10 Recent Movie Subplots Everybody Hated
A 6,000-year-old goddess dates a teenage boy in Shazam 2, because... reasons.
When they work, subplots are a welcome accompaniment to a movie's overarching A-plot - an appetiser which supplements and even enhances the wider story that audiences paid their good money to see.
But crafting an entertaining B-plot is a hell of a lot harder than it looks, as demonstrated by the many promising films which have saddled themselves with dull, leaden, or even problematic subplots nobody actually asked for.
That's certainly the case with these 10 recently released movies, which whether good or bad overall, served up some iffy side-stories that just didn't quite work - at least not in the way the filmmakers intended.
From pointless cameos to lazy sequel-bait, painfully bad running gags, and the creepiest screen romance of the past year, these movies dished up moldy, cringe-worthy, and generally time-wasting subplots that just distracted from the quality content the film had to offer otherwise.
Sometimes less is more, as the saying goes, and these movies are all a glaring testament to that. Sometimes you're better off just ditching that subplot and giving the audience a shorter, more satisfying movie as a result...
10. Everett Ross & Val - Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
While some fans argued that the presence of Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) felt shoehorned in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, she was positively essential compared to Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).
Though they're thankfully not in the movie much, every moment they show up they simply grind the already wildly overlong superhero sequel to a halt. And for good measure it's later revealed that they were actually formerly married, because why the hell not?
But the banter between the duo fell mostly flat, and at worst deigned to be genuinely cringe-worthy - especially when Val joked about "jumping on [Ross'] peloton."
All in all there's nothing here that contributes something vital to the overarching story, and the duo felt included simply to remind audiences that they exist ahead of the upcoming Thunderbolts film.
This whole plot whiffed of cutting floor material that would've been better off included in a Disney+ series rather than, you know, one of the MCU's biggest sequels to date.