10 Movies Nobody Wanted But Ended Up Loving
Nobody asked for Ambulance, but it's one of the year's best action flicks.
We've all watched a trailer for a movie and thought to ourselves, "Nobody asked for this." Sometimes Hollywood just misses the mark when gauging audience interest and ends up putting out films that fail to find sufficient interest from apathetic viewers.
But our first impressions about movies can also end up being totally wrong, for though these films might've appeared to be pointless exercises on a first glance, they ultimately went on to enjoy critical and/or box office glory.
It's important to appreciate when you're wrong about something, and it's safe to say that most everybody was mistaken where these 10 movies are concerned.
Expectations may have been low for understandable reasons, as we all wondered why a studio bothered to bankroll projects with little apparent appeal, yet each ultimately defied the odds to deliver a damn fine time at the movies.
Whether they became immediate breakout hits upon release or found a second life on streaming, these films all ended up overcoming negative pre-release PR to be enthusiastically embraced by audiences en masse in the long run.
And so, the lesson here? Don't always be hasty to write a film off on the basis of a single bad poster or trailer...
10. John Wick
It might seem ridiculous now, but back in 2014 John Wick seemed like just another step down on the career ladder for Keanu Reeves.
The first decade of Reeves' post-Matrix career was a wildly tumultuous one, filled with critical and commercial failures which severely dented his standing as a box office draw.
The trailers for John Wick didn't do a particularly good job of selling the movie as anything more than another conventional, sub-Taken revenge thriller, with the mildly silly hook that Reeves' title character was avenging not a person but an adorable puppy.
Yet John Wick was a surprise hit both with critics and general audiences, largely thanks to Reeves' dryly amusing performance, Chad Stahelski and David Leitch's kinetic fight choreography, and the unexpectedly rich mythology of its criminal underworld.
Its success of course led to two enormously well-received sequels, while John Wick 4 is due to release next year and a fifth film is already in the works.
For a movie that initially seemed like another lazy dud action vehicle for Reeves, what a pleasant surprise the original John Wick truly was.