10 EXACT Moments That Derailed Huge Movies
With just one gunshot, Django Unchained was toast.
It's always interesting when you can pinpoint the exact moment a movie lost its way. Films are made up of so many different moving parts, and you'd expect a picture's creative decline to be more of a gradual, subtle thing. Often, that is absolutely the case, but certainly not always.
In fact, there are plenty of movies that contain a specific scene where you know the movie you're watching has dropped the ball and isn't going to get its mojo back. The following ten films are all great examples of this. The moments that derailed them vary heavily - they range from ill-judged third acts to gratuitous cruelty, from jarring plot twists to moments so staggeringly ill-conceived that the work's credibility is forever lost.
What they all have in common is that the movie in question was no longer a genuinely good movie after these moments dropped, and that is such a crying shame. Quite a few of these offerings were actually doing just fine before these moments came along, and so this proves, just one misjudged moment can kill a film. That's a bit of a scary thought.
Kicking off with a certain terrible Disney sequel...
10. Ralph Breaks The Internet - Ralph Infects Slaughter Race With A Virus
Ralph Breaks the Internet didn't get off to the best start, what with it breaking the first movie's rules and squandering many of its characters. That's not even mentioning all of the awful product placement, which gave off unfortunate Emoji Movie vibes. Having said that, it was still watchable and seemed destined to join the crowded club of not-great, not-terrible, unnecessary sequels. And then... this happened.
While travelling through the worldwide web, Ralph (John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) discover an online racing game called Slaughter Race, and Vanellope decides she'd like to join this game. That already set off alarm bells, as Wreck-It-Ralph (2012) firmly established that characters moving to another game is a bad idea, and then... Ralph is so clingy and worried about losing his best friend that he deliberately infects Slaughter Race with a dangerous virus.
At this moment, the picture finally goes from OK to outright poor. In the first film, Ralph was arguably one of Disney's all-time great protagonists with one of the most heartfelt character arcs in the studio's entire canon, but here, he's completely ruined and becomes an unlikable, borderline-creepy dude being far too possessive in his friendship with a ten-year-old girl. Seriously, what on earth was up with that?
The movie's godawful climax is Ralph and Vanellope defeating an army of insecure Ralph-clones created by the virus, so it's fair to pinpoint this as the moment that finally destroyed this sequel.