10 Movies Probably Made Out Of Spite

M. Night Shyamalan has had one of the most fascinating careers of any major filmmaker, from being crowned "the next Spielberg" following The Sixth Sense to his more divisive follow-ups, a couple of blockbuster duds, and what appeared to be a more reserved comeback.

Jaws were dropped around the world when Shyamalan's Split was revealed to be a secret Unbreakable sequel, seemingly setting the stage for a third film to bring the constituent characters together for an epic showdown.

But Glass wasn't really that movie at all.

Audiences conditioned on the formula of modern superhero movies quite clearly expected Glass to be a big-scale follow-up to Unbreakable and Split, with Bruce Willis, James McAvoy, and Samuel L. Jackson throwing down with one another in a mighty superhero brawl.

But Shyamalan, seemingly in a quest to troll viewers expecting this, gave them anything but.

The three principal actors spend a huge chunk of the film locked inside an asylum, the brief action sequences are minimalist and unremarkable, and even the setup for a bombastic third act turns out to be a red herring.

Oh, and the film ends with all three super-powered individuals dead. In effect, Shyamalan was taking your expectations for a Glass sequel and plugging them in the head at close-range.

If nothing else, it felt like Shyamalan getting revenge on critics and audiences for his most expensive failures, The Last Airbender and After Earth, by subverting the formula of the tentpole movie and delivering something far smaller and less commercial.

It's certainly an interesting provocation, though you can't really blame audiences for finding it unsatisfying either.