10 Movies That Totally Misunderstood Their Audience
6. Halloween Ends
Halloween Ends was teed up to be a pretty straight-forward conclusion to the Laurie Strode/Michael Myers saga, with Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) taking on The Shape (James Jude Courtney) one more time to avenge her daughter Karen's (Judy Greer) death at the end of the previous film, Halloween Kills.
But instead, writer-director David Gordon Green decided to subvert expectations in a most bizarre and deeply polarising way by just... not giving fans the movie they wanted.
Halloween Ends instead pushes Laurie and Michael to the periphery to focus primarily on an entirely new protagonist, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), whose arc throughout the film is divisive to say the least.
Though the final 10-or-so minutes circle back to become a more recognisable Halloween Movie again, the advertised epic climax between Laurie and Michael was quite the damp squib indeed.
Following the vocal fan backlash to the film, Green hilariously responded that he never intended to end his trilogy with a Laurie vs. Michael movie, which really tells you everything you need to know.
It's not that a subversive, expectation-defying finale couldn't have worked, but asking the audience to buy into a new character they've never met before who spends much of his screen time in an unconvincing romance with Laurie's granddaughter? This ain't it, chief.