Uncertain Audience / Live-Action Films

• 65 arrived to a poor critical reception with many reviewers wondering why a film with such an inherently cheesy and popcorny premise — aliens vs. dinosaurs — was played so seriously and drably rather than embracing its silliness and goofiness. Meanwhile, dinosaur lovers were not thrilled with the wildly inaccurate depictions of dinosaurs in both an anatomical sense (featherless dromaeosaurs and bizarre quadrupedal theropods) and a behavioural sense (the dinosaurs are nearly all depicted as brainless, hideous, always hungry monsters in a way that wouldn't be out of place in a 1950s b-movie).
• Artemis Fowl: Many critics were left baffled as to who exactly Disney was trying to market the film to. Fans of the book series were angry at the numerous changes the film made, including changing the Grey-and-Gray Morality from the first book, making Artemis a standard hero rather than a Villain Protagonist, and completely removing the fairies' inherently sexist society as a plot point. Non-book fans weren't interested in yet another generic Disney action movie based on a franchise they weren't familiar with. This led to a movie that pleased no one, and many consider that in spite of its high budget, Artemis Fowl being dumped on Disney+ because the COVID-19 Pandemic closed theaters was the only factor that prevented the company from having a massive commercial failure.
• Baby Geniuses features a concept (babies have superintelligence and martial arts skills that go away when they become toddlers) that is basically impossible for anyone over the age of about six to take seriously. However, the film also contains a lot of elements unsuitable for that age group, such as creepy imagery or Demographically Inappropriate Humor, such that the film actually ended up being rated PG at a time when that was uncommon for family films.
• Babylon (2022), directed by Damien Chazelle, was presumed to be a slam-dunk project (following off the success of First Man) showing the glamorous excess of The Roaring '20s and the transition from silent films to "talkies", as seen through the eyes of several characters like an aspiring actress, a jaded male star and a prospective studio executive. While "old Hollywood" and the behind-the-scenes struggles of Hollywood actors have been portrayed in plenty of films, reviewers were ultimately split right down the middle on its merits (with Rotten Tomatoes rating it at 56% just after its opening weekend). Despite cinematography and acting that very clearly mark it as an auteur-driven dramatic film, the movie also indulges in outright Gross-Up Close-Up moments, including close-ups of an elephant defecating on a human being and a partygoer delivering a golden shower on a heavyset guest that both occur before the title card, a character projectile-vomiting on a carpet and a human being that's more at home in The Exorcist than a dramatic film about the End of an Era, and discredited stereotypes about old Hollywood that weren't even palatable to the crowd that would normally see such projects. Not helping matters was that the film was Christmas Rushed, and came in even under Paramount Pictures' low projections (only making $4.85 million off a four-day weekend, versus initial projections of $5.3 million).
• This is what caused The Banana Splits Movie to fall headlong into So Okay, It's Average territory with a mediocre 5.0 on IMDB and a 63% / 49% on Rotten Tomatoes, in spite of it having decent effects and otherwise being a fine horror film with a serviceable, if flimsy, plot. This film was going to appeal to only two groups of people: fans of Hostile Animatronics, and fans of The Banana Splits. The former were going to be put off by its obvious attempts to Follow The Lead of Five Nights at Freddy's and were inevitably going to at best make unfavorable comparisons and at worst accuse it of being an outright rip-off. The latter were going to be put off by how the show they loved, a sketch comedy musical, was now a horror film with gritty deaths and absolutely no attempt to even resemble the series they liked. Who else is there who was going to watch this film?
• Batman:
  • Whereas Batman (1989) was a film adaptation of the comicbook that deliberately went for a more grounded tone (with a sprinkling of campy moments, via the Joker character), Batman Returns went much further but had an inconsistent tone. Due to Protection from Editors, Tim Burton had much more authorial control over the film, but as a result, the tone veers wildly between Darker and Edgier material (Penguin's parents throwing him into the sewers in the opening sequence, the Penguin himself wanting to exterminate Gotham's firstborn children, the exploration of Bruce and Selina not being able to hold a relationship because of their underlying personal problems/secret identities) is juxtaposed with ridiculous camp like Batman strapping an oversized bomb to a henchman and blowing him up, rocket-firing penguins, the Penguin driving around in a giant duck while screaming maniacally and the goofy soundtrack in scenes with the Red Penguin Circus Gang. This even extended to the future direction of the movie — in an infamous case, the film got in hot water with audiences after McDonald's marketed Happy Meal toys featuring family-friendly versions of the characters, for a film that has all manner of surprising violence and darker source material. The subsequent films, for better or worse, adopted a much lighter tone that began to introduce more elements of camp.
  • The Schumacher films also ended up having varying degrees of issues with unclear audiences. It's most obvious in Batman Forever, which ends up kind of in the middle between Returns and the utter absurdity of Batman & Robin: there's a lot of slow, angsty moments and the film depicts the death of Robin's parents and Batman's commitment to the cause in a serious light, with Val Kilmer's performance being The Comically Serious at best and more often completely straight-laced. And then you get to the scenes with Jim Carrey playing The Riddler, or Tommy Lee Jones hamming it up as Two-Face, or any of the film's actual action scenes.
• Battlefield Baseball, which is sort of a spoof of baseball movies... but also has gratuitous violence, an inexplicable plot, and a few musical numbers, all wrapped up in a martial-arts package. It's weird.
• Black Christmas (2019) was the second remake of the 1974 slasher classic - which had a dedicated fan base. It however had virtually no relation to the original's plot, only taking place on Christmas and having a couple of Shout Outs. The film also has very unsubtle feminist subtext - dealing with rape culture in a way most viewers found very preachy. The director filmed it first to be R-rated but then decided in the edit to release it as PG-13, resulting in a lot of awkward cuts to some scenes. Horror fans were turned off by the heavy-handed social commentary more akin to a college lecture, which also had the effect of turning off feminists insulted by its simplistic messages (trying to deal with toxic masculinity and rape in a movie aimed at teenagers).
• Perhaps the main flaw of The Black Hole was that it didn't seem to have any specific target demographic. On the one hand, the film includes some rather dark imagery and themes such as the zombified Cygnus crew members, visions of Hell, and Durant's death by drilling, along with hard science fiction elements that would not exactly appeal to younger audiences. At the same time, it also includes kid-appeal elements such as Cute Machines V.I.N.CENT and B.O.B. and the goofy target-shooting sequence. The fact that it was released by Disney only further confused matters.
• Blank Check. The setup for how the kid protagonist ends up with a million dollars involves a knowledge of banking practices that very few younger viewers could easily follow along with, while the standard 90's "Home Alone" Antics and attendant "grown-ups suck" tropes keep it from being particularly engaging to parents while they explain how interest accrual works to their confused children. And that's not even getting into the creepy, pedophilic overtones of our young hero's crush being a grown woman... who does reciprocate his affections.
• Blood and Chocolate:
  • The film is ostensibly based upon the young adult werewolf novel by Annette Curtis Klause, but makes so many changes to the plot and characters it's barely recognizable. In the process it became a bland and generic supernatural love story that's been told a hundred times, stripping out the more unique and gritty elements from the novel. The end result is that fans of the book weren't interested because it had little in common with the story they loved, while other people weren't interested because it looked cheesy and cliched; it couldn't even appeal to horror fans because it clearly played up romantic drama over the horror elements. The film only grossed $6 million on a budget of $15 million.
  • The attempt to associate it with Underworld - including rewriting the story to take more inspiration from those films and advertising it as being "from the producers of Underworld" - didn't quite work either; the Blood and Chocolate novel is a supernatural romance/Coming of Age drama geared towards a teenage audience with only a handful of fight scenes, while Underworld is an R-rated action movie (it does have romance in it, but it takes a backseat to vampires and werewolves kicking ass). The similarities between the two are few and at its core, Blood and Chocolate has more in common with Twilight than Underworld. Interestingly, an early idea for the Twilight film adaptation was to make it much more action-oriented, until Stephenie Meyer (who had more influence than Annette Curtis Klause) put her foot down and pushed for a more faithful adaptation. Blood and Chocolate's film adaptation was reviled by fans and barely made back half its budget, while Twilight became a smash hit the following year, so the filmmakers of the latter seem to have made the right decision.
• Uwe Boll, back when he still made movies based on video games, complained about hating gamers and discouraged them from seeing his game movies (nearly all of which alienated gamers anyway because of their poor quality and worse faithfulness to the source material) because he wanted a "real" audience. It's unclear why he chose to make movies of video games if he hated the very people he knew were going to watch them, although most of his earlier films were shot to exploit a loophole in German tax laws, so it's equally unclear if he cared.
• One of the main criticisms directed at The Book of Masters is that it doesn't seem to know who it's for. Reviewers noted that the filmmakers tried to appeal to older audiences by evoking the feel of classic Soviet fairytales (e.g. Morozko) while adding Parental Bonus humor, and to younger ones by making a fantasy film in the style of The Lord of the Rings. The result is often viewed as too kitschy by old movie fans, too simplistic (with an underdeveloped plot to boot) by fantasy fans, and So Okay, It's Average by kids. As a result, it wasn't an outright Box Office Bomb, but it only made two million rubles (less than 70 thousand dollars in 2009) beyond its budget.
• A common statement about the notorious bomb Caligula is that it was trying to be both a deep, dramatic historical film that happened to feature sex (which was what writer Gore Vidal and director Tinto Brass wanted, though even their visions were very different), and high-budget exploitative Porn with Plot spectacle (which was what producer Bob Guccione wanted). The result was too trashy and debauched for fans of drama, and too heavy on narrative for people who watched it with their pants off.
• Cats (2019), as an adaptation of a musical famous for having only the barest bones of a plot, confused and disappointed audiences who were unfamiliar with the source material and would have been expecting more of a standard plot structure. Fans of the musical, on the other hand, were put off by the new story material director Tom Hooper did add, as well as the film's tone being inconsistent not just with the musical, but from scene to scene as well. One reviewer who was a fan of the stage version declared that Cats doesn't even know what Cats is about. Cats is also known for being very Campy and fantastical, and yet Tom Hooper seemed intent on bringing it to realism the same way he had for Les Misérables (2012). This resulted in the movie falling headlong into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley.
• Catwoman (2004) was supposed to appeal to both fans of the original comic book character and a female audience as well. Unfortunately, fans were put off by the unnecessary changes made to the character and setting, along with the nonsensical story and laughably bad acting, and despite being targeted for a female audience, the movie couldn't even appeal to women, who were also put off by the sexualization of the character which felt more like it was aimed at men than its supposed female audience. In the end, the movie failed to find any audience and bombed at the box office.
• As pointed out in Nathan Rabin's review of Chappie, the film seemingly can't make up its mind about whether it should be a violent, R-rated crime drama or a family film starring a quirky, child-like robot. The result is a film that's too violent for anyone under 17 and too stupid for anyone over 17.
• Not even the straight-to-video movie Chuck E. Cheese in the Galaxy 5000 is safe from this. Yep, a movie that is a tie-in to a children's restaurant but you'd be surprised what the movie has in store. This film contains a simple plot about Chuck trying to win the futuristic race just for money. Adults may not like the film for being childish due to having over-zany antagonists, some kiddie songs, some corny humor, and a premise that wouldn't sound too out of place for something like Barney, yet you still have some humor that feels off (like Jasper talking about a Chicken Restaurant in front of Helen), zoom gas being similar to drugs, what zoom gas is actually made of, and implied bestiality at one point. Of course, it's too immature for older audiences (especially since the restaurant itself is a children's place) yet it's too mature for younger audiences.
• Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant was an attempt at adapting The Saga of Darren Shan, and it failed primarily because of a tone problem. The books were Low Fantasy and came from a grounded place - only introducing more fantastical elements as the plot goes on. The film is far Denser and Wackier, relocates the setting from Europe to America as well as incorporating so many other differences from the source material - ostensibly to make it more marketable - that it might as well have been a completely separate story from the books it was trying to adapt. This turned off mainstream viewers for seeming like a derivative mess, and alienated book fans for barely resembling its literary counterpart.
• City of Ember, the 2007 adaptation of The Books of Ember, largely failed at the box office due to lack of advertising, but also an uncertain audience. The film is set After the End in an underground city that is due to collapse soon as the resources are used up, and features scenes such as the twelve-year-old protagonist's grandmother dying and the children having to hide from the Mayor's secret police (who proceed to ransack their homes in a manner very reminiscent of the Gestapo). While this is presented in a child-friendly way, the film goes Denser and Wackier by pandering a bit too much to a young audience - with an occasionally goofy tone and several cast members giving very overblown performances (while the two leads play it straight).
• The Craft: Legacy is in actuality a stealth sequel to the 90s cult horror The Craft. However, many viewers mistook it for a remake because it follows most of the same story beats. It also fails to capture the nostalgia of the original because the only returning cast member Fairuza Balk is reduced to a non-speaking cameo at the end, and it shifts in tone; the original was unique for its time in that its portrayal of witchcraft came from a very grounded place, setting it apart from its successors Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Charmed (1998). Legacy however is more obviously inspired by Urban Fantasy of the day, alienating a lot of fans who felt it was too derivative.
• Crossroads: Britney Spears reportedly wanted a film her tween fan base could enjoy, but also a serious drama that dealt with hard-hitting issues. Thus you get a film that deals with Teen Pregnancy, date rape, Parental Abandonment, and losing one's virginity — but has to sanitize said topics to make them palatable for tweens. Thus you get a movie that is too mature for younger viewers, but too twee and cliched for older people who'd be able to appreciate its messages.
• The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys is, on its face, a Coming of Age Story with lots of comedic elements, but which at times takes a dark turn, with a subplot involving incest and sexual abuse, and a Downer Ending. It also features cheesy animated segments.
• DC Extended Universe
  • The franchise ran into this from the beginning as the studio attempt to build an interconnected franchise off a film intended to just be a new Superman. WB attempted to recapture the critical acclaim of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy, which were generally serious films, and resulted in the first film, Man of Steel, being noted as quite somber for a Superman movie. At the same time however, the films is aimed at multiple demographics like Marvel's movies even though the audiences may not necessarily like the approach.
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice got a lot of criticism for having the kind of premise and execution that could really only appeal to hardcore fans of superhero comics, while also having an unrelentingly grim and cynical tone that seemed calculated to turn off most of those same fans. On one hand, it was an unabashedly commercial franchise film that was marketed as a set-up for Warner Bros. then-upcoming Justice League film adaptation (hence the subtitle), but it was also a somber and slow-paced rumination on the morality of superhero stories that seemed to suggest that characters like Batman and Superman would be deeply unsympathetic or hated by society if they really existed. And while the non-traditional approach to the characters might theoretically have appealed to viewers who ordinarily don't care for superhero films, most of those potential viewers were alienated by the film's dense continuity and constant references to prior DC Comics stories, which made the plot largely incomprehensible to anyone without a working knowledge of The Dark Knight Returns, The Death of Superman, or Jack Kirby's New Gods.
  • WB's reactionary approach lead to radical changes being made in post-production of Suicide Squad (2016) and Justice League (2017) to lighten the tone. Suicide Squad was intended to be a darker criminal underworld drama but a different cut of the film was made that emphasized the comic book camp, and they ended up blended together for the final product. Justice League was completely revamped with reshoots, making the film more of a standard pulp adventure instead of a more apocalyptic encounter. However, the recuts ended up dragging the quality of both movies down anyway, with Suicide Squad having a similar reception among critics as Batman v Superman. Justice League ended up receiving the worst of this, as it became clear that Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon had different ideas on how to approach the same movie, and the Mood Whiplash between the pre-existing footage and reshoots was so jarring that although the final film had a marginally better reception critically than Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, it still ended up a commercial failure and failed to win over any audiences. It was only through a director's cut that solely used Snyder's ideas that the movie would achieve much more notable acclaim due to finding a more natural balance between the darker and lighter elements.
  • Birds of Prey (2020) was attempting to attract Birds of Prey fans and Harley Quinn fans. However, the numerous changes the film made to the Birds of Prey members as well as largely being sidelined by Harley Quinn ended up alienating Birds of Prey fans. Meanwhile, the majority of Harley Quinn's fans are teenage girls, but the film's graphic and extreme black-comedy violence meant it got an R rating, precluding any of them from being able to see it. Furthermore, fans of Harley as she appears with the Joker didn't enjoy the movie as it starts with him kicking her out, while fans of Harley and Poison Ivy stories^note Bizarrely, including Margot Robbie herself, who showed interest in Poison Ivy eventually appearing in a sequel also weren't satisfied as Ivy doesn't appear at all.
  • The Flash (2023) was set-up as several things: the unofficial "finale"/Continuity Reboot of the DCEU, an adaptation of the Flashpoint storyline from the comics, an origin story for the DCEU version of Barry Allen, a bookend to the events which occurred in Man of Steel, and a pseudo-sequel to the Michael Keaton version of Batman/Bruce Wayne established in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns. The movie was marketed and billed towards modern superhero movie fans, but it also repeatedly leaned into nostalgia of previous DC films. The "Keaton Batman" in particular was both necessary from a marketing standpoint (given how its lead star Ezra Miller was dealing with real-world controversies at the time), and was very clearly intended to appeal to an older generation of fans who were familiar with Returns and his exit from the role three decades earlier. Considering how old some of these cameos and call backs were^note some dating back to the 1950s, not counting the production gag of Nicolas Cage finally appearing as Superman based on the canceled "Superman Lives" project from the mid-90s, said nostalgia largely bypassed anyone born after the mid 1990s — and those who would like such nostalgic references often found them shallow at best and (in the case of using CGI to "resurrect" the deceased Christopher Reeve and Adam West) distasteful at worst. It led to an uneven film that couldn't decide if it wanted to appeal to modern or older fans, and caused lower-than-expected review scores (after an initial period of pre-release hype) and a $55 million domestic opening weekend, the lowest theatrical opening for any of the DCEU films.
• Dick is a 1999 comedy that follows two teen girls who, in their quest to meet U.S. President Richard Nixon, accidentally get wrapped up in the Watergate scandal and become informants for Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The film was clearly marketed to a teen audience, but the subject matter is Historical Fiction, centering around a scandal that was two decades old at that point and required viewers to be at least somewhat familiar with several key figures and incidents during the scandal (the Washington Post, the source "Deep Throat", the private cassette recordings Nixon made which had damaging information). Most teens at the time wouldn't really have had the necessary knowledge about The '70s or Nixon to get all the jokes and references, while the people who would've been interested in a comedy about Watergate would've perceived it as lightweight teen farce. This was a major reason it became a Box Office Bomb.
• This is why Drop Dead Fred received negative reviews on release. About half the humour in the movie is very broad slapstick and Toilet Humour seemingly aimed squarely at children, while the other half is made up of blatantly crude adult jokes. The tone of the movie also varies a lot from moment to moment: a lot of it is pure wacky comedy, but the parts involving Lizzie's emotionally abusive mother and ex-husband are played absolutely straight.
• The Fantastic Beasts series received much more division than the Harry Potter series for being trapped between two tonally different goals: to be a Lighter and Softer spinoff series featuring the whimsical globetrotting adventures of Newt Scamander and his friends discovering the titular Fantastic Beasts, and to be a Darker and Edgier prequel series detailing the Dark wizard Grindelwald's conflict with Dumbledore and his war against the rest of the wizarding world. Especially by the time of the second film, people interested in Newt's story wondered why he was being involved in the grim-and-gritty politics and corruption of the wizarding world beyond his realm of magizoology, while people interested in Grindelwald and his backstory wondered why a nebbish scientist became the main pivot of the conflict rather than Dumbledore himself. Even fans of both sides widely agreed that they didn't belong in the same movies, and were weighed down from trying to stuff both of them in at once. The third film attempted to find a balance between them by having Grindelwald's plan revolve around use of a magical creature, giving Newt a good reason to be involved.
• This trope is usually pointed to as one of the reasons behind the failure of Fantastic Four (2015). The director was clearly shooting for something along the lines of a grim, sinister Cronenbergian Body Horror film, while the executives panicked, took it away from him in post-production and hastily finished it as something intended to chase the coattails of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The result is a movie that's too scary for kids, too slow and joyless for casual audiences, too quippy and fast-paced for horror fans, and too different from the source material for comic-book fans, and ultimately ended up pleasing no one, critically or commercially.
• From Dusk Till Dawn has been criticized by crime movie fans for the Genre Shift that happens halfway through. Lots of fans of the producers' other works agree that the movie would've been better if the first half had been stretched to the end. That might be a case of Trolling Creator, though.
• The Garbage Pail Kids Movie is supposed to be a children's movie, however, there is a good chunk of gross, often self-loathing adult humor, disturbing imagery, and repulsive characters one would expect to see in adult shows like Family Guy or South Park, that is more likely to turn its targeted audience away from the film than attract them. Unfortunately, adults are less likely to be drawn to the movie either for its childish elements and juvenile writing.
• Godzilla:
  • Though the films seem to alternate audiences, with some being for adults and others for children, Godzilla vs. Gigan can't quite decide who it's supposed to be geared to. On one hand, it has a lot of goofy elements, including a couple of scenes where Godzilla and Anguirus actually talk. But on the other, the fight scenes are disturbingly violent and show more blood than was ever seen in a Godzilla movie before. Part of this is that the films were a response to the rising star of the Gamera series, which at the time also ran hard with kid-appeal while featuring a weird amount of blood and gore.
  • Godzilla vs. Hedorah has plenty of aspects pandering to kids, such as a kid main character, silly-sounding music, and Godzilla flying, but also Family Unfriendly Deaths of people being disintegrated to their bones, a scene where a guy has an alcohol-fueled hallucination, a creepy-looking Muck Monster villain, and fights between Godzilla and Hedorah that, while not exactly gory, are still rather grotesque due to Hedorah's manner of dumping his slime on Godzilla.
• The 2011 Green Lantern film was criticized for bumbling trying to split the difference between being aimed at existing comics fans and the general audience. Most people feel like they introduced too much of the mythos too early for the latter but eased into enough that they alienated the former. The film was a Box Office Bomb that lost at least $75 million in its theatrical run.
• Hancock has issues with this due to a Halfway Plot Switch. The first half is a comedic satire with the premise of "what if a guy had superpowers, but not the usual comic book world's structure to deal with them and is therefore a weird grumpy hobo?", before shifting to his attempts to shape up a bit. The second half, meanwhile, delves into his origins, his history, the nature of his powers, and his true hidden nemesis, who turns out to be the wife of his closest friend, with the comedic elements vanishing in favor of a serious drama of gods and men. This resulted in the film doing rather poorly in review circuits, because many essentially saw it as two very different stories with very different tones mashed together; people who liked the comedic bits found the dramatic bits to be unnecessary and drag the film down, and people who liked the dramatic bits found the comedic bits only lessened the story.
• Heart of Dragon is a martial arts action flick starring Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung and a heartfelt drama about a police officer trying to protect and care for his mentally-impaired brother and is also a comedy with heavy emphasis on slapstick. A combination of just two of those concepts could be feasibly workable, but the film tries to juggle all three equally, with the incredibly jarring tone being the dominant criticism fueling its critical and financial underperformance.
• This is perhaps one of the biggest problems with The Hobbit film series. It couldn't really decide if it wanted to go with the tone of the book (silly and whimsical, but with darker, more poignant moments scattered throughout) or more like the epic tone of the previous The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This ended up alienating fans of the book, while also falling short of the expectations of fans of the original trilogy.
• Hobgoblins is a blatant ripoff of Gremlins with an even less clear target demographic. It's about a bunch of Grotesque Cute obvious puppets who trap people in twisted versions of their wildest fantasies... all of which seem to be about everybody boning their brains out.
• It's a bit unclear what audience the creators of the 1983 Australian crime drama Hostage (also known as Savage Attraction) were aiming for. On the one hand, the Lifetime Movie of the Week-style premise is most likely to appeal to a female audience. On the other hand, the film includes Exploitation Film elements such as gratuitous sex scenes and nudity, which can come across as Fan Disservice for many viewers given the traumatic context. The fact that it's based on a real person's memoir doesn't help either.
• Despite being rated "PG", and having lots of childish humor, the movie version of Howard the Duck also contains lots of sexual humor and innuendo, including references to zoophilia. Fans of the comic (along with the comic's co-creator) disliked the changes from the source material, while more casual audiences were confused by references to the comic they didn't understand. The film became an infamous Box Office Bomb as a result.
• Hudson Hawk was marketed as an action adventure. What it turned out to be instead was a musical comedy (by virtue of there being a singing cat burglar amongst the cast) and a parody of action/adventure/espionage. This played heavily into its ultimate box office fate and current reputation as a result since audiences who'd come to see an action adventure were left disappointed by the noticeable lack of action, critics were similarly unnecessarily harsh towards the film (to the point it won the Worst Picture Razzie at the 1991 Golden Razzberry awards ceremony) for not adequately offering what it had sold itself to be, and comedy audiences who might have appreciated the film on its own merits ended up dropping by to see it too late to save the film due to having already been alienated by the misleading marketing.
• Ang Lee's Hulk was marketed like a standard superhero blockbuster, complete with all the usual bells and whistles, such as a line of action figures and other merchandise aimed at young children. Despite this, the film itself is actually very slow and somber, with far less action than one would expect from a movie about the Hulk. Many critics stated that the movie feels less like a superhero film and more like a serious family drama that just happens to have a giant green monster in it. The end result was considered too boring and pretentious for the audiences that enjoyed movies like Spider-Man and X-Men, and yet too silly for more serious audiences that might otherwise enjoy the kinds of films Ang Lee is known for making.
• The Huntsman: Winter's War was a sequel to a vehicle for Kristen Stewart in her heyday that was also embracing a market for Darker and Edgier fairy tale retellings. This sequel/prequel drops Kristen Stewart from the story, focuses on a side character and goes for a Lighter and Softer tone to capitalise on the popularity of Frozen. Fans of the first film are turned off for the changes in characters and shift in tone, while younger viewers weren't attracted because the first was outside their demographic.
• It's not clear who Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is aimed at. The film is a legacy sequel that functions as a nostalgic send-off, fanservice machine (to the extent that it weaves in elements from the Expanded Universe), and another attempt to find a potential replacement for Indiana Jones himself. Despite being ostensibly aimed at teens and young adults, most didn't tune in either because they weren't familiar with the franchise (the previous entry being released fifteen years prior didn't help) or because they weren't interested in watching a movie about an octogenarian. Die-Hard fans weren't interested in it either, because it ended up being the only Indiana Jones movie not directed by Steven Spielberg, and/or felt burned by the previous attempt at reviving the franchise, and didn't want to see another Indy movie where he's out of his prime. Even Crystal Skull fans were turned off because the movie pulls a Happy Ending Override on the previous film. This was reflected in a marketing campaign which couldn't seem to decide if it wanted to attract a wide audience or aim at the pre-existing fanbase. The end result was the movie fell far below expectations, despite being planned as the summer tentpole of 2023.
• Ink has many lighthearted and whimsical elements from Fairy Tales and children's fantasy, but it also has lots of swearing, frightening scenes, and deals with several adult themes such as drug use and suicide. It also has several elements from arthouse films (especially in the visual style) and fighting sequences involving martial arts and a shaky camera.
• Jeanne du Barry is a French historical drama about the last mistress of King Louis XV... co-starring Johnny Depp, an American actor who is widely believed to have gotten his role so that director and star Maïwenn could secure funding. While it received sufficient buzz to open Cannes, on wider release, it ran into significant marketing problems, as history buffs ridiculed it for taking liberties with the history (notably the fact that 46-year-old Maiwenn played the 25-year-old Madame du Barry), while Depp's fans are not particularly famous for their interest in French history. It had a budget of $22 million and made little over $12.5 million.
• Jem and the Holograms (2015) is based off a cartoon from the 80s with a small but dedicated fan base. The film includes lots of Mythology Gags and incorporates some of the cartoon's wacky charm into the stage costumes, but then again gives it a Setting Update for the 2010s, switches the set-up from an adventure theme to a Coming of Age Story, makes the cast Younger and Hipper and seems to be trying to appeal to the youth of the day. Grown fans of the cartoon were put off by the massive changes, while tweens were put off by how derivative it looked. The result was an embarrassing $2 million gross on a $5 million budget, getting pulled from theatres after only two weeks.
• A big reason why Kangaroo Jack was critically panned was its inability to decide which demographic it was supposed to be catering to. On one hand, it tries to appeal to kids by advertising itself as a lighthearted kid's comedy about a talking kangaroo (who neither speaks, except for in one hallucination sequence, or has that much screen-time), but on the other hand, it also tries to be an adult-mafia comedy with plenty of dark humor and sexual innuendo that feels too inappropriate to be in what is allegedly supposed to be a movie for kids (not helping matters is the fact that the movie was supposed to be rated R originally). Children were put off by the adult humor, mafia film elements, and especially by the fact that there is no talking kangaroo in the movie, despite what the trailers, posters and DVD cover promised, while adults were put off by the incredibly juvenile, unsophisticated nature of the film and that it's advertised as a Talking Animal kid's movie. The end result was a movie that really doesn't know what it wants to be, leaving the audience (both adults and kids) confused as to which demographic it's meant to appeal to.
• The 2009 film of Land of the Lost with Will Ferrell, which is probably why it flopped. It has a goofy, slapsticky sci-fi plot you'd expect to see in a kids' movie, but most of the humor that isn't slapstick-based is very dark and sexual.
• Last Action Hero was largely marketed as a standard action movie, but turned out to instead be a mass Lampshade Hanging of action/adventure movie tropes mixed with a comparison between Real Life and cinematic reality to the point of seeming like more of an Indecisive Parody instead. The fact that it was originally intended to be an outright Affectionate Parody of action movies before subsequent script rewrites and other production troubles turned it into what it is today didn't help matters.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: As of Phase 4, the franchise has started to enter into a period where audiences are becoming put off by the films, largely because they can't decide between being big-budget action flicks, superhero comedies, serious sweep epics, or genre films that happen to have superheroes in it.
  • Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania served as both the first film of Phase 5 as well as the cap to the Ant-Man trilogy, but it found itself wanting pretty quickly. The previous two films were smaller-scale (Pun fully intended) comedies with relatively low stakes plots, and a fair share of humor based on character interactions. In Quantumania, much of the comedic elements were dropped to help pave way for Kang The Conqueror, the planned overarching Big Bad of The Multiverse Saga and the ultimate threat to the entire multiverse. Fans of the first two movies weren't happy that their favorite elements were dropped, and those who didn't like the first two movies and might have better appreciated the ostensibly more serious tone in comparison to its predecessors' light-hearted and comedic tone found that the comedic elements that did make it into the film were too tonally clashing with such a high-stakes plot.
  • Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was helmed by famed horror director Sam Rami, who's previous superhero work included a trilogy of features about Spider-Man. However, Rami's more horror-comedy based approach turned off potential viewers who were expecting more of a traditional superhero flick, and those who were excited about the horror aspects were turned off by the film's use of the usual Mood Whiplash and fanservice-heavy cameos typical of the franchise. The movie still made a good chunk of money at the box-office, but there's still no clear pick as to exactly who it was trying to appeal to.
  • Eternals was made by director Chloe Zhao as a sweeping epic detailing the journey of a very obscure group of Marvel characters throughout history. The problem was, most casual fans had no idea who the Eternals were (even more so than the Guardians of the Galaxy, who at least had some media exposure before their big-screen debut), so they wouldn't have been interested in the first place. Even die-hard fans who knew about the Eternals had little interest in seeing a movie about them, and those that did had to contend with the planned epic tone clashing with the more snarky, self-aware comedy and typical big-budget action scenes that the MCU was known for. The end result caused a massive Box Office Bomb, leading to any plans for the characters' future in the films being scuttled.
  • The Marvels (2023) suffered heavily from what is often perceived to have been an identity problem in regards to who it was trying to appeal to. On the one hand, it is partially a comedy about a teenage superheroine who gets to tag along on an adventure with her idol. On another hand, it is also partially a drama about a woman trying to mourn the death of her best friend, repair her relationship with her estranged niece, and make amends for plunging a galactic empire into a nasty civil war. Yet at the same time, it's also partially an action-adventure film about a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits teaming up to save the galaxy from a genocidal dictator. Fans who wanted an epic blockbuster were frustrated at the comedic and character-driven elements, while fans who liked the comedy and character focus hated that those elements were interrupted for the sake of action sequences. Consequently, the film has Marvel's lowest box-office to date.
• Man of the Year: The film was marketed as a straight comedy, not least because it starred Robin Williams, and the premise itself seems to suggest it as such, but the movie itself is actually a much darker political drama that happens to have some comedy in it because the plot revolves around a comedian. The main heroine Eleanor is a lonely woman with mild mental health issues who by the end is near-fatally injured in an attempted murder orchestrated by her psychopathic bosses to cover up the computer glitch, events the Tom Dobbs character is unaware of and detached from; he instead spends most of the film worried and depressed that he is going to be elected President because he knows he isn't qualified yet feels pressured by everyone around him to make a go of it. The premise is already improbable to the point of ridiculousness, but the film spends less time on jokes and more on trying to make actual semi-serious points about the American political system and ultimately it isn't clear at all who this film is supposed to be aimed at.
• Milk Money is an odd combination between a sex comedy and a family rom-com. The end result is a movie too lewd for a family audience, being about prostitution, but not sexy enough for the kind of audience that would enjoy a more risque comedy. Siskel & Ebert jokingly referred to it as "the raunchy sex comedy the whole family can enjoy!"
• Mulan (2020) was criticized for this, in terms of the changes made between it and the 1998 original. The removal of Mushu and a lot of the more comedic moments imply a desire to make a gritty and realistic war movie, but the film also introduces actual supernatural powers and an evil witch. Reportedly, the removal of Li Shang was to reduce implications of a commander romancing his underling, implying an attempt to play up a more feminist angle, yet several people pointed out how Mulan's importance is credited to her natural superhuman magical powers and not her ingenuity, suggesting that women can only be great if born with special abilities. The removal of musical numbers, casting of Chinese actors and partial filming in Chinese provinces suggested an attempt to deliberately go for Germans Love David Hasselhoff by playing to Chinese audiences. However, the film had no Chinese people in its creative team, featured a very bizarre interpretation of chi that most Chinese audiences disliked, and didn't offer anything to differentiate itself from locally made wuxia films.
• The Mummy (2017), Universal's first entry to kickstart the Dark Universe franchise, failed because it couldn't win any specific demographic; fans of the classic horror movies were turned off by how the movie spends most of its runtime on Tom Cruise's character instead of the titular monster, while mainstream audiences weren't won over by the film's connection to rather obscure horror monsters. Universal eventually scrapped such plans, with The Invisible Man (2020) becoming a solo movie much more geared to their normal horror fans.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child attempts to return the series to its darker roots by keeping Freddy in the shadows more, integrating more gothic imagery and adult topics, and building up the kills as being more gruesome and shocking than before. At the same time, however, Freddy keeps his snarky, jokester persona from The Dream Master but with even more one-liners than before, which results in all of the kills falling into laughable territory and contrasts the darker and more serious tone being presented here, almost as if the writers of the Freddy's Nightmares TV series wrote his dialogue. In the end it leaves the viewers wondering who its intended audience really is.
• Nine Lives. The film is a talking cat movie, which typically only appeal to kids, but the movie has several business scenes which are too boring for kids. The movie also has several disturbing scenes like the main character nearly dying in a coma and a suicide attempt, but also has a lot of Toilet Humour.
• North was intended to be a kid-friendly film with a few adult jokes here and there, but the kid-friendly scenes were too childish for adults and the adult jokes were too inappropriate for kids.
• The Nutcracker in 3D is a musical fantasy aimed at children, but features so much fascist imagery that it ends up as Nightmare Fuel. The Mood Whiplash between lightheartedness and grim drama was the main reason the movie was universally panned.
• Oh! Heavenly Dog was a failed attempt at a Benji movie for adults. It has several disturbing scenes in it, like Benjamin Browning (Chevy Chase) getting stabbed to death, and contains implied bestiality between Browning character (as Benji) and an adult woman, but also has some instances of Toilet Humour in it.
• This proved to be a bit of a problem for Ophelia. It's an adaptation of one of William Shakespeare's most famous plays, exploring it from another character's perspective, which would appeal to Shakespeare fans. But the film also has a Lighter and Softer tone, simplifies and modernizes the dialogue, takes many liberties with the source material (including borrowing a lot from Romeo and Juliet) and plays up the romance, which seems to appeal more to the young adult crowd (the book it was based upon is also aimed at young adults). However, some teenagers aren't all that interested in Shakespeare and/or may not be familiar enough with Hamlet to fully understand the plot, while Hamlet fans didn't always appreciate how much the story was changed.
• Pixels combines low-brow Adam Sandler comedy with loving homages to 80s video games, and the audiences for those topics don't exactly mesh together. People who love video games don't enjoy the film portraying video game players as the archetypal Basement-Dweller, people who specifically love 80s retro games are likely to skew pretty old and therefore wouldn't be too interested in the film's style, and young kids who do love (or at least prove more receptive to) Adam Sandler's humor style probably aren't familiar with half the games the film is referencing. It doesn't help that the film gets several details about these games wrong, such as claiming there are cheat codes in Pac-Man. Plus, the studio aiming for the least demanding demographic by marketing towards children ends up questionable when there's surprisingly raunchy jokes and scary fantasy violence.
• Pod People features an E.T.-like Friendly Alien who befriends a little kid, but also features a duo of poachers and a pop music band with some coarse language and sexual innuendo. It also contains a B-plot about a second alien, identical to the first, going on a murderous killing "spree" against the rest of the trapped-in-a-cabin cast.. so it's E.T. meets Friday the 13th. Possibly a result of Executive Meddling; originally it was written to be a straight up horror film, but when E.T. was released they tried to capitalize on the success and turn it into an alien buddy film. Didn't really go well.
• The Indian science-fiction superhero film Ra.One starts like a kid's comedy about a nerdy father making a video game for his son in order to make him think that he is cool. Then, after the first musical sequence (which doesn't look at all like something from a kid's film) the movie turns very serious and dark, with the villain from the video game becoming real and starting to kill people, including a main character. Then, the movie turns silly again, but after another musical sequence the movie turns serious once again.
• The 2018 film Red Sparrow was seen as too campy for people who like more serious spy fiction but too serious for people who like camp. Add that the movie has so much objectionable content that it borders on Exploitation Film, and the studio was forced to cut a very misleading trailer, and it's not hard to tell why it proved very difficult for critics and viewers to figure out just who this film was supposed to be made for.
• RoboCop 3 was a Franchise Killer in large part because it was far more kid-friendly and toyetic than the prior films: the rating dropped to PG-13, and the story featured elements like RoboCop flying around in a jetpack and a prepubescent Playful Hacker controlling ED-209. Meanwhile, it remained a followup to the incredibly dark and violent first two films, and kept a lot of kid-unfriendly elements like gun battles with large bodycounts (albeit with Bloodless Carnage), corporate skullduggery, a major character being riddled with bullets onscreen, and implied suicide.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show incorporates horror and sci-fi themes that probably don't appeal to the average musical fan, while fans of those genres would hardly go after an incredibly campy musical. In the DVD Commentary, Richard O'Brien mentions that this was a concern around the time the film was released. Despite this, it has one of the most bizarre and devoted audiences of any film.
• The 2013 movie version of Romeo and Juliet, adapted for the screen by Julian Fellowes, drew criticism for not only rewriting most of Shakespeare's lines in some way but also adding his own, in spite of the movie going for an "authentic" presentation otherwise, with an Italian Renaissance setting akin to the acclaimed 1968 movie version. The intent was to make it easier for modern audiences to relate to. But modern audiences, especially educators, deemed it too seriously compromised as an adaptation and near-useless as a teaching tool for people learning about the actual play, and the educators/experts in turn did/could not recommend the movie to younger audiences who might be interested. Such younger audience members could just (or were encouraged to) turn to the 1968 and even the modernized-setting-with-guns 1996 versions instead, which made far less changes to the text in comparison. And on top of everything, direct Shakespeare adaptations are a bit of a hard sell to younger audiences these days. The movie was ultimately a box office bomb.
• R.O.T.O.R. really wants to have a Cyberpunk-like atmosphere, adding in constant monologues about human nature and the ups and downs of technology. However, there are so many goofy moments that the overall tone becomes muddled. If the Word of God is to be believed, Executive Meddling instructed they turn a parody into a serious film, hence tone issues.
• The Runaways failed to make much headway at the Box Office because executives were unsure whether to market it towards the now-aged fans of the band from their heyday, or the teenage fans of the two leads Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart.
• Small Soldiers is a movie that features a lot of Family-Unfriendly Violence and generally dark moments, to the point that it was rated PG-13 even after the director had to pare it down. It's also a movie about microchips that cause action figures to come to life. Consequently, a lot of the reason for its mixed reception was being a bit too outlandish for adults and a bit too dark for kids. (Notably, this got Burger King very miffed that their kids meal toys were from a PG-13 movie.)
• The Spring Tale, a film adaptation of The Snow Maiden. It has a cheery animated sequence accompanying the credits in the beginning, has a lot of comic relief moments included, and has the whole marriage drama of Grandfather Frost and Spring Beauty removed; apparently aiming to make it kid-friendly. However, the love interests are every bit as unsympathetic as in the source material (Lel is The Casanova and shamelessly flirts with any woman, single or not, and Mizgir is a selfish jerk and attempted rapist), and it's ambiguous whether the original's tragic ending is changed or retained. As a result, the reviewers who like it watch it as a holiday fairytale movie that should be judged separately from its source material, and/or simply to watch the actors,
• Spice World. The Nostalgia Chick comments on how she has no idea who it was being marketed towards, given that some of the jokes were clearly meant for adults (such as men in thongs and one of the girls suggesting that they get naked for a young boy in the hospital), but other jokes seemed more geared for kids, or at least would be unfunny to adults.
• Spider-Man:
  • Spider-Man Trilogy: The first two Raimi films had a pretty clear idea of what they were supposed to be: throwbacks to the goofy-but-earnest Silver Age Lee-Ditko comics with a somewhat modernized feel. Spider-Man 3, on the other hand, is notorious for being a bit all over the place. It's both one of the darkest and interpersonal films in the franchise, and also one of the silliest and weirdest, creating a bit of a dissonance between the brooding angsty setting and aesthetic or tragic plots like Harry fully dipping into revenge, and moments like Emo Dancing Peter or Venom with a Topher Grace head. By Raimi's own account, he was against putting Venom in the movie because he felt Venom didn't match the stories he'd been trying to tell in the earlier films, and you can kinda see why.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man Series: The Amazing Spider-Man has moments where it's easily one of the grittiest films in terms of feel (Peter being a much bigger jerk than in the Raimi films, a noticeably more menacing costume, a darker aesthetic and moody soundtrack, and a recurring plot point being a wider conspiracy and Peter's desire for active revenge) and moments of being one of the silliest (the main antagonist being a mutant lizard man who wants to turn the city into lizard people, Peter's wisecracking and quips being finally added to his character after the Raimi films removed them, and scenes like all the construction workers in the city turning their cranes to help Spider-Man in the climax). Much of this was because Sony found the film's original premise ended up being too much of an Audience-Alienating Premise, and so the film was recut to move the focus away from the gritty parts of the plot.
  • The sequel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ran headlong into this problem as well. In addition to the issues carried over from the previous movie, the film introduces more subplots and multiple antagonists in an attempt to make a Shared Universe in the vein of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Fans who liked the darker tone of the first film were confused by the sequel being Lighter and Softer as well as Denser and Wackier (the film opens on a scene with the death of Peter's parents, only to then be immediately followed up with a more comical action scene on the streets of New York), while MCU fans were put off by the darker portrayal of the character such as when he fails to prevent the death of Gwen Stacy and contemplates hanging up the mask altogether. The film ultimately ended up a critical and commercial disappointment that resulted in the franchise being rebooted again in the MCU.
• Star Wars:
  • George Lucas himself stated that the franchise was primarily for children with the original Star Wars trilogy being a light-hearted popular children's fantasy that adults could see with them in the vein of The Wizard of Oz and the The Thief of Bagdad (1940). However, as the Star Wars fandom aged up, adults became a sizable and vocal part of the fanbase, meaning that Star Wars could never really lean solely on its kid demographic in the best interests of merchandising and marketing. Not helping matters is that many of the later Star Wars creators, who happened to be fans of the franchise themselves saw it from an adult perspective.
  • This dichotomy was very evident in the prequel trilogy, which were simultaneously intended to be Darker and Edgier and more Merchandise-Driven. The Phantom Menace, for instance, has some of the most blatant Kid-Appeal Character candidates in the series in Jar Jar Binks and tons of silly, pulpy action setpieces that would probably get an eyeroll from older or more serious fans, but its central plot is introduced with a trade dispute over new tax policies and features scenes dealing with political minutia and speeches in the Senate that would likely leave kiddies bored or confused.
  • The Disney-era installments struggled with appeasing multiple demographics despite their relative financial success. Although the newer films are more "adult" than previous Star Wars movies (i.e. more intense violence, less whimsical humor, and a lessened Kid-Appeal Character presence), Disney still markets them towards kids with an abundance of family-friendly merchandise and tie-ins. Disney's attempts to expand Star Wars to newer audiences and markets (most notably the Chinese) have been mixed partly due to the Once Original, Now Common nature of the films and competition from newer blockbusters like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Most notably, Solo was aimed at die-hard, nostalgic fans who would be interested in Han Solo's backstory, yet the film's massive budget would necessitate the inclusion of more casual fans, most of whom didn't watch the movie either because they weren't interested the subject matter or felt there wasn't a unique selling point that appeals to them like a famous lead actor.
  • The Rise of Skywalker, the finale of the sequel trilogy, had a very uncertain audience, likely not helped by The Last Jedi leaving quite the Broken Base in its wake and a very Troubled Production. It attempted to appeal to old-school fans who felt burned by the prior installment by retconning as much of its predecessor as it could manage, but also undoes the largest accomplishment of the original trilogy in resurrecting Palpatine, hands Rey even further Story-Breaker Power, and introduces multiple new Force powers and unprecedented technologies, all of which seem designed to annoy those old-school fans. Meanwhile, fans brought on by The Force Awakens were angered by elements like Finn and Poe being mostly marginalized in favor of focusing primarily on the Skywalker legacy from the old films, while fans that enjoyed The Last Jedi were obviously none too happy to see its themes and characters abandoned. This was also evident in its treatment of "Reylo", the series' main Fan-Preferred Couple—bringing the two together with almost no relationship development, which angered the fans who saw it as abusive and creepy, but also killing Kylo off seconds after their first kiss, angering the shippers who wanted the two to have a happy ending.
• Stormbreaker was the first attempt at an adaptation of the popular Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz. The books are known for eventually deconstructing the concept of a Kid Hero (Alex is a young adult who becomes a spy; and rather reluctantly in that regard). And to its credit, the film, coincidentally enough written by Horowitz himself, contains some elements of that. Unfortunately, due to being made at a time when the spy genre was slowly starting to transition away from the campiness of the then contemporary latter pre-Daniel Craig James Bond films but hadn't yet fully undergone the reconstruction that had already been set in motion by The Bourne Series and would eventually be solidified by the Daniel Craig era James Bond, the film essentially tried to simultaneously be both a child friendly Affectionate Parody of spy thrillers and a Deconstruction of the Kid Hero like the Alex Rider books eventually became all at once. This meant that not only did Horowitz have to pull his punches in the deconstruction department in order to allow the film to be palatable for younger audiences, but also that, for every grounded and gritty scene that emphasizes the seriousness and danger of what Alex is up against, there's also an incredibly comical or escapist moment that makes the whole thing seem like an Indecisive Parody of the spy genre instead. All this combined left the end result as a film that was too sanitized and defanged to work properly as a deconstruction, while also being too mundane and grounded to be enjoyable escapism.
• Stuart Saves His Family.
  Al Franken: Somebody wrote a review that said something like, "Watching Stuart Saves His Family go into the multiplexes is like watching a platoon of rookie soldiers head into an ambush. The people who will like this movie won’t go to it, and the people who will go to it won’t like it."
• Sucker Punch: While the trailers make it look like it was a popcorn flick (with giant robots, dragons and samurai monsters), is actually a serious drama about a girl being put in a mental institution that uses her imagination to escape from harsh reality, involving at least two fantasy sub-plots: One that takes place in a brothel, and another that involves different genres, such as Tolkienesque High Fantasy, Science Fiction/Cyberpunk, Steampunk/Diesel Punk/War Movie.
• Terminator: Dark Fate tried to both appeal to old fans by bringing back Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but at the same time tried to be a clean slate for the franchise by killing off John Connor and replacing him with a different destined savior. Old fans were furious that once again, a Terminator sequel performed a Happy Ending Override on Terminator 2 and were not happy about the series' focal character John Connor not only being usurped but actually killed off unceremoniously in the Cold Open, while non-fans were either intimidated by the references to the previous film or simply didn't care about the new characters. Unsurprisingly it was a massive Box Office Bomb, costing the studio between an estimated 110 and 130 million dollars once everything was said and done.
• The Three Musketeers (2011) can be difficult to rate objectively as an adaptation of its source material, because it clearly tries to be as faithful to the novel as possible in some elements and just as crazy and embellished in others. This ultimately played against the movie, as gimmicks like the airships and cool weapons repelled purist fans of the novel and period film enthusiasts, while conventional action flick fans were likely uninterested due to the film being an adaptation of a swashbuckling novel (which wouldn't probably cater to a wide audience either). The fact that an infamous pop-corn director like Paul W.S. Anderson was in charge of the film didn't help either.
• The obscure Hong Kong movie Thunder Of Gigantic Serpent is essentially three movies in one: a kid-friendly "little kid with a cute pet" movie, a violent spy thriller (including death, gore, and multiple F-bombs) and a Kaiju movie (when the girl's pet snake becomes giant size). As such, it's hard to know who the hell it was aimed at, which may be part of why it's so obscure.
• Venom (2018) seemed to be pretty torn whether it was supposed to a Superhero Horror story or a whacky Black Comedy. The trailers and promotional material heavily played up the former, with a teaser that downplayed the superhero elements and made the film look like a pschological sci-fi horror. This does reflect the first act of the film, which plays itself mostly straight. The film takes on a campier tone once Eddie bonds with the Venom symbiote, featuring slapstick sequences and comedic banter involving the two that's juxtaposed with the Horrifying Hero action. While the film was a box-office success, critics were unsure if the film's comedy was intentional or not. Its sequel avoided this by focusing on the campier aspects and marketing itself as such.
• The film War Dogs is a Based on a True Story film about a pair of arms dealers who got busted for embezzlement. It's directed by Todd Philips of The Hangover fame, who attempted to bring his usual comedy sensibilities to the project. Common criticisms of it is that the film was too slapsticky to be taken seriously as a Dramedy, but also not funny enough to be an out and out comedy.
• The live-action film adaptation of Yatterman made by Takashi Miike seems pretty childish, with lots of slapstick humor, colorful special effects, cheesy action scenes and a clumsy villain trio... but it also had many sex-related jokes, including one scene where one robot starts acting as if it was having an orgasm.

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