheus' most interesting elements.
Covenant ended up killing Shaw off-screen in highly anti-climactic fashion and literally nuking the Engineers, by far the most interesting aspect of Prometheus, out of existence, clearing the board for a generic third act Xenomorph showdown.
It unsurprisingly ended up feeling like a mere watered down reenactment of the better Alien movies without bringing much new or interesting to the table.
Ultimately Michael Fassbender's excellent dual performance as androids David and Walter is really the only truly creative and boundary-pushing aspect of the movie.
Everything else feels like a mediocre retread, and it's all because fans couldn't face another Alien film without the series' well-worn antagonist.