YMMV / Jem and the Holograms (2015)

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Many scenes with Jerrica and Kimber's dad Emmett usually just have Jerrica and him, with Kimber nowhere in sight. Add that to the fact that Emmett's hologram only mentions that he loves her, with no mention of Kimber led to some reviewers' speculation that Kimber is The Unfavorite of the two. This is probably due to bad writing, but still.
• Awesome Music: Regardless of the quality of the movie, "Youngblood" is a pretty good song.
• Base-Breaking Character: Kimber is divisive. Some found Stefanie Scott's Genki Girl tendencies annoying but others liked her and felt she deserved more screen time.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The various videos from YouTube sometimes have a place in the film - the montage of people claiming they love Jem for instance. However often the clips are just random and make no sense. For example a clip of musician Rob Scallon drumming interspersed with Jerrica and Rio sneaking in and out of Starlight.
• Bile Fascination: A few checked out the movie to see what all the negativity was about.
• Broken Base:
  • Some suggest that the movie was hindered by the fact that it had to do an origin story for Jem and her band, and that another film featuring The Misfits probably would have been a Surprisingly Improved Sequel. Others feel that it would have sucked anyway.
  • Eric being a woman. See They Changed It, Now It Sucks! for the first set of opinions. Others noted that Juliette Lewis' performance was one of the redeeming things about the film.
• Cliché Storm: The film uses the standard band movie formula: Band gets famous, lead singer considers going solo, brief amount of conflict, Corrupt Corporate Executive meddling, band gets back together just in time for a performance at the end.
• Designated Villain: Erica Raymond. The worst thing she does is to try to get Jem to become a solo act, which is something Jerrica could easily just say no to. She's treated as a Corrupt Corporate Executive because she produces "no talent auto-tune pop acts", rather than musicians with depth, but she's nonetheless competent and successful at her job. Also, we never get to see any of the damage she does to the music industry. This is especially true when her countpart in the original series was a genuinely horrible person who endangered the heroes' lives.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: As noted below, Kesha's cameo as Pizzazz is about the only thing warmly received in the movie.
• Girl-Show Ghetto: Compare the other Hasbro properties with live action films. Transformers (2007) cost $150 million. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra $175 million. Even Battleship of all things had a $220 million budget. The one adaptation based on a girl-oriented franchise? $5 million.^note It should be noted that, despite being animated, even My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) was treated better than Jem, with a budget of $6.5 million. While the cartoon broke out of the ghetto, the film fell straight into it – grossing just over $2 million, and that's including international box office numbers. This may have been related to removing everything remotely distinctive about the franchise from the film.
• Mis-blamed: Director John M Chu was on the receiving end of countless hate mail, death threats and racist slurs for how it turned out. However, he grew up with the original series (even trying to get the adaptation made for a decade before this) and the responsible parties for the cartoon's magical realism being averted to angsty teen drama are, in fact, producers Jason Blum and Scooter Braun.
• Questionable Casting: Aurora Perrineau got criticism for being cast as Shana - who is much darker skinned in the cartoon and has an afro. The actress is lighter skinned and wears her hair straight. Of course, many fans took this too far and attacked the actress herself, prompting her father to point out it wasn't exactly progressive to accuse her of not being "black enough", and that anger should be directed at the casting directors.
• Retroactive Recognition: In The Stinger, The Misfits member Jetta is played by Eiza González, before she would become more famous in the United States for her roles in From Dusk Till Dawn, Baby Driver, and Hobbs & Shaw.
• So Okay, It's Average: Some of the more positive reviews, including a more famous one from Matt Zoller Seitz, have said that the film isn't the worst ever made, as it has catchy and fun songs, good makeup and costumes, good acting performances from the leads, and a decent plot.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The travel montages are literally screen captures of Google Earth. At one point, the copyright stamp and logo even appear in the bottom right corner.
  • The montage of people praising Jem is clearly pulled from fan-submitted videos praising the cartoon and makes very little effort to convince the audience otherwise. One such video even has an episode of the cartoon playing in the background.
• Squick: Chris Pratt makes a cameo through an old interview where he talks about how he pretended to date his sister's Jem doll as a kid — except it's edited to make it sound like he's claiming to have dated the movie's teenage version of Jem. Yeah.
• Tainted by the Preview: When the first trailer was released, fans were unhappy with it only vaguely resembling the cartoon.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Practically everything about the movie has created this reaction:
  • Setting it in the 2010s instead of making it a 1980s Period Piece (though to be fair, the well-received comic is also set in the 2010s.)
  • Synergy is no longer a cool holographic woman, instead she is a little robot thing. Many fans feel she should have been left out if they were going to change her so much.
  • Eric being a woman met with some controversy, though not nearly as much as everything else.
  • The general plot is considered more Hannah Montana than Jem. This is so overdone, no one wants to even bother anymore.
  • The lack of Misfits until The Stinger is seen as appalling. To many, The Misfits make the cartoon so their absence was poorly received.
  • The movie went for realism instead of keeping the outrageous, campy style of the cartoon.
  • Rio secretly being the owner of Starlight Music.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Some people have pointed out that a Jem and the Holograms movie had tons of potential, between the hologram induced disguises, colorful characters, and action-adventure elements... and the movie didn't tap into any of it. They did get the Misfits in there... in The Stinger. Arguably pretty much the only time the film actually did feel like the cartoon.
  • Aja apparently spent time in juvenile hall. The movie just skips over this instead of using this to give her actual characterization.
  • The film does next to nothing to explore when it is right to sacrifice artistic freedom and what it means to sell out.
  • It also misses out on an opportunity to go for a more refreshing Aesop with regards to the music industry. Rather than showing Jerrica creating songs on her own and working hard with the others to put out regular content and building up fans this way - it goes for the more Hollywood plot of 'one song makes them overnight famous'.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Stinger set up Kesha as Pizzazz, which many saw as an inspired casting decision.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • Critics noted that the movie wasn't good but Aubrey Peeples (Jem) and Juliette Lewis (Erica Raymond) turned in good performances. Peeples admitted to being unfamiliar with the source material beforehand but became a fan of it during production. She likewise insisted on doing her own singing.
  • On a different level, special care and attention were clearly put into the stage costumes and make-up at least. Critics did praise the film for those somewhat interesting qualities.
• Uncertain Audience: This was the primary reason it bombed. Original fans were put off by the lack of the original's gaudy, cheesy charm, while a good chunk of the Younger and Hipper audience that the movie was aiming for have no idea what Jem even is, and even if they had seen the original series, they would've been put off by the film having very little in common with it.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film's Setting Update to the 2010s focuses heavily on what it means to become famous through the internet, obviously paralleling it to the rise of Justin Bieber. They only focus on YouTube rather than any social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok - which likely would have been a big talking point had the movie been made even four years later. An anachronism immediately dates the movie to the 2010s; Jerrica and Kimber are playing with My Little Pony toys in the flashbacks - and the toys are the ones from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (the franchise would receive its next reboot in 2021).

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