10 Awesome Movies Audiences Weren't Ready For

6. Unbreakable

M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable was the filmmaker's follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Sixth Sense, for which Shyamalan was nominated for both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay Academy Awards, while the film itself received a nod for Best Picture.

Expectations were sky-high, then, with audiences evidently thirsty for another ingenious horror film with a mind-melting plot twist.

As it turned out, despite marketing that suggested otherwise, Shyamalan opted to go in an entirely different direction with Unbreakable, serving up a wildly imaginative deconstruction of the superhero genre while it was still in its larval stage.

Shyamalan's ambitious project was a fair box office success but ended up grossing barely one-third of The Sixth Sense's worldwide take, unaided by mixed reviews and a brutal "C" CinemaScore, indicating just how little casual audiences thought of it.

Clearly, its grounded take on a genre still finding its footing was too ahead-of-its-time for mainstream audiences to appreciate, and had it released a few years later, it would've been compared far more favourably to the increasing glut of overblown cape fare crowding up the multiplexes.

In addition to Unbreakable's cult fandom, Quentin Tarantino called it a "masterpiece." It's also fair to say that a general fondness for these subversive, boundary-pushing superhero stories has certainly grown as the genre has become more widespread and entrenched over the decades.