10 Successful Low Budget Films (That Weren't As Good As You Think)

5. (500) Days Of Summer (2009)

500 Days of Summer is like most movies on this list - you can't call it terrible, just absolutely criminally overrated. Hailed as some fantastically clever take on the stalest genre in movie history, its only real cleverness was being able to disguise just how cloying and pandering it actually is. There is nothing entirely unique about 500 Days of Summer, as it almost immediately falls into the romantic-comedy trap of having two majorly unlikeable characters just sort of bump against each other for a while in the hope that something entertaining happens. Then nothing really does. You can try to hide your shortcomings with witty banter, nonlinear editing, and douche-chillingly forced references to The Smiths all you want, but under it you still need to have some substance. Instead, 500 Days of Summer ends up being a movie that is essentially High Fidelity if somebody completely misunderstood the point of High Fidelity. When you take into consideration the title card and the fact that writer Scott Neustadter has admitted this movie was about actual relationships he had, things just become even murkier and less enjoyable. He frames 500 Days of Summer as a film that treats relationships fairly realistically since, generally, there are no actual villains in a normal relationship. Just two different people who might end up wanting different things. Except the tone of the movie doesn't actually accomplish that. It tries to show that Tom Hansen is being unreasonable and projecting too much onto a clearly unwilling relationship partner which is completely laudable in a genre that often confuses cringe inducing obsession with storybook romance, but by the end those wheels just fall entirely off and the character ends up as the same unbalanced dude who learns absolutely nothing.