Ranking Joss Whedon's Projects - From Worst To Best
9. Much Ado About Nothing
This entry on the list feels a bit "which one of these is not like the others". In 2012, Joss Whedon rounded up a bunch of his tried and true cast members (almost everyone in Much Ado About Nothing had worked with Whedon before) and mounted an ambitiously faithful adaptation of the Bard's work.
So why is it so far down the list? There's nothing wrong with Much Ado About Nothing, per se. It's a clever, minimalist interpretation of Shakespeare's mid-level comedy of the same name. Sometimes it can be a challenge for directors to adapt his work into the modern era with any degree of subtlety, but Whedon accomplishes that and more here.
He succeeds in making the dialogue completely understandable to modern audiences, and this is one of the few Shakespearean comedies that maintains its sense of humor when brought to the present day. But at the end of the day, it's hard to overlook the fact that while this is good, there are other things that Whedon does so much better, and almost everyone would rather be watching them.