20 Recent Movies EVERYONE Knew Would Suck

Though it's nice to be optimistic and open-minded about upcoming movies, sometimes the winds are blowing so strongly in one dire direction that it's simply impossible to ignore.

Sometimes it's just so abundantly clear pre-release that a film is destined for a panning that there's no hoping otherwise - it's going to happen, and that's that.

Perhaps the marketing was awful, the studio clearly decided to dump it with little fanfare, or reports of production issues clued us all in to the end product awaiting us.

Whatever the reason, then, these 20 films were duds we all saw coming months, hell, perhaps even years before they finally came out.

From woeful A-list vehicles sent out to die in January with minimal marketing, to terrible sequels we all knew would be terrible, and awkward cast-off projects whose mere existence raised some eyebrows, these films were always going to turn out one way.

It's always nice to be proven wrong when an awful-looking movie surprises us all and delivers something terrific, but sadly that wasn't the case with these obvious flop projects...

A January release in which Chris Pratt spends almost the entirety of the movie sat in a chair staring at screens, from the director of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - what could possibly go wrong?

Beyond all that, despite the topicality of Mercy's AI-centric premise, the marketing simply made it look like a cut-rate Minority Report or Blade Runner, while keeping stars Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson - who weren't on set together for most of the film - separated by screens.

There was a sure campy potential here, but Timur Bekmambetov's film ultimately takes itself far too seriously to be much fun, while Pratt and Ferguson are largely just going through the motions for a paycheck. And who can really blame them?

And frankly, it would've been a shock if Mercy were anything else - a film that came out of nowhere, was sent out to die with mediocre marketing, and was near-instantly forgotten about.