5 Movie Spin-Offs That Suck
The unforgivable side quests that almost ruined the main events...
Aren't spin-offs great? They bring something you love packaged in a new way that can ultimately give you a new way to love it.
And with that in mind, behold, the birth of a new era of THESE THINGS SUCK, whereby my broiling rage that now it's spilled over to the WhatCulture main YouTube channel, which I'm sure is not going to be good for my health.
If you're new to the series then this isn't a list it's a personal peeve rant marathon where I talk about facets of the industry that really pour salt on my pickle and give it a good tug. And what better a way to bring it to its new home than by looking at spin-offs?! Sometimes we think these things through!
What is a spin-off movie, I hear you possibly say? Well to put it bluntly instead of a movie focusing around a character you grew to love and admire, you get upwards of 2 hours of their buddy chewing scenery.
Usually (but not always) these films have lower budgets, lower quality and much lower standards. They're usually identified as an opportunity to cash-in on popular characters - and if they work and somehow surpass the original (like Bumblebee), it's so rare it becomes even more notable. Because they usually don't.
But which sucky spin-offs made the list? Read on and watch the video above...
5. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
We begin - as we should - with an origin story, that of fan favourite and Vascular Magazine Monthly subscriber Huge Jackedman aka Wolverine. Now here's the thing, I - and indeed millions others - was SO game for a film to deliver on the interesting, painful and downright stabby story of how this amped up honeybadger came to be. However this is quite possibly the worst X-men film ever made, and I do not say that lightly because Dark Phoenix and Last Stand also exist.
Things start out well though, because the film has - without question - one of the best opening sequences in any superhero movie. Hell, the time-leaping montage is one of the best openings of ANY film. But then this incredible start left the film sprinting out of the gate with its shoes tied together and by the end, you're left looking back on a catastrophic wreck wondering how so much promise was turned into such a torrential fountain of noxious arse.
The pacing of this film is all over the place and it feels like the script was written by picking up a bucket of cliches and implanting each poor, contrived moment like LITERALLY walking away from explosions, deus ex machina plot devices and contrived character deaths right into the brittle bones of this film.
And the maddening minutia of moments of this massacred mutant film are many. Among them we have cliched dialogue that sounds it was written with the same mentality as how Will.I.am named himself. Which is fitting, because he is BAFFLINGLY in this film as John Wraith. Memorable only for wearing a cowboy hat.
Then there's the absolute butchering of Deadpool that turned the merc with a mouth to an impossibly ugly pastiche of superpowers with NO mouth, and my personal favourite which no one seems to address, the fact that the script writers killed off Agent Zero and then in the next bloody scene introduce that the bad guys now have bullets that can kill Wolverine. Boy shucks isn't that convenient that your one villain who is extremely good with sniper rifles and guns had to die and NOW you're telling us you have bullets designed to kill him. Bloody. Lazy. Ass. Writing.
Plus to top it all off this is the only time we've been able to see the literal Ace mutant Gambit on the silver screen and that just makes me very sad indeed. Props have to go to Liev Schreiber for his performance as Sabretooth slash Victor Creed (though confusingly it's not the same one that turned up in the first X-Men film because f**k continuity amirite, Fox?
This was a horrible mutation from the main X-Men franchise and was a movie that was an evolutionary dead end for both fans and critics alike. Needless to say, it got a sequel.
SAD TRUMPET NOISE.