10 Movies That Didn't Understand What The Fans Wanted
Misguided isn't even the word.
Filmmaking is hard - there's no two ways about it. But when it comes to franchise filmmaking, there's always a clear stylistic and thematic template that has proven successful before, and which should probably be replicated in order to leave fans satisfied.
It's worked extremely well for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, for instance - they know exactly what fans want and give it to them. They're not all great movies, but they know what their audience expects and deliver it in spades.
Not all franchises are quite so lucky, though, and as a fan of a movie IP, there's nothing quite so heartbreaking as watching a new entry that just doesn't understand what made the property popular in the first place.
There are certainly those big-budget failures that did at least try - Green Lantern, for instance, had a wise-cracking Ryan Reynolds and swung hard to try and realise the world of the comics, but between bad CGI and awful writing, it just didn't work.
These movies, meanwhile, were fundamentally misguided from a conceptual level upwards, and it's honestly amazing they passed through so many checks and balances unscathed before being greenlit and released...
10. X-Men: The Last Stand
X-Men: The Last Stand may not quite be the worst X-Men movie ever - that honour surely goes to X-Men Origins: Wolverine...for now - but it is the most disappointing, given the enormous potential of adapting The Dark Phoenix Saga to the big screen with this cast.
Where to even begin with what it got wrong? Fans were lumbered with director Brett Ratner after Bryan Singer decided to helm Superman Returns instead, but the film's fundamental issues largely stem from its misguided script.
Some of the more widely-loathed moments include: Cyclops (James Marsden) getting an anti-climactic off-screen death, Mystique (Rebecca Romijn) losing her powers, Vinnie Jones playing the wise-cracking juggernaut, and an unintentionally comical climax where Magneto (Ian McKellen) telepathically moves the Golden Gate Bridge.
That's not to forget the numerous new characters given little to do and the fact that Phoenix (Famke Janssen) was a massively damp squib, getting little to do until the tail-end of the film.
Oh, and there's that daft post-credits scene where Charles Xavier's (Patrick Stewart) death is quickly nullified, robbing it of any impact it might have had.
Worse than all this, though? Simon Kinberg, who co-wrote The Last Stand, was incredulously given a second chance to adapt the Dark Phoenix Saga in the upcoming "conclusion" to the mainline X-Men saga. Do you know the definition of insanity, Fox?