10 Underrated Movies Everyone Loved At First (But Now Dislikes)

9. Chronicle

The Awesome Movie: If there's one genre people are more ready to call spent than superheroes, it's found footage. But then along came Chronicle, which managed to give a shot in the arm to both. Josh Trank's modern update of comic book cliches, with a cool guy, a class president and a loner (whose documenting of everything makes character-based sense) each gifted telekinesis and reacting exactly as a cool guy, a class president and a loner would (i.e. jokey-cum-destructive) was an engrossing, astutely-written movie.

Making $120 million on a $12 million budget, the film was a bona fide hit, promising big things ahead for its key creatives.

What Happened? Whoops. Chronicle's impressive accounting led to Fox offering Trank the Fantastic Four reboot, and we all know how that turned out.

Who exactly is to blame for Fant4stic's complete and utter failure (c'mon Jon Schnepp, we need a documentary on this) is still up in the air; Fox certainly meddled, but it certainly looks like Trank had already steered the ship aground. And so people now look back on Chronicle with a more critical eye, looking for clues to the director's distruptive future and in the process relegating it to a footnote alongside a bigger movie, if not being simply loathe to check it out because of the quality of what followed.

Here's hoping Trank's alleged meltdown and getting kicked off his Star Wars spin-off doesn't stall his career; Chronicle showed some real talent (and that movie's stars, Michael B. Jordan and Dane DeHaan, have already bounced back from their own superhero misfires).