10 Movies That Ingeniously Subverted Expectations

Though J.J. Abrams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens was broadly praised as a welcome return to form for the franchise, many also felt it was a little too comfortable paying excess "homage" to A New Hope, mirroring its plot in a number of key ways.

But Rian Johnson's sequel, The Last Jedi, certainly can't be called familiar or lazy, even if its aggressive attempts to shake up Star Wars' over-sentimental, shameless reliance on nostalgia left many fans furious.

From suggesting that Rey (Daisy Ridley) was actually just a nobody unrelated to any existing Star Wars character, to killing off Supreme Leader Snoke (Andy Serkis) totally out of nowhere, and developing Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) into a more sullen loner Jedi who dies at the end of the movie, it took some extremely bold risks.

For fans fed up of Star Wars' lazy over-reliance on rehashing tropes and pandering to the most nostalgic quarters of the fanbase, though, The Last Jedi was a major breath of fresh air, even accepting its own flaws (namely that iffy Canto Bight sequence).

The backlash is however widely cited as the reason for Abrams effectively walking back much of the film's creativity in The Rise of Skywalker, namely making Rey the granddaughter of Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) and confirming Snoke to have been a clone of the Emperor.

Despite its divisiveness, it is the film most commonly associated with the phrase "subverted expectations" nowadays, whether you dug it or not.