10 Movies That Unexpectedly Confused Audiences
3. Prometheus
From one confusing Damon Lindelof movie to another now with Prometheus.
On paper, people seemed to have a pretty good idea of what the movie was going to be: a direct-ish prequel to Ridley Scott's Alien, which would probably explain how the Space Jockey ended up on LV-426 and also the origins of the Xenomorph.
The marketing for Prometheus absolutely played on the audience's expectations that the film would dovetail directly into Alien, and so major confusion abounded when the movie turned out to be something a little different.
Though Jon Spaihts' original script for Prometheus was indeed a straight prequel, Lindelof's rewrites ultimately re-imagined it as a tangential storyline in close proximity to the events of Alien, taking place instead on the moon LV-223.
While it's easy to see how the movie's events could so easily have fed directly into Alien, for reasons unknown the decision was made to create a buffer between them, leaving fans understandably baffled and frustrated.
Some suspected this was done in order to leave room for sequels which would inch closer to actually connecting to Alien, but whatever the reason, fans couldn't quite get their heads around such a bizarre bait-and-switch.