10 Movies That Embarrassed Other Movies Released At The Same Time

The success or failure of a movie is never just down to its quality - timing is also hugely important.

Knowing when to release a film, free of obvious competition, can make all the difference at the box office, and in terms of overall reception, it's probably smart to create some distance from other similarly-themed movies.

After all, films with something in common that release close together will inevitably be compared, and generally speaking one of these movies will be considerably better than the other.

And in extreme cases, the better movie doesn't just outdo the lesser one - it decisively shows it how things are done and basically embarrasses it in the process.

These 10 movies, each of them majorly critically acclaimed, were released alongside lesser renditions of a similar concept, and regardless of which movie made more money, the superior film ended up making its inferior competition seem actively worse by sheer virtue of comparison.

There's being better than another movie, and then there's categorically showing it up, enough that in extreme cases the worse of the two films evaporated into the pop-culture void, never to be heard from again...

This past holiday season was the battle of the aquatic-themed mega-budget blockbusters, as Black Panther: Wakanda Forever faced off against Avatar: The Way of Water.

Wakanda Forever was released first in mid-November - just five weeks before the Avatar sequel - to solidly positive reviews, even if most critics agreed it didn't match the brilliance of its predecessor, quite understandably given Chadwick Boseman's untimely death.

With its primary antagonist being Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), the king of the Atlantis-like civilisation Talokan, the bulk of the film is centered around water, and director Ryan Coogler did a mostly solid job with it.

But then Avatar: The Way of Water came out, and the mind-boggling visual majesty of James Cameron's long-gestating sequel made Wakanda Forever's seafaring action look, well, like a crayon drawing crudely scrawled on a napkin.

This is particularly apparent in their especially water-based third acts - widely considered both the strongest part of Avatar 2 and the weakest section of Wakanda Forever.

Cameron obviously had the major advantage of time and money, whereas basically all Marvel movies are on a strict production conveyor-belt due to their interconnected nature.

Even so, The Way of Water showed what can be achieved by a filmmaker at the top of their game with all the resources they need to achieve their vision. No matter how good a director Coogler is, there was no way for him to compete with that.