Tropes Media Browse Indexes Forums Videos Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Tools
Cut List New Edits Edit Reasons Launches Images List Crowner Activity Un-typed Pages Recent Page Type Changes Changelog
Tips
Creating New Redirects Cross Wicking Tips for Editing Text Formatting Rules Glossary Edit Reasons Handling Spoilers Word Cruft Administrivia FAQ
Tropes HQ
About Us Contact Us Advertise DMCA Notice Privacy Policy Report Bug
Go Ad-Free Changelog
  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Highlight Links
 

Follow TV Tropes

Following

Franchise Original Sin / Film

Go To

As easy as it can be to complain about flaws in later installments in a film series, sometimes those same flaws can be easily found on full display in much earlier installments if you squint.

Movies/franchises with their own pages:

    open/close all folders 

    #-L 
  • The American Pie films had Steve Stifler. A Jerk Jock villain straight out of an '80s frat-house teen comedy existing in a more modern (1999) film, Stifler is often described by fans of the series as a character who was hilarious in small doses in the first two films, where his jerkass behavior was treated as such. The problem was, he became the Ensemble Dark Horse of the series, and American Wedding and American Reunion expanded his role and turned him into a more heroic Butt-Monkey. As one of the protagonists, his behavior became a lot more polarizing.
  • While the Billy Jack series' turn to the political is often derided now, it was initially well-received. In contrast to the largely apolitical first film The Born Losers, Billy Jack leaned heavily into hot-button issues of the day, particularly the counterculture and Native American rights. However, it was still an action movie first and foremost, and the politics served largely to make the film more intellectually and emotionally stimulating for its hippie-era target audience rather than slowing it down. Unfortunately, later movies would up the political content significantly to the point that it became more of a burden. The Trial of Billy Jack was over three hours long and sidelined the action for filibustering and vision quests, and while the committed fanbase ate it up, critics and general audiences were less enthusiastic. Billy Jack Goes to Washington, meanwhile, would drop the action entirely in favor of the title character giving speeches to the Senate in a loose remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and failed to gain a wide release.
  • The 2013 adaptation of Carrie got criticism for casting Chloë Grace Moretz as the eponymous heroine, with many fans feeling that she was far too conventionally pretty to convincingly play such a beaten-down social outcast. Except that the 1976 film also gave Carrie a heavy dose of Adaptational Attractiveness in its casting of Sissy Spacek, who had been voted Homecoming Queen in her own high school. It's just that Spacek wasn't as well known beforehand, meaning that her performance as Carrie was most people's first experience of her, whereas Moretz had been a child star beforehand and had a prominent public persona. And the 2002 remake had cast Angela Bettis, who used Beauty Inversion to make herself believable as Carrie, whereas Moretz was Hollywood Homely at best. (That said, some still feel that her performance makes up for her beauty, making it believable that she could be a social outcast.)
  • Cats:
    • Despite criticisms that Jennifer Hudson is too young to play the elderly Grizabella at 37, the first actresses to play her on stage (Elaine Paige in London, Betty Buckley in New York) were actually younger at only 33 and 34 respectively. The make-up on stage conveyed the White-Dwarf Starlet look fine and the suspension of disbelief is easier to take on stage. In the film, it's just Jennifer Hudson's very youthful face on a normal cat's body, making the Adaptational Attractiveness all the more apparent.
    • The stage musical was similarly divisive upon opening because of how strange and bizarre it is, but the experience of seeing it in theater made the spectacle worth watching. However, the film tries so hard at realism that it falls into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley. The actors are scaled down to miniature and their faces on realistic cat fur in contrast to the make-up and choreography that is more evocative than literal.
    • Lindsay Ellis claims that certain controversial creative decisions can already be seen in Tom Hooper's previous Broadway musical adaptation, Les Misérables (2012):
      • The first of such controversial creative decisions was its being given a more grounded and 'realistic' interpretation. While a similar such decision worked for Les Miserables, which is a fairly grounded musical to begin with, Cats is one of the gaudiest and most surreal musicals to ever be performed on Broadway, and any attempts at realism miss the point of the play and plunge it into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley.
      • The All-Star Cast of Les Miserables was replicated, but whereas Les Miserables has a constantly rotating cast which can allow for many big names to appear, in Cats every character is on stage for the duration of the entire play. This forced Hooper to turn Macavity into a more active antagonist to get the A-Listers out of the way, as many of them have busy schedules that prohibit them from being on set for long periods of time in addition to high salaries and various demands. In addition, said celebrities wanted to perform group numbers solo, thus lowering their quality.
  • Die Hard:
    • Later films are criticized for turning John McClane into an invincible Hollywood Action Hero, even though, in the first three films, he was simply a Badass Normal cop who subverted many of the tropes of the action heroes of the '80s. Truth is, the original film also had plenty of moments where John should've straight-up died from the injuries he'd sustained, such as the elevator shaft explosion or getting kicked in the throat. Honest Trailers even analyzed the films with a medical doctor, and found that there really weren't that many more No One Could Survive That! moments in the later sequels than in the original trilogy, with Die Hard 2 actually being the only installment where a normal person in John's position could realistically survive all of his injuries. The difference was, in the first three films (especially the first), John's injuries were shown as taking a serious physical toll on him; by the end of each film, he's a bloody mess who's barely standing and in dire need of medical attention. The later sequels ignored this, making the damage John sustains come across as much less serious than it should be, especially given that, unlike the first three films where John was only in his thirties, the fourth and fifth films heavily played up John's advancing age. What's more, the death-defying stunts got excessively outlandish; while Honest Trailers noted that John shouldn't have survived the first and third films, it was only the fifth film where he survives something (namely, a fifteen-story fall out of a building) that would logically leave him "super dead".
    • As noted in this video by Rossatron, the third film, Die Hard with a Vengeance, changed the formula from "Die Hard" on an X — a lone cop in the wrong place at the wrong time serving as the Spanner in the Works for a bunch of criminals/terrorists within a Closed Circle — to something more akin to a Buddy Cop Show, pairing John McClane up with Zeus Carver and taking place across New York. It worked in this film because Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson had great buddy chemistry and John McTiernan (returning from the first film) is a pro at shooting great action scenes, but at the same time, it made John feel less trapped and gave him fewer opportunities to reflect on his course of action, thus making the action feel less personal and more driven by spectacle. Later films copied the formula of With a Vengeance to diminishing returns, with John feeling increasingly out of place — which they outright lampshaded in Live Free or Die Hard, and which culminated in him being a Supporting Protagonist to his son Jack in A Good Day to Die Hard.
  • For all the hay that is made of Ghostbusters (2016) treating its male characters as bumbling fools, it would be wise to remember that most of the non-Ghostbuster and non-Mayor male characters in the original Ghostbusters (1984) were hardly treated all that much better. Mr. Delacorte at the library is a weedy milquetoast, Dean Yeager is a prissy bastard who takes sadistic delight in getting rid of the Ghostbusters, Louis would probably get into deep trouble if he weren't so charming, and Peck is an outright Hate Sink. That being said: it was a fairly common convention of buddy comedies of the era to portray rich people and authority figures as dimwitted and unlikable (as seen in Animal House, Caddyshack, and Stripes, all of which were written by Ghostbusters star Harold Ramis), so those sorts of character archetypes fit with the general premise of Ghostbusters being a contemporary buddy comedy mixed with elements of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror — which was a fairly novel and interesting concept at the time. The convention just became a bit more obvious when the core theme pivoted from Slobs Versus Snobs to "Girl Power". It didn't help that while the Mayor showed open support for the Ghostbusters in the original film, he had to publicly pretend to bash the team in the reboot (while secretly supporting them), which encouraged a lot of the bumbling attitudes.
  • Godzilla:
    • Fans often complain about the overuse of human drama, Monster Delay, Exposition, and (in a rare case) Technobabble to explain the science in the series. The thing is, all of that started with the original Godzilla (1954). That film does this on purpose since it uses Reality Subtext and Real Life Writes the Plot as a theme (specifically, the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident)History lesson. Many other monster movies in the era tried to replicate the success of this approach by using these tropes up until the monster's reveal as well, but lack the horror-tragedy balance that lets this film succeed (which explains the human drama and technobabble being written done right). After the polarizing reception of Godzilla: Final Wars, the series would go into hiatus and try to use the tropes that made the this film successful with Shin Godzilla. Then Godzilla Minus One defined those tropes in a way it doesn't interfere with the narrative of the film.
    • Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) is one of the more fondly regarded Godzilla films of the modern era, but it's also notable for being the first post-reboot film to bring back an older iconic monster from the Showa-era films instead of introducing a new one—a trend that would eventually lead to criticisms about the franchise being overly reliant on nostalgia for the older movies.note  At the time, though, very few people had issues with King Ghidorah returning to the big screen, largely because the film gave the character a completely new backstory that allowed the new version to stand on its own (instead of a malevolent alien monster, Ghidorah is a mutant created from a fusion of three dragon-like creatures and was converted into a heroic robotic cyborg). Ghidorah's return also wasn't the primary draw of the film (which is primarily a pretty inventive Time Travel story), so it didn't feel like the studio was relying too heavily on his star power. The subsequent sequels were successful for similar reasons: Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth and Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II introduced Mothra and Mechagodzilla to the Heisei continuity, but the former keeps things fresh by introducing Mothra's Evil Counterpart Battra, and the latter reimagines Mechagodzilla as a human-controlled Humongous Mecha. By contrast, the Millennium-era films (Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla, Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S., and Godzilla: Final Wars, in particular) were heavily criticized for relying more on references to past movies and kaiju at the expense of originality. Final Wars is often singled out as the worst offender due to its plot largely being a rehash of Destroy All Monsters (giant monster crossover involving aliens) and its cast being overstuffed with cameos from "Showa"-era monsters.
    • Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) is notable for being the beginning of King Ghidorah's widely criticized Villain Decay, since it's the first film that depicts him as a brainwashed attack dog for a race of aliens rather than a malevolent planet-devouring monstrosity in his own right (a trend that would continue throughout the rest of the series). Despite this, the film is widely considered to be among the best of the original series, with many fans citing it as the last film in Godzilla's "Golden Age". There are a few reasons for this. For one thing: it was the first film to use the idea, so it hadn't become a trend yet. For another thing: Ghidorah being mind-controlled by the Xiliens is a surprise plot twist that isn't revealed until midway through the film; it's supposed to be shocking, and it's used to make the Xiliens look more threatening rather than just making Ghidorah look like a pushover. And lastly: even if not everyone liked the idea of Ghidorah being enslaved by aliens, most fans agree that the rest of the movie's story was interesting enough to make up for it—since it's still a fun and freewheeling sci-fi story that boasts astronauts, psychic aliens, a newly discovered planet, an army of flying saucers, and Godzilla getting blasted into space. But not only did later films reuse the idea with increasing frequency, they generally made it clear from the beginning that Ghidorah was brainwashed, and their stories seldom offered many redeeming qualities to compensate for it — eventually causing Ghidorah's apparent wimpification to wear out its welcome.
    • In recent years, fans are beginning to see Mothra’s constant dying and being resurrected via Born-Again Immortality as getting tiresome and cheap at best and as sexist and/or misogynistic at worst, to the point where it’s becoming the fandom equivalent of Ashes to Crashes or related tropes: If she shows up, you know she’s going to die either at the halfway point or in the climax. Others point out that her constant use as a Sacrificial Lamb has a detrimental effect on her character: Despite bearing the title “Queen of the Monsters” (opposite to Godzilla’s King), she rarely wins fights by herself and generally isn’t given the same amount of respect as the other monsters, especially her nominal equal Godzilla. Mothra actually survives her debut film, but it’s worth noting she also didn’t actually fight another monster in that one. Later films slap her hard with Worf Had the Flu or have her only win as part of a team-up or an Enemy Mine. This reaches new extremes in KOTM, where she receives the least screentime and smallest role in the plot out of all the monsters, dies again, and cedes her power to Godzilla for him to do the ass-kicking for her.
    • One of the most controversial aspects of Godzilla: Final Wars is that it brazenly borrows ideas and scenes from many big-name Hollywood blockbusters popular during the late 90s and early 2000s. The Godzilla franchise is no stranger to this trend as previous films tended to appropriate concepts or pay homage to iconic scenes from pop-culture on both sides of the Pacific (e.g. Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Reptilicus, Aliens, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Dragon Ball Z among many more) and even owes its very existence to it as the 1954 film was inspired in large part by The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and King Kong. This tendency wasn't such a problem before because the filmmakers who had a hand in making the preceding films put unique spins on the concepts that they copied or made an effort to hide their influences. Final Wars, meanwhile suffers significantly as the film leaves no room for subtlety whatsoever thanks to it's over-the-top, brash and in-your-face tone while not even bothering to do something different with what it imitates.
    • For Godzilla Raids Again, regarding the American Gigantis cut of the film, one of the biggest points of contention is the overuse of narration heard throughout the movie. This complaint was also there in the American cut of the original with Steve Martin, but it wasn’t as much of a problem as Martin was a reporter documenting the events of Godzilla’s appearances and the destruction of Tokyo. Plus he only narrated over scenes he was in. It was considered worse here as the narrator talks over every single action the characters take, even when they’re not even present in the scene and especially when it blatantly explains how the characters are feeling instead of allowing the scene to speak for itself.
  • Return to Halloweentown, the fourth and final film in the Halloweentown series of Disney Channel Original Movies, is treated by most fans as having never happened, largely for marking the series' final slide into the Girl-Show Ghetto at the height of the Disney Channel's Teen Idol era. The protagonist Marnie was recast, Lucas Grabeel got an expanded role now that High School Musical had made him one of the Disney Channel's biggest stars, the main villains were an obnoxious Girl Posse while The Dominion, the evil witches they worked for, were treated as The Man Behind the Man, Debbie Reynolds was demoted to a "Special Appearance By" credit, and the setting of "Witch University" forbade students from using magic on campus, leaving very few opportunities for the film to show off the magic that was previously integral to the series. All of these problems were there in the prior film, Halloweentown High, which marked the franchise's transition from family comedy to teen comedy. In that film, many characters from the first two films were either Put on a Bus or had much smaller roles in order to focus on the new cast of teenage characters, including Grabeel's character, and the more overtly fantastical elements were heavily toned down, including very few scenes set in the titular Halloweentown itself. The thing was, the move to teen comedy made sense given that the main characters were now older, the most important members of the original cast were still there, and the main plot still revolved around the monster kids trying to fit in at a human high school, so the supernatural elements were still a major source of the film's humor. As such, even though it produces a Broken Base, Halloweentown High doesn't get nearly the hostile reception from fans that Return to Halloweentown does.
  • The two sequels to The Hangover were thrashed by critics (in large part) because the main characters were seen as having become far too unlikeable to be funny, with many people finding the sequels far too cruel and mean-spirited in tone as a result. But much of this could be said of the original film, which also dabbled in its fair share of ethnic and homophobic humor. But the original film is still generally agreed to have worked quite well in spite of these issues, largely because it also had Doug as its emotional center. Doug was the only character with any real stakes in the story—but since he spent most of the movie offscreen as a Living MacGuffin (ensuring that he didn't distract from the comedy), it allowed the other three main characters to take center-stage without needing to be sympathetic. But when the sequels tried to reframe the main trio as their emotional center (instead of just as the butt of every joke), it made it clear how horribly ill-suited they were to that role. Part II was also criticized for dialing the original's ethnic humor up to uncomfortable extremes, since it moves the action from Las Vegas to Thailand—leading many critics to see it as little more than a long parade of stereotypes about Southeast Asian culture.
  • With Hellraiser, fans have noted how the films all but abandon Clive Barker's original concept of the Cenobites as neither truly good or evil, but as simply beings obsessed with the extremes of bodily sensations, both pleasure and pain, who seem to believe they're doing their victims a favor. This was a shift that starts as early as the second movie, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, even though Barker did provide the basis for the screenplay. For example, when we meet Frank in Hell, he's being subjected to a fairly traditional ironic punishment. Later installments would go further in depicting the Cenobites' motives as like demons, rather than (to quote "Pinhead" himself) the "demons to some, angels to others" from the original film.
  • How the Grinch Stole Christmas! featured needless Adaptation Expansion, confused morals that make the originally-simple message a lot less coherent, an emphasis on big sets over good writing, some problematic and unfitting jokes, and a few creepy makeup jobs. However, it was saved by Jim Carrey, who was at the height of his popularity and perfectly cast as the protagonist, topped off with an Academy Award-winning look that worked well with the cartoonish energy Carrey was known for. When the same people made The Cat in the Hat, they cast Mike Myers right when he was starting to slide off the radar, and shoved him into a costume that mostly just looked creepy, leaving the bawdy jokes, confused morals, and mindless spectacle in the spotlight.
  • Indiana Jones:
    • The infamous 'nuking the fridge' moment in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is largely considered one of the most implausible cases of Plot Armor that Indy has ever experienced. But as much as fans consider this emblematic of all the problems of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indiana Jones has always had an impressive history of surviving situations that should have been guaranteed to be lethal in Real Life via incredibly improbable escape strategiesnote . But as improbable as his similarly implausible escapes in the earlier movies were, viewers were willing to look past this detail since they were still balanced out by Indiana himself being at an age where he was practically in his prime and already quite the larger than life action hero that could plausibly survive unbelievable situations by Hollywood standards. But not only is Indy a visibly aging man by the time of Crystal Skull, most people agreed that the idea of surviving a nuclear explosion without so much as a scratch was a bit hard to take seriously.
    • One of the most widely criticized aspects of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is the rather insensitive and inaccurate treatment given to Indian culture and religion. This was actually a logical extension of similar content that was already there in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg biographer and film critic Joseph McBride points out that Raiders begins with stereotypical imagery of angry natives chasing a white man through the jungle after he steals an artifact from their culture (after Rene Belloq steals the artifact from him and uses it to turn the natives against Indy), and the portion set in the Middle East is full of similarly stereotypical Orientalist imagerynote . What balanced it was that in Raiders of the Lost Ark the main bad guys are the Nazis and it's heavily implied the day ends up being saved by God, whereas Temple of Doom paints local Indians as a psychotic child-sacrificing cult of cannibals while the forces of the British colonial authorities are given the role of The Cavalry, making it far harder to ignore the characterization of foreign cultures. Raiders of the Lost Ark is likewise a Genre Throwback to a whole slew of relatively well-aged pulp fiction and adventure movies, where Temple of Doom is largely based on Gunga Din which is adapted from a Rudyard Kipling story, deriving in both cases from a more values-dissonant time.
    • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade attracted some criticism for repeating most of the story elements from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The writers of the film had done so to recapture the success of the film following mixed reaction to the Darker and Edgier tone of its predecessor, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. However, Crusade was still different enough from Raiders that most fans considered it a worthwhile entry in the canon, as it had a much more comedic tone and added a new dimension to Indy's character by revealing his issues with his father. But when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull repeated many of these elements for a third time, it went over a lot less well, especially since the few new elements that were added this time were generally seen as pointless and unnecessary.
  • As explained here by Maven of the Eventide, a lot of what went wrong with the film adaptation of Queen of the Damned can be traced back to its much better predecessor, Interview with the Vampire. In Interview, Lestat was a vivacious, lively character who mocked his brooding counterparts, yet those "tortured souls" still came off as sympathetic characters due to their development over the course of the story. Unfortunately, the makers of Queen mistook that as "brooding = sexy and cool".
  • James Bond:
    • All the problems with the Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan-era movies — the over-the-top gadgets, the bad puns, the overly-elaborate villain plans and death traps — are visible in Goldfinger, where they were still reasonably in check and weren't showcasing the Willing Suspension of Disbelief breaking excesses that would be present in later films. That these elements were not necessary to the franchise was demonstrated by the 2006 reboot Casino Royale. The caveat to this, though, is that Royale and its immediate followup, Quantum of Solace, have themselves been criticized for feeling less like Bond films and more like a reskinning of Bourne with all of the Bond names.
    • Many of the traits that make Moonraker often derided as one of the worst films in the series were present to an extent in previous films, and only taken to extremes here. Most films included some science-fiction elements, usually in the inventions of Q or the villains, but these were grounded enough to pass as cutting-edge technology. But Moonraker had so many sci-fi elements that were critical to the story and action that it can safely be called a sci-fi story just as much as a spy one, making it feel out of place in the series. The franchise itself developed a basic formula and recurring elements early on, but Moonraker's whole plot was such a rehash of the previous film it was hit hard by It's the Same, So It Sucks. And the franchise has never been afraid to change with the times or imitate elements from other films popular at the time, but making a film about laser fights in space, and ending with a final, desperate shot to destroy a superweapon so soon after the success of "Star Wars" screamed that the films were cynically Following The Leader.
    • Roger Moore received increasing complaints that he was getting too old for the role (something which he concurred with), culminating in the embarrassing realization that he was older than his A View to a Kill co-star Tanya Roberts's mother. But even in his very first outing, Live and Let Die, Moore was more than twenty years older than all three of the actresses playing Bond's paramours. (It didn't help that, despite being Connery's successor in the role, Moore was almost three years older than him.) But since Live and Let Die was Roger Moore's very first film as James Bond after Sean Connery's departure, critics and viewers were able to look past this in favor of interest in what Moore would bring to the table as Connery's successor in the role. But as time went by and the novelty of Roger Moore being the new James Bond wore off, the noticeable age difference between him and the actresses being chosen to play Bond's paramours started becoming both increasingly uncomfortable and equally increasingly more difficult to ignore, especially since he was only getting older.
    • On the continued subject of Bond girls, a common complaint about several of the ones featured in later films involves how they are largely present to serve as eye candy for the viewers and very rarely (if ever) contribute to the plot. The same, however, could be said about the very first Bond girl Honey Rider from Dr. No. The key difference, however, is that Honey was enough of a genuinely charismatic Nice Girl for the audience to feel willing to invest in her despite how comparatively little she properly contributed to advancing the narrative, a factor that couldn't quite be claimed about many of her successors in later movies.
    • The Daniel Craig Bond films have also gone through two noticeable up-and-down periods that both started with a deconstructive period followed by a period of Revisiting the Roots, in that order. To elaborate:
      • Casino Royale (2006) got rave reviews for its Darker and Edgier reinvention of 007, and it was widely hailed as a breath of fresh air. Thing is, though, in spite of its grittier tone and minimalistic storytelling, the movie also had enough spectacle to keep the audience engaged (in the famous construction site chase, for instance), and the Big Bad Le Chiffre still retained enough of the classic Bond villain flavor to keep the movie anchored in the world of Tuxedo and Martini fiction; he didn't have a supervillain lair or an arsenal of elaborate gadgets, but he was a genuinely scary Soft-Spoken Sadist who wept tears of blood. For the follow-up, Quantum of Solace, the filmmakers tried to maintain that stripped-down approach, but wound up stripping out most of the spectacle that made Casino Royale work. In trying to do a "realistic" evil industrialist as a villain, they ended up with Dominic Greene, generally considered one of the most boring Bond villains in the series' history; and in trying to tell a simpler story, they wound up with a largely by-the-numbers revenge story with a subplot about hoarding a country's water thrown in.
      • Skyfall got similarly rave reviews for managing to bring much of the fun of 1960s-era Bond to The New '10s, balancing out some of the grittier elements of Craig's previous outings by resurrecting some old series favorites. The return of the original Aston Martin DB5, complete with machine guns and ejector seat, was widely applauded by fans, as was the return of Q and Moneypenny. But in spite of its homages to the series' past, it also wasn't afraid to shake up the status quo by killing off M and exploring Bond's childhood with the visit to Skyfall manor. Its followup, Spectre, kept those same trends going, but it was widely criticized for sloppily handling the return of the SPECTRE organization, and its attempt to reintroduce Ernst Stavro Blofeld as Bond's evil stepbrother has proven to be much more divisive. While Skyfall's odes to the past were seen as a good way to complement a genuinely interesting story with a strong antagonist, Spectre has been accused of leaning too strongly on them to round out a weak plot hinging almost entirely on old faces.
    • While Craig's films have gotten plenty of acclaim, their attempt to give Bond a definitive Origin Story has always been one of the most divisive things about them. Detractors of Casino Royale (2006) argued that it was an unnecessary Continuity Reboot in a series known for its very loose continuity, detractors of Quantum of Solace argued that it was needlessly weighed down by Bond's angst over losing Vesper Lynd, and a few people argued that Skyfall stripped Bond of much of his mystique by showing us his childhood home and introducing us to the man who raised him after his parents' death. In spite of all that, the movies generally had strong enough original plots that they could still stand on their own, and Bond remained as badass as ever (his relative inexperience was something of an Informed Attribute). But when Spectre tried to give the same Origin Story treatment to Ernst Stavro Blofeld—"explaining" that he and Bond grew up together, and that his hatred of Bond was a twisted case of Sibling Rivalry—detractors accused it of being an embarrassing case of Villain Decay that made it all but impossible to take the story seriously.
  • Jaws:
    • The original film, together with Star Wars two years later, has often been held by many old-guard (or at least highbrow) film critics with ushering in The Blockbuster Age of Hollywood and all of its worst excesses, killing off the New Hollywood era in the process. The makers of both films, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas respectively, both came from the same "film school geek" background that many of their New Hollywood contemporaries came from, but their films were made with a far more populist orientation, telling simple plots of "men vs. shark" or "plucky resistance vs. The Empire". The difference was in the artistry they put into telling those seemingly simple stories, elevating them into classic tales that still garner the respect of those who watch them. Years later, even Spielberg and Lucas themselves had grown disillusioned with the trends that their films had kicked off, predicting that they would lead in time to Hollywood's downfall.
    • The original film used some pretty heavy Artistic License regarding shark behavior in the name of Rule of Scary, portraying the Great White Shark as lurking in the shallows of a heavily populated beach town and repeatedly preying on humans—even though real sharks find humans unappetizing because of their low fat-to-muscle ratio, and a large Great White would find such shallow waters far too confining.note  The end result made for a highly effective horror film, but it relied on portraying the shark as more of an ethereal monster than a realistic predatory animal.note  The sequels took that idea to its logical conclusion. Jaws 2 introduced the idea of a shark taking revenge against Martin Brody and his family for killing the original shark, though to the film's credit, it's quickly dismissed by a scientist who tells Brody that "Sharks don't take things personally." Then Jaws: The Revenge treated the idea dead seriously, stretching Willing Suspension of Disbelief to the breaking point.
  • George A. Romero's Living Dead Series.
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • After Peter Jackson's trilogy debuted, the general consensus of them were that they were the best potential LOTR adaptations that the books were likely to get. Some criticism was directed at the overly long ending(s), but they were mostly joked about than harshly derided. When Jackson's King Kong (2005) came around, consensus also was that it was great, but that Jackson might have overdone the homage to the original a tad, resulting in the film being much longer and more padded than it should be. Then when Jackson returned to Middle-earth with The Hobbit, enthusiasm for them dipped upon the announcement that it would be split into three films, despite the book being shorter than any of the Lord of the Rings books. The resulting films have been highly divisive, with many criticisms directed at the over-length of the story being stuffed full of unnecessary padding, most of which was designed to connect the films even closer to The Lord of the Rings than before.
    • In Lord of the Rings, Jackson notably played up the roles of Arwen and Eowyn and put some more focus on romance. Though not everyone liked it, it did help give the films a strong Periphery Demographic among girls and women. Their success was likely the inspiration behind Tauriel being created whole cloth for The Hobbit, and the addition of a Love Triangle between her, Kili, and Legolas (who himself isn't in the book). Said love triangle became one of the film's most criticized aspects. This extended even to Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, whose Xenafication was met with even more divisiveness than Tauriel.
    • It was fairly evident in The Lord of the Rings that Jackson was more interested in the story of the War of the Ring than in Frodo's journey as the Ringbearer, which had the side effect of playing up the violent spectacle and making Frodo noticeably more passive. But for the most part, it was just a question of focusing on stuff that was already there, and it's easy to understand why one would think epic fantasy battles would be more crowdpleasing than some hobbits wandering around. Fundamentally, Lord of the Rings is half about an epic war permanently affecting the world's status quo and half about a personal journey and the accompanying struggles, so showing off the battles made perfect sense for a blockbuster movie approach. In The Hobbit, though, they were adapting something that was in no way a war story and almost entirely a personal journey, but still tried to give it the same level of action as its predecessor. Consequently, battles and events that took up a few sentences or happened offscreen get expanded into significant chunks of the film, to the point of adding in new characters just to partake in ridiculous action scenes. The result almost completely compromises both the narrative of the original and most of the agency and screentime of the story's actual main characters. It reaches the point of the titular character being given almost nothing to do in the last film, to the point that he barely even fights in the titular battle—in both versions, he gets knocked out and misses most of the Battle of the Five Armies, but in the book, it's about three pages long, while in the film, it's essentially the entire last half.
    • The expanding and lionizing of elven characters started in Lord of the Rings, with an added plotline involving an intervention at Helm's Deep that wasn't in the book, and Legolas being given a few over-the-top action setpieces. This got some grumbling from purists, but it was largely under control and never overshadowed the actual narrative. The latter two Hobbit films, though, went so far as to add in multiple elven main characters and elf-focused plotlines and scenes, in a narrative where the elves were originally nowhere near as important, turning them into a massive Spotlight-Stealing Squad that somehow still felt completely pointless.
    • One of the criticism about the Hobbit films is that not only is a lot of action added, but much of it involves cartoonishly over the top stunts. LOTR indulged in a bit of this too, like when Legolas surfed on a shield in battle. However, The Hobbit had entire "toon physics" action sequences that were quite long and went far past what LOTR did: most notably, the barrel-riding scene, where the dwarves bounce around in barrels like they're made of rubber and seem to be impervious to all damage. While nobody was exactly asking for historical realism with these films (because you know, they're fantasy), it's hard to take a bunch of dwarves floating down a river in barrels while fighting off orcs with said barrels seriously, especially when the movie then tries to do gritty war drama. Even the more cartoonish stuff would be reasonable in light of the book, which did have a fairly comedic and lighthearted tone, but it clashes horribly when, for instance, the end of that barrel scene involves Kili getting shot by an arrow, being crippled for the rest of the film by it, and almost dying in melodramatic fashion.

    M-S 
  • Mad Max:
    • Mad Max: Fury Road was a smash hit that was acclaimed as one of the best action movies of the 2010s, but it also caught flak from people asking "why is this even a Mad Max film?" and complaining about Max only being there to put on the poster for what was essentially Furiosa's story. But Max being a Supporting Protagonist was actually a tradition that started in Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, where Max was just a hired hand in a story about a tribe of wastelanders and a gang of raiders. Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome was a Dolled-Up Installment, and likewise more about the orphans than it was about Max. But in Fury Road, there was a single individual, Furiosa, who clearly had better claim to the protagonist slot than Max, and that led to the complaints of Max "just being there." Furthermore, previous films were about Max showing up and helping someone else's struggle, with him still indisputably the main character, while in Fury Road, Max is helpless and doesn't actually accomplish anything until the second act. What's also odd is that his first actual active role in the movie is getting into a brutal fight with Furiosa, who then inexplicably trusts him to save all of her charges like she recognizes he's a protagonist too.
  • The Matrix:
    • The original film is still widely cited as one of the greatest science-fiction movies ever made, but it also suffers from some inconsistencies in its lore and concepts, which sometimes flit between science-fiction and fantasy with little rhyme or reason. It's ostensibly a hard cyberpunk film about virtual reality and Artificial Intelligence, and the characters' "superpowers" are supposedly justified in that they can bend the rules of the Matrix by manipulating its code—but the story also plays The Chosen One trope completely straight, with Neo supposedly being a reincarnation of a legendary Messianic Archetype with genuine mystical abilities, and "The Oracle" being a computer program who can accurately predict the future. The movie even ends with Neo returning to life after being shot to death. Many of the plot points didn't really hold up under scrutiny, but the film was so tightly structured and well-acted that they never broke Willing Suspension of Disbelief, and the story still worked perfectly fine as a thrilling riff on The Hero's Journey.

      In the sequels, though, it was a bit harder to overlook. This was partly because the fantastical elements were considerably more explicit: The Matrix Reloaded has Neo seeing visions of the future and telepathically shorting out Sentinels while in the real world, and The Matrix Revolutions features Agent Smith possessing a living human and Neo developing psychic sight after being blinded. They weren't exactly less plausible than anything in the first movie—but since many of them happened in the real world, it was harder to Hand Wave them by saying "That's just how the Matrix works!" It also didn't help that the story became a lot denser and less emotionally engaging, making the inconsistent mythology stick out much more.
    • Josh Friedman, creator of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, alleged that The Matrix also had this effect on cinematic and television science fiction as a whole, producing a greater focus on action and special effects at the expense of story and characterization. Daniel Dockery of Cracked has voiced similar opinionsnote , in particular blaming it for the proliferation of bad Wire Fu and CGI stuntwork in Hollywood action movies in the early '00s. Whereas The Wachowskis went out of their way to get it right, hiring legendary Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping to do the fight scenes and having the cast train with him for four months, many Matrix imitators simply settled for putting actors with no martial arts experience into wire harnesses and having them do physics-defying stunts, which inevitably looked goofy.
  • Many of the criticisms thrown towards Morbius (2022), namely a weak story, a sluggish pace, and an Ass Pull involving the Marvel Cinematic Universe were also levied against Venom (2018) and (in the case of the spoiled part) Venom: Let There Be Carnage. But unlike Morbius, whose only major appearance in mainstream media is Spider-Man: The Animated Series and little else, Venom has appeared in nearly every Spider-Man franchise across all forms of media to date. Plus, his disconnection to Spidey aside, the Sony's Spider-Man Universe Venom is considered a far more faithful take on the character compared to the version seen in Spider-Man 3, which helped his movies perform as strong as they did in spite of their flaws, but Morbius having little mainstream presence to judge from instead brought on a lot of ironic mockery. And while Eddie and Venom get confused at the dimensional hopping that would be explained in Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Vulture's unfazed reaction at being brought out of his world - and worse, in a way that completely contradicted how the spell that brought in other Spider-Man characters in No Way Home worked - was very hard to swallow, meanwhile Venom at least utters a line about the Venom hivemind being across universes right before he is brought to the MCU that combined with how the spell is said to have worked helps fans piece together how it happened.
  • A Nightmare on Elm Street:
    • By the time of its self-destruction with the sixth film, Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, the series had fallen into almost literal Self-Parody, with Freddy Krueger a comedian first and a killer second, while the kills lacked any real sense of tension or fear in favor of serving as special-effects showcases. The overarching plot had also become needlessly complex, with Freddy developing a backstory that stripped away his mystique.note  All of these elements can be traced back to the third film in the series, Dream Warriors, generally regarded as the best of the Nightmare sequels, and a rival to the original by some fans. Here, Freddy first began to take on his jokester persona, but he was still Faux Affably Evil, his twisted sense of humor only getting under his victims' — and the viewers' — skin that much more. The kills were amped up compared to the first two films, but if anything, this served to demonstrate just how powerful Freddy was, emphasizing that, within the dream world, he was practically a god who could bend reality to his whims. As for his developing backstory, well, "the bastard son of a hundred maniacs" is still an unforgettable line.
    • Entertain the Elk identified another Original Sin in the fourth film, The Dream Master, the first entry in which Freddy's motivation was no longer to get revenge on the parents who killed him by going after their children. After killing off the last of the Elm Street children in the first act of The Dream Master, Freddy's Ghostly Goals were fulfilled and he no longer had a clear goal beyond just killing for the sake of it, and so the plots and characters in the films became increasingly paper-thin, little more than excuses to get to the inventive kills and dream sequences. While The Dream Master is still remembered as a better film than the ones that followed, there's a reason why Nightmare fans debate whether it was the last good film in the series or the first bad one. The difference: while later films used this as an excuse to dive further into Freddy's backstory to give him a motive, which merely fed into the aforementioned problems with over-explaining him, this film keeps his motive simple by deciding that he doesn't really need a motive beyond being evil, since he was already a Serial Killer in life and never stopped being one.
    • While Freddy vs. Jason more or less met the approval of fans of both the Nightmare and Friday the 13th series, Nightmare fans have criticized it for Jason Voorhees racking up most of the kills, with Freddy only really coming into play in the third act while serving as The Man Behind the Man before then. (In fact, the reason Freddy gets angry at Jason to begin with is because Jason steals one of Freddy's kills.) This is simply a reflection of both franchises as a whole, where Jason often had much higher body counts whereas Freddy typically had fewer kills, but much more elaborate dream sequences and special effects.note  Putting the two together turned out to be an asymmetrical battle owing to their radically different methods of killing their targets.
  • While Pacific Rim was was widely acclaimed by fans of mecha and kaiju, some did criticize it for what was perceived as it taking excessive inspiration from Neon Genesis Evangelion. This mostly died out because this inspiration was mostly used as homage, alongside references and homages to numerous other mecha anime and kaiju movies. The sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising, however, rested a bit more excessively on Evangelion: not only was its plot a multi-level mixture of the arcs of Bardiel, the Jet Alone, the Mass Produced EVA, and Ritsuko's brief rebellion, but its climax reveals that the Kaijus were trying to reach Tokyo to cause a disaster that would terminate humanity, just like the Third Impact plot point, a reveal that notably contradicts their established behavior in the previous film.
  • One of the most common critiques of The Phantom of the Opera (2004) was the reveal of the Phantom's true face, which many found laughable due to the apparent Informed Deformity, comparing his "freakish birth defect" to a bad sunburn or allergic reaction. In truth, adaptations of the story had been giving him some level of Adaptational Attractiveness for a while (even Lon Chaney, generally seen as the standard for an "ugly" Phantom, wasn't quite as nightmarish as the character described in the book), and it was often remarked by fans that he seemed to be getting Progressively Prettier. The Broadway musical upon which the film is based also put a pretty hard cap on how deformed the Phantom could be. The iconic "half mask" (originally designed to not get in the way of the microphone) meant that at most, only about a third of the Phantom's face could be deformed, and that's before you take stage makeup budgets into account. The 2004 film was just the breaking point, because not only does The Reveal have a ton of buildup in-story, even featuring wild Dutch angles when it kicks in properly, but considering that this was a big Hollywood blockbuster, there was really no reason to not go all-out and give him a properly hideous face, especially when this would likely be many people's first exposure to the character—and they were treated to one of the least terrifying Phantoms in cinema history.
  • While the final three The Pink Panther movies (not counting the 2006 remake and its sequel) are frequently criticized for their reliance on questionably funny Running Gags, outdated racial stereotypes, and over-the-top humor more suited to the Pink Panther cartoons than their live-action cousins. In actual fact, most of these began during 1978's Revenge of the Pink Panther, the last one generally regarded as being any good. As to why Revenge works and most of the subsequent ones didn't, most fans have one simple answer: Peter Sellers was still alive.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl featured elements that hurt the sequels: Jack Sparrow stealing the show from Will and Elizabeth, the nominal leads; characters (well, Jack and Barbossa) double-crossing each other; a balance of light-hearted comedy and serious action and drama; a climax that even many fans felt lasted a few beats too long. In Black Pearl, these elements were well-integrated and added to the appeal. For Dead Man's Chest and especially At World's End, these elements were cranked up as the tone degenerated to full-on Mood Whiplash (say, juxtaposing Jack's slapstick antics with mass hangings and Davy Jones's undead crew), every character developed Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and the plot amounted to a colossal Gambit Pile Up that left many viewers without anyone to root for. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides fixed the problem by embracing it, and reworking the franchise to focus on the pirates instead: Without an ostensibly clean-cut protagonist like Will or Elizabeth, the film could maintain a more consistent mood and characterization, and the backstabbing seemed much less obnoxious when the film was about Black-and-Gray Morality from the very beginning.
  • Later films in the Predator franchise have been criticized for the Monster Threat Expiration given to the Predators, a trend that reached its nadir in Predators: two of the movie's three Predators die fairly quickly, despite having advantages the Jungle Hunter didn't such as "hunting hounds" and UAV surveillance, being more ruthless than him, and spending the movie hunting less competent and dangerous "quarry" (a random assembly of criminals and soldiers — some of them poorly-armed and one of whom has no combat background — who didn't trust each other rather than a mostly-cohesive group of elite mercenaries). This trend actually got its start in the second movie. Harrigan is an average and somewhat paunchy cop with no military experience who manages to kill the City Hunter in personal combat. This stands in stark contrast with Dutch, an experienced ex-special forces operative with a bodybuilder's physique who was clearly outmatched by the Jungle Hunter and only managed to kill him with his wits and well-placed booby traps. However, unlike later installments, the movie went to some lengths to justify this. The City Hunter was established to be more reckless and careless than the Jungle Hunter (with Word of God confirming that he was also significantly younger and less experienced), and it's implied he didn't do better because he'd already been shot multiple times by the time of the final confrontation as a consequence of said recklessness and carelessness. Moreover, he'd earlier managed to showcase his badass credentials by slaughtering multiple police officers and gangsters, so he didn't seem like a pushover even when the tables were turned against him. As for Harrigan, part of why he won was because he'd managed to turn one of the City Hunter's own weapons against him, and the area of the city he has to police is an Urban Hellscape that garners in-universe comparisons to a war zone, so his victory still seemed plausible enough.
  • The excesses of the RoboCop sequels could be traced back to the original film. The original film was a dark satire of 1980s consumerism with graphic violencenote , goofy elements like a military-grade robot that can't go down stairs, and a scathing anti-capitalist message. However, it was still respected by many film critics for balancing its extremes with an existential examination of the titular character's humanity and maintaining moral ambiguity by painting the villainous corporate executives as fleshed-out characters instead of strawmen. However, the sequels doubled down on different aspects of the original while ignoring the nuances that made the first film so admirable. RoboCop 2 exaggerated the violence at the expense of the protagonist's humanity while also having children as violent drug dealers who end up getting brutally killed, RoboCop 3 added ninjas and had military machines that can be hacked by children, and the 2014 reboot had anvilicious jabs at right-wing politics, with Samuel L. Jackson playing an exaggerated caricature of a Fox News pundit. Needless to say, none of them lived up to the original film, as they only carried exaggerated superficial aspects of the first installment but none of its wit, humanity, or depth.
  • The flaws that built to a fever pitch in Rocky IV (overuse of montages, implausible fight scenes, schmaltz, lionizing Rocky) were mostly present in earlier films. In particular, the first film featured a pretty believable fight (Rocky was lucky and determined, Apollo was playing, caught off-guard, and still won), which became less believable in the second film (Rocky was still injured, Apollo had been training for months), but it didn't seem impossible. In Rocky III, Clubber Lang losing to Rocky was seriously stretching it, given that Lang was younger, taller, heavier, and tougher than Apollo while Rocky was significantly older, but he at least had something resembling a character and was within the realm of possibility (especially since the film goes out of its way to show how Rocky can beat Clubber). By Rocky IV, the main villain has no personality and appears to be physically superhuman while Rocky had only gotten older, abandoning any semblance of down-to-earth realism as a thirty-nine-year-old goes fifteen rounds with a cartoonish muscleman who should be able to knock his head off his shoulders in a single punch, no matter how many trees he cuts down.
    • Rocky III in particular started a lot of the things that'd be derided in IV; a main character gets killed off for little reason, the antagonist is a lot less well-written than Apollo, several moments are flat-out silly, and Rocky's victory over Lang doesn't feel very plausible. It's just that most of the silly moments in III weren't as bad as those in IV, Lang was still a more well-rounded character in comparison with the overtly-villainous and otherwise lacking in personality Ivan Drago, a clear explanation on just how Rocky could plausibly defeat Lang despite the seeming impossible odds being clearly provided in contrast to Rocky's victory against the practically superhuman Drago being all too obviously inexplicable with no real explanation given, and III also having Apollo's Character Development to help further anchor it.
  • A common criticism of Rush Hour 2 and Rush Hour 3 is how Carter constantly acted like a stereotypical incompetent black buffoon who would not shut up. As it so happens, he'd actually been a pretty talkative and incompetent figure as far back as the very first film, with those traits being considered a part of his character's appeal at the time. But in the first movie, not only did the humor based around these traits feel a lot more fresh and the traits themselves feel a lot more endearing due to this being most viewers' first introduction to the character, but they were also balanced out by moments in which he could occasionally contribute some useful skills to the plot when he really needed to. Later films, however, heavily flanderized his incompetence and Motor Mouth tendencies, allowing the joke to swiftly wear thin while also allowing his Jerkass moments towards Lee to stand out considerably more than similar such moments that had been present in the first movie. Further not helping matters was that Lee tended to always have strong personal stakes in the films' stories, even having personal connections with the Big Bad of the 2nd film and Dragon-in-Chief of the 3rd film that resulted in him having personal demons to battle at the same time, while Carter tended to often have minimal (if any) in-story stakes and largely stayed the same throughout the entire trilogy.
  • The Scary Movie films were horror parodies that always had a problem with sticking to the "horror" part. The first film had scenes spoofing The Matrix, The Usual Suspects, and Budweiser's Wazzup ads, while the second had gags riffing on Charlie's Angels (2000), the Mission: Impossible films, and an ad campaign for Nike sneakers. In those films, however, these were only minor gags that had little bearing on the films' actual plots; the first was clearly a parody of the teen slasher movies of the late '90s, while the second was just as clearly a parody of supernatural horror. Plus, some of these moments made some sense in the context of the films' Excuse Plots. The Charlie's Angels and Matrix parodies are both Let's Get Dangerous! moments for the characters, and the Usual Suspects parody served to reveal the first film's real Twist Ending. The third film, on the other hand, had a whole subplot that served as a parody of 8 Mile, and the targets of mockery were drawn more from pop culture as a whole than from horror movies specifically. Scary Movie 3 also marked the start of the movies drifting into Narrow Parody territory, as they stopped broadly parodying the horror genre and just started parodying whichever horror movies had made money at the box office recently (namely Signs and The Ring), even if those films had nothing in common with each other—resulting in the humor becoming unfocused and scattershot. Diminishing returns set in quick.
  • One of the principal reasons Spider-Man 3 is the least liked in the original Spider-Man Trilogy is that it was widely viewed as too goofy in tone (the most commonly cited moment being the "Emo Dancing Peter" sequence), but the trilogy had always been pretty goofy: outsized and hammy personalities, cheesy action sequences, and a lot of moments that were deliberately going full Bathos. While there were a lot of heartfelt and emotional dramatic beats, the overall tone was very much "comic book come to life." This approach just didn't work as well for the third movie, for a few reasons. For one thing: its plot was notoriously cluttered and overlong due to the film featuring three different villains with their own individual character arcs, which made the more dramatic aspects of the story—Peter and Harry's decayed friendship, the issues with the black suit, Peter's quest for revenge against Flint Marko, Peter and MJ's relationship going south again—feel underserved. As a result, the dramatic beats didn't stick, and the audience only remembered Emo Dancing Peter. For another thing: the first two films drew most of their inspiration from the earliest Spider-Man comics from the 1960s, which were fairly campy and whimsical to begin with, so the goofy tone actually felt appropriate to the source material. But when Sam Raimi tried to apply almost exactly the same tone to the Venom symbiote arc—a considerably darker horror-themed story from the 1980s—it inevitably suffered from tonal dissonance. The "Emo Dancing Peter" sequence is, in fact, a direct result of this: Peter's "emo" haircut and impromptu dancing were how Raimi chose to depict his personality change after falling under the symbiote's influence, which struck many people as an odd interpretation.
  • A few fans were overly critical about Zachary Levi's performance as Shazam in SHAZAM! Fury of the Gods, feeling that he generally acts more childish than he should, even by the standards of a kid in an adult body with superpowers. In truth, Levi’s performance isn't actually too different from the first movie, and in fact was considered one of its highlights at the time due to his contrasting personality with Asher Angel's more moody teenage self. However, it’s also worth noting that Billy was only 14 years old in the first film, meaning his personality after being empowered lined up with a kid that age becoming someone like Shazam and was all but explicitly stated to be Billy allowing himself to "be a kid". Here, Billy is nearing the age 18 with Angel portraying him as such, while Levi still acts like the character is in his early teens. As such, the two actors' very different performances of the same character felt much more disconnected for viewers.
  • Suicide Squad (2016) is what started the trend of DC and Warner Bros. attempting to turn the characters into their version of Guardians of the Galaxy, as said film featured a quirky group of anti-heroes going up against traditionally overpowered superhumans despite their own conflicting views on how society had treated them, and all the major characters played by A-Listers survived while very few characters who weren't died unceremoniously—all to the tone of classic rock music from the 70s and 80s while they constantly snark at each other. The problem was, the studio's cut of the film was not well received at all, being seen as mindless but flawed fun at beset, and heavily lacking on characterization and a coherent plot. However, Warner Bros. saw the box office numbers despite the poor reviews and came to the belief that's how audiences wanted to see the Squad, and subsequently made it so most iterations followed, with a similar lineup and tone. Even then, when James Gunn (who directed the Guardians of the Galaxy film) released The Suicide Squad to make everything more in line with the comics (i.e. killing off a lot of characters, featuring numerous C-Listers most audiences had never heard of, sending the squad on dirty black-ops missions against regular people, and even featuring a cameo appearance from the squad's most notable writer John Ostrander), the lower box-office numbers despite the higher acclaimnote  resulted once again in WB making all Suicide Squad based stories a combination of the two takes while mostly drawing from the former's tone and lineup. Fans who were pleased about Gunn's film making things more in line with the comics weren't too happy that Warner Bros. took the wrong lessons from the 2016 film and made that the sole template to draw on, especially when Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League borrowed too heavily from it and alienated any potential players.
  • Superman:
    • One major critique of Batman v Superman is that Superman ends up coming off as a Pinball Protagonist; his role in the story is very reactive, his motivations are undefined and underexplored, and he has significantly less dialogue or development than Batman or Luthor. These complaints could be found in the somewhat less controversial Man of Steel, where most of Superman's pivotal choices are either things he has to do (killing Zod) or effectively made for him (Jor-El makes the costume for him and gives him his mission), he's largely silent for big chunks of the movie, and his actual reason for being a hero is pretty messily-established. It can even in turn can be traced to the first third of Superman: The Movie, where Clark is instinctively drawn to the Artic by a Kryptonian crystal and generates the Fortress of Solitude with it, with a hologram of Jor-El giving him his mission and training him mentally for over a decade, after which he first appears in costume.note  It just wasn't as obvious an issue in Superman: The Movie or Man of Steel because Superman was still the undisputed protagonist and therefore had to be given stuff to do or choices to make, rather than having to actively fight for room against Batman.
    • The at-best controversial reception of Zod's death in Man of Steel goes back to Superman II, where Superman also (in most cuts, anyway) kills Zod. If anything, it was less defensible there, since the Man of Steel Zod was still dangerous and it was the only way to stop him, while the Superman II Zod was depowered and already defeated, and Superman is clearly horrified and disgusted by what he's done in the former and triumphantly smiling in the latter. Plenty of Superman fans would argue it didn't work back then, either (Superman's frequent jerkishness in that film is easily the most common complaint about it), but it didn't end up being as infamous because while the original Zod death was a Disney Villain Death (to the point that it's ambiguous if he even died or just fell somewhere to be imprisoned, as in some cuts), the Man of Steel Zod was killed by a Neck Snap with considerably more focus placed on it, meaning it left far more of an impression and made Superman himself come off as brutal, even though it was the only way to save the innocent family Zod nearly killed with heat vision. The far grittier tone of Man of Steel didn't help, either.
    • The depiction of Lex Luthor in Batman v Superman was roundly panned, with many fans in particular claiming that Jesse Eisenberg's jokey Large Ham portrayal of the character was ill-fitting and more suitable for someone like The Riddler or The Joker. This is yet another element that can be traced back to the Christopher Reeve films, where Gene Hackman very much played Lex as a jokester and could be quite campy at times. The main difference is that the Reeve movies were lighthearted enough that Hackman's performance didn't seem out of place, and the first two installments were so well-liked by critics and audiences that even those who didn't care for Luthor were more forgiving. Furthermore, Hackman seemed to be channeling James Bond villains with his performance, Hollywood's go-to reference point for the kind of comic book supervillain that Lex Luthor is, and not only was it easy for audiences to picture a Bond villain as a Worthy Opponent for Superman, but Hackman's performance stacked up well by that measure. By contrast, the extremely dark and bleak tone of Batman v Superman just highlighted how odd Eisenberg's performance was, with many finding it quite jarring and irritating — the revelation that he pees in jars even became something of a memetic counterpoint to those who claimed the film as mature and philosophical. Eisenberg also seemed to be channeling Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, which invited unfavorable comparisons to that film, especially since his Luthor had little in common with the Joker otherwise. Finally, the Reeve films came out decades before Superman: The Animated Series, Lois & Clark, and Smallville, all of which helped cement the popular image of Luthor as a cunning and charismatic businessman and a scientific Übermensch who would probably have fit better into the story that Zack Snyder was trying to tell.

    T-Z 
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) often gets flack for making April the focus of the story, though the film still centers around the turtles. The Turtles' personalities are well done, but they don't get much character development. Lacking Casey Jonesnote  and putting in a villain (Eric Sacks) who had nothing to do with any of the comics or cartoons prior to that point was a mitigating factor too. The thing is that this problem can be found all the way back in the 1990 original. Raphael is the only turtle who gets a character arc of some sort, Leo gets some, and Donnie and Mikey don't get any at all. Plus, Danny, a minor character, had a sub-plot that while it did not take over the whole film, was an odd decision. The reason why it wasn't noticeable back then was due to it being the Turtles' first film, the hype surrounding it, and a well written story with great practical effects and action scenes. The sequel, Secret of the Ooze, tried to fix the character development issue by putting the focus on Donnie's arc note , but it never really goes anywhere. Turtles III and TMNT (2007) both featured villains that had nothing to do with the comics or cartoons, albeit, the latter had Karai with hints of Shredder returning in a sequel that was never made. As Karai had yet to debut in the comics when the first two films were made, Tatsu was created to be Shredder's right-hand man. Ooze had Tokka and Rahzar as expies for Bebop and Rocksteady, because Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman did not want them in the film. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, the sequel to the 2014 movie, attempted to fix that by dropping the Eric Sacks character entirely, adding in Bebop, Rocksteady, and Baxter Stockman (villains that have appeared in the cartoons or comics), and focusing on the Turtles themselves. Said sequel, while better than the previous film, still received a Rotten score and became a Box Office Bomb, so while the improvements helped it out, the upcoming reboot may have a lot to improve on.
  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and other slasher movie franchises frequently get criticized for their reliance on shallow, stereotyped characters whom it's difficult to connect with. But the first movie in the series, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), has characters that are even more one-note than typical of the genre, and yet is generally considered one of the few truly great slasher movies. What differentiated it from its sequels and imitators was its efficiency: rather than devoting a substantial amount of the runtime to Developing Doomed Characters, the original TCM takes only the bare minimum amount of time necessary to establish the cast, and what follows is so relentlessly thrilling from beginning to end that the protagonists' lack of personality doesn't have time to register.
  • Bride of Frankenstein is considered by many fans and critics to be one of Universal Pictures' best monster movies, if not the greatest of them all—but it also has many of the elements that contributed to the Universal Horror brand ultimately fizzling out in the mid-1940s. It largely started the franchise's shift from dark, psychological horror to goofy, juvenile camp, it introduced yet another archetypal mad scientist to the cast of characters, and it effectively undid the ending of the original Frankenstein (1931) (an early warning sign of the Universal Monster movies drifting into more-or-less Negative Continuity). But compared to the mid-1940s "monster mash" movies like House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula, it featured a pretty decent balance of drama and farce, with its more light-hearted moments (like the homunculi sequence) mostly acting as a counter-balance for some truly hard-hitting story beats (like the climactic destruction of the laboratory). Similarly, although Dr. Septimus Pretorius (Henry Frankenstein's previously unmentioned mentor) was effectively just a clone of Frankenstein on paper, he was brought to life through a truly memorable performance by Ernest Thesiger that allowed the character to truly stand out as a gleefully insane science professor with a god complex (contrasting Colin Clive's performance as a more down-to-Earth family man with a dark side). And although the movie elected to ignore the Creature's death at the end of the original Frankenstein, this could be pretty easily forgiven as a necessity of the premise—and it was balanced out by the bulk of the main plot, which featured quite a few continuity nods to the first film, and actually moved the stories of Frankenstein and his Creature forward in interesting ways (most notably with the introduction of the titular Bride). The end result ended up feeling like a meaningful continuation of the original Frankenstein rather than just a rehash or an Excuse Plot.
  • A lot of negative reviews of Zoolander 2 comment on how dated the movie's joke about supermodels being stupid is. Although the "dumb model" character has always been something of a Dead Unicorn Trope, the original movie received a lot less flak for it, even though models weren't any more popular in 2001 than they were in 2016. The thing is, that movie was so steeped in nostalgia for The '80s that it was easier to accept it as a sort of Retro Universe. The sequel, bloated with special effects and celebrity cameos, got no such free pass.

Previous

Index

Next

  • Show Spoilers
  • Night Vision
  • Sticky Header
  • Wide Load

Important Links

Ask The Tropers Trope Finder Media Finder Trope Launch Pad Tech Wishlist Reviews Go Ad Free!
Crucial Browsing
Resources
Top