10 Recent Movies Ruined By Unrealistic Expectations

Expectations are a funny thing - they can make or break the moviegoing experience. Going into a movie with low or no expectations, only to be left pleasantly surprised, is a glorious feeling, but it's surely far more common to be excited about a film only to be underwhelmed by the end result.

Yet our expectations as moviegoers aren't necessarily always reasonable or even informed by the movie's marketing.

Perhaps we spent too long reading rumours and theories on subreddits, such that when the final film went in an entirely different direction, we felt like we'd been cheated through no fault of the movie.

Maybe we simply wanted a filmmaker to repeat their old tricks rather than try anything new, or once again bought into astronomical hype despite how many times we've been burned in the past.

But the reality was very different in each case, and for whatever reason we just weren't ready to embrace it. As a result we walked out of the cinema feeling a little empty and unfulfilled, even if it wasn't the movie's fault at all.

The lessons here? Don't let yourself get swept up by snowballing hype, and be as open-minded as you possibly can...

It might be fair to say that Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was always going to feel like a comedown after the fist-pumping, fan-serving satisfaction of Spider-Man: No Way Home.

And yet, Marvel Studios did a remarkable job hyping up Sam Raimi's sequel as a deliciously weird and twisted dive into the multiverse, all while fans speculated wildly on the bevy of mind-melting cameos they might see.

Many fans got it into their heads that they'd absolutely, positively be seeing Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds' Deadpool, and as was most intensely rumoured, Tom Cruise playing an alt-universe version of Iron Man (in reference to him almost playing Iron Man earlier in his career).

Yet the cameos were largely relegated to a single, fairly brief section of the film involving the Illuminati, and given that Charles Xavier's (Patrick Stewart) presence was given away in the marketing, only John Krasinski's appearance as Reed Richards proved genuinely show-stopping.

But this was entirely on fans for building a headcanon for themselves which the movie had to adhere to lest it be a failure. And so, when the hopeful superstar cameos were nowhere to be seen, there was a misplaced feeling of, "Is that it?"

At least with Avengers: Secret Wars on the horizon for a 2025 release - it's basically a multiversal battle royale event - Marvel Studios will surely pull out all the stops to inundate fans with jaw-dropping cameos.