10 Movie Openings That Wanted To Piss You Off
8. The Autobot Massacre - The Transformers: The Movie
There are many, many ways that filmmakers can piss off millions of people in record time, but few as efficient as brutally killing off numerous beloved characters in the movie adaptation of a classic kids cartoon.
And that's precisely what happened in the opening sequence of The Transformers: The Movie, what with Autobots Ironhide, Prowl, Ratchet, and Brawn being smoked by the Decepticons like the director's life depended on it.
The quartet is grimly shot to death by the invading Decepticons, memorably culminating in a mortally wounded Ironhide getting callously put down by Megatron.
Despite the TV series featuring no Autobot deaths, Hasbro reportedly mandated a slew of dead Autobots in the movie in order to refresh the cast - that is, give them a host of new Transformer toys they could sell.
These deaths, combined with the most shocking demise of Optimus Prime a little while later, left kids traumatised and their parents angry at seeing their children shaken so thoroughly by a seemingly harmless cartoon.
The backlash was significant enough that home video releases of the film included a closing tag assuring kids that Optimus would return, as he did in the next season of the TV series.