10 Movies That Hated Their Own Audience

Looking back on 2017's big-budget Ghost in the Shell adaptation, you really have to wonder what the hell Hollywood was thinking.

On a superficial level it's an entertaining enough movie with some truly gorgeous visuals, but you also have to consider who it was really made for. Given the clear lack of respect the film shows for so many of it potential demographics, it seems even the filmmakers weren't sure.

For starters, the film veers away enough from the manga to upset the purists, particularly with regard to the conception of protagonist The Major (Scarlett Johansson).

Progressive audiences meanwhile took umbrage with the film's "whitewashing" of a hero who was Japanese in the source material.

And the film did itself no favours by rolling this criticism into its plot, eventually revealing in the third act that Johansson's character is actually Japanese on the inside.

It was a bold attempt to deflect criticism and incorporate it into the narrative, but it came across as smug, tone-deaf and disrespectful to, well, a large portion of the people who were initially interested in the film.

With it seeming "too weird" for the mainstream crowd and majorly turning off fans of the source material, it's little surprise that Ghost in the Shell was a catastrophic bomb. And a mere two years after its release, it's largely been forgotten.