10 Movies Ruined By Fan Overhype

There's nothing quite like the excitement of sitting down to watch a hugely anticipated movie that actually delivers on all that insane pre-release hype.

Yet films that well and truly obliterate fans' high expectations are extremely rare: movies like The Dark Knight, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and Toy Story 3 are incredibly few and far between.

It's sadly far more common for films to fail to match the immense hype, and while in some cases the filmmakers can certainly be blamed for delivering an inferior product, often fans really only have themselves to blame.

The obsessive nature of fandom is such that people spend months or even literally years thinking about how great a movie's going to be, only for all those hopes and dreams to be played out in a mere two or three hours.

It's unsurprising that so many films have fallen short of fans' arguably unrealistic, even impossible expectations, because there comes a point where literally nothing would be good enough to satisfy all that anticipation.

That isn't to say these films aren't all flawed in their own ways, but fans also set themselves up for disappointment by expecting nothing short of genre-defining masterpieces...

Let's kick things off with inarguably one of the most anticipated movies in the history of cinema.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace was of course the first Star Wars movie since Return of the Jedi more than 15 years prior, and most fans never even considered the possibility that it wouldn't be another great entry into the franchise.

The movie's marketing campaign was extremely effective in drumming up hype, enough that some fans decided to camp outside of cinemas weeks or even months ahead of time in anticipation. Yup.

And then The Phantom Menace was released. Critical reviews were mixed, and the response from fans was one of general bemusement, that George Lucas had delivered something so clunky and uneven.

Esteem for the film has grown somewhat in recent years, acknowledging it as an ambitious yet deeply flawed piece of work, but let's be honest: it was never going to live up to the insurmountable hype created by an entire generation's nostalgia for watching the original trilogy in their youth.

It was impossible for most Star Wars fans to accept the possibility pre-release that the new movie would be anything less than great, and so when that turned out to be the case, there was denial, anger, confusion, and only much later begrudging acceptance.

Needless to say, follow-up Attack of the Clones didn't launch to anywhere near the same level of excitement, and it's just as well, because it turned out to be the very worst mainline Star Wars movie.