10 Awesome 2018 Movies Everyone Thought Would Suck

8. Annihilation

Why It Should've Sucked: As talented as director Alex Garland proved himself with Ex-Machina, the early word on his sci-fi follow-up wasn't encouraging at all.

With news that Garland became embattled with Paramount over Annihilation's final cut - with the studio requesting some "audience-friendly" changes -the film ended up sold to Netflix for international distribution.

Considering that Netflix has a reputation for picking up troubled projects to be dumped on their platform - including The Cloverfield Paradox, which released just a few weeks prior - it was reasonable to be immensely sceptical about this one.

Why It Was Awesome: You don't have to watch much of Annihilation to realise that this is the good kind of Netflix acquisition.

Paramount, to their credit, didn't railroad Garland into delivering a mangled version of his original vision and were able to offload a probable box office bomb by selling it to the streaming giant. Everybody wins.

The movie itself? One of the best and most ambitious films of the year, a dizzyingly intelligent and creative sci-fi spectacle topped by incredible work from a top-drawer ensemble cast, led by Natalie Portman.

The final half-hour of this movie sure is a trip, even though it's a shame most of us never got to see it on the big screen.