10 Movies That Tried To Subvert Expectations (But Still Sucked)
A lazy remake of Snow White would genuinely have been preferable.
We are in an era of Hollywood cinema that has become dominated by sequels, reboots, remakes, and spin-offs, with original ideas or riskier, more inventive approaches to existing IPs all too often being avoided. As such, it's great when a movie takes steps to subvert expectations and do something different... right?
Well, on paper, yes. Unfortunately, things don't always work out for the better. In Hollywood, there is sometimes a frustrating tendency of those behind a film seeming to assume that subversion in of itself is automatically a win, but that's really not the case. It's not enough to just be different for the sake of it; it's vital to subvert expectations in a way that feels earned and to do this with good storytelling to back it up.
The following ten movies all suffered from this problem. Yes, they made admirable attempts to be different, but they still foundered because they were subversive in the wrong ways, and their differences actually made the movies considerably worse. If anything, many might find themselves wishing these pictures had instead been more generic and cliched.
Warning: spoilers lie ahead. Kicking off with a very ill-judged horror remake...
10. Black Christmas (2019)
Credit needs to be given where credit is due: the second remake of the wonderful 1970s horror film Black Christmas - which stands as arguably one of the most underrated horror flicks of them all - is not a lazy redo in the slightest. It has little in common with the original film and very much goes off in its own direction.
That is commendable, but as every other movie on this list will also show, subversion on its own is not enough. You need a good script as well, and that is something this film simply didn't have. The 2019 Black Christmas began development only a few months before it was released, so production of this was unusually short - and man, does it show.
From the tame PG-13 scares to the obnoxiously overt social commentary, this is a poorly written and unscary mess with dialogue that feels like it came from a Twitter comments section, and it gets sillier and sillier as it goes along, but never seems aware of just how goofy it is.
The performances are solid enough, and it isn't quite as cringe-worthy as the first Black Christmas remake from 2006, but it still isn't a good film at all. The best thing that can be said about it was that it tried its best to be different, and that really isn't much.