10 Films That Made Audiences Dumber

The most hyped product since Viagra, The Phantom Menace is a dynamic, edge of your seat story about an evil ruler who achieves power via bureaucratic delays and Trade Federation blockades.

The picture has a real shot at being the most mediocre film ever to make a billion dollars, although it achieved a weird hold on the minds of true Star Wars aficionados, who re-watched it in the mistaken belief that they might actually like it this time.

The Phantom Menace has no feel for character, but then the movie was never about people, whether on the screen or in the audience. It was all about shifting product – the toys, the games, the books, clothes, mugs, beach towels etc.

Kudos to George Lucas for pulling off the same trick not once, but twice, but three times before returning to the Indiana Jones franchise for Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull and giving us the term “nuking the fridge”, which Time Magazine defined as “to exhaust a Hollywood franchise with disappointing sequels.”

The movie’s true legacy isn’t it underwhelming sequels, though, but the numbing effect its soullessness had on audiences. The same viewers later flocked to see Pirates Of The Caribbean and Transformers, turning them into multi-billion dollar franchises in the process.