10 Movies Everyone Wanted To Hate Before They Even Came Out

There was just no winning with adapting Stephanie Meyer’s widely mocked tweenage smash on the big screen—except, you know, for the producers who made hundreds of millions of dollars from the franchise.

The Twilight series really did try, too, hiring Thirteen helmer Catherine Hardwicke in order to give the grungy flick some semblance of indie credibility—you know, as credibly independent as a big budget, vampires versus werewolves love story could hope to be. But it was to no avail, and well before Twilight hit cinema screens it was mercilessly mocked by critics and cinemagoers alike despite being projected to do tidy financial business.

However, in the years since its release, stars Robert Pattinson and Kirsten Stewart have reinvented themselves as indie darlings through a slew of superb turns in smaller films, and the later instalments of the franchise such as the David Slade-directed Eclipse were actually (whisper it) pretty decent.

Revisiting the series, as an increasingly large number of critics and fans are doing, reveals that whilst the films are undeniably corny and silly, a lot of the ire directed at them was oversized, unnecessary, and pretty transparently aimed at insulting the franchise’s young fans as much as its actual content.