After Sylvester Stallone's laughable 1995 attempt to bring the 2000 AD icon to the big screen, 2012's Dredd didn't exactly have to do much to be a significant improvement. Despite murmurs of production troubles (director Pete Travis was locked out of the editing process after disagreements with producers), Dredd turned out to be the gritty, R-rated adaptation of the classic comic we had all been longing for. Despite a modest $45 million budget, the movie benefited from excellent visual effects, and in particular some beautiful slow-motion photography used to portray the effects of the drug Slo-Mo. If the plot itself was frequently compared to The Raid, Dredd certainly had more on its mind than in that movie: the characters are fleshed out enough to be believable, and the performances, especially from Karl Urban as Dredd, Olivia Thirlby as Anderson and Lena Headey as Ma-Ma, were widely praised. And better yet, there isn't one second in this movie where Dredd takes his helmet off: victory! The movie scored well with critics (78%), but only made $41 million at the box office, making it a financial failure, even with the strong home video sales. Its status as a cult classic keeps the idea of a sequel very much alive, but clearly, not enough people are loving this movie if it couldn't even make its budget back at the cinema. It might not be high-art, but it's damn fun, and deserved a far more fruitful reception.