10 Recent Movies That Wasted AMAZING Concepts
These films totally squandered these awesome ideas.
Every screenwriter in Hollywood wants to come up with that brilliant elevator pitch idea which instantly gets greenlit and sold - a snappy, easily understood concept with majorly crowd-pleasing potential.
But thinking of the logline is just the beginning - then somebody needs to write the script and it needs to be shot and brought to full term by the cast and crew.
Needless to say, the steps to taking a great idea and making it into a great movie are myriad, and there are so many places along the way that everything can go so horribly wrong.
For proof of that, look no further than these 10 recent films, each of which touted immediately fascinating, attention-grabbing concepts on paper, yet failed to do justice to them for one reason or another.
Perhaps a new screenwriter mangled the tantalising original idea, or the studio decided they could turn the neato concept into a more cynical, commercial affair with some "creative tweaks."
Or maybe, just maybe, the many minor miracles that comprise a great or even basically good movie just didn't come together during shooting. Whatever the reason, these movies all squandered some absolutely blinding ideas...
10. A Haunted Swimming Pool - Night Swim
The first major theatrical release of 2024, Night Swim, certainly rocked an attention-grabbing premise - what if the swimming pool in your new home was haunted?
It's a logline that can't help but make you laugh, so it's a shame that Blumhouse's bafflingly po-faced horror flick takes its fundamentally daft concept so seriously.
With the movie being developed by James Wan's production company Atomic Monster, a campy tone in the vein of Malignant or M3GAN should've been a no-brainer for this one, yet filmmaker Bryce McGuire instead gives it all the solemnity of an A24 joint.
But beyond that, this is duller than any movie about a killer swimming pool should ever be possible of being, and because it's saddled with a restrictive PG-13 rating there aren't even any amusingly OTT death scenes to savour.
Night Swim could've been a bonkers way to kick off the year of horror, but it has so few fresh ideas and such little ambition that it's instead near-instantly forgotten.