10 Acclaimed Movies Everybody Now Hates

Prequel hate is everywhere. The overwhelmingly negative reaction to this film has been so strong that child actor Jake Lloyd completely quit acting due to bullying as the film's reception gradually soured. The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones are credited as being the worst the Star Wars franchise has to offer by most people, which makes the trends in its original reviews and perception all the more interesting.

Back before the world of online ticket systems, the long-awaited first instalment in the Star Wars prequel series had filmgoers queuing all the way down the street hoping to snag a ticket to a showing on opening day.

The film wasn't heralded as all-round masterpiece like its predecessors, but critical reception saw a huge trend towards leniency for nostalgia, and a large amount of the reviews and opinions of the public focused as much on the positives as they could, resulting in an A- CinemaScore and leading critic Roger Ebert heralding it as "an astonishing achievement in imaginative cinema".

While that was certainly true in 1999, time has taken away much of the spectacle of groundbreaking visual effects, leaving behind criticisms of story, script, characters and actors.

Modern reviews of the Star Wars series are far less likely to lean on nostalgia as a positive, and the discourse surrounding the prequels in the 21st century largely speaks for itself.