Why is nothing ever as good as people make it out to be? When someone tells you a show or a film is the best thing they’ve ever seen and you just have to watch it. Quite often there’s a good chance it’s going to be awful.
We have a tendency to get caught up in the hype but sometimes it’s just not worth it. It’s a similar notion when thinking about drug use. While you might think people your age are doing drugs, the truth is 4 out of 5 are not.
When it comes to film and TV, the levels of disappointment we experience when the show or the movie just doesn’t live up to expectations is directly proportional to the amount of people telling you it’s great.
Getting carried away with a show or desperately soaking up all of the teaser trailers is a good way to get yourself hurt. Getting lost in the build-up of more niche interests is an even harder one to deal with since there’s usually no one to complain to about it when it lets you down.
Here’s to the ones that some of us got way too carried away with and a warning for anyone thinking about getting involved. It’s just not worth it with the following:
Game of Thrones
Might as well kick things off with the greatest example of the letdown. Game of Thrones hooked viewers across the world for nearly a decade and managed to enrage them all with a super rushed ending.
No one was happy. The huge battle that had been building for the whole series effectively had no impact and the character we were all rooting for turned out evil. Bran becomes king for whatever reason, Jon Snow ends up back where he started, and there were more loose ends than your favourite old jumper. A great example of something not to bother starting.
The Last Airbender
Turning beloved TV shows into films is a huge risk and no one played it off worse than M Night Shyamalan with The Last Airbender.
Nickelodeon and Paramount committed US$250 million to bring one of the formers most successful series of all time to life on the big screen. This was rapidly cut when audiences were able to see the deadpan, boring adaptation of their favourite show. The film couldn’t even manage to get the names of the characters right and the animated series creators have since said that they like to pretend the live-action adaption doesn’t exist.
Suicide Squad
Nothing got us going quite like Suicide Squad. With the appetite for more Joker shenanigans laid by Heath Ledger and Mark Hamill, teaser trailers in the lead up to the film capitalised on the clown prince of crime only to have him hardly appear at all.
The casting choices were also intriguing, and the DC universe looked set to hit back at the overwhelming success of the Marvel franchise. None of that materialised after strong studio interference created a boring, hard-to-follow supervillain mashup that has somehow materialised a sequel. Here’s hoping they’ve learned from their mistakes.
The Witcher
The Witcher started life as a series of supremely popular Polish fantasy books which became monumentally successful games and then managed to fall flat on its face when brought to the small screen.
There’s no origin story here, there’s no background on our mysterious hero. It’s just actors living out tales that have very little to do with either the books or the game, giving weird new backgrounds and subplots to supporting leads that confused everyone. If you love the Witcher aesthetic, then it’s not terrible viewing but beyond that, it’s a huge disappointment.
The Hobbit Trilogy
After the phenomenal success and perfect delivery of The Lord of The Rings trilogy, you would have thought that Peter Jackson could do no wrong. Sadly, you would be mistaken.
All the elements were there for success: excellent source material, stunning scenery, and great casting choices. Instead of playing it close to the books, like in the original films, Jackson decides to go way, way off-piste, cramming a bunch of unnecessary extra plot in there for reasons that can only be explained as money. Just make some more films about the LOTR universe and leave The Hobbit alone! Don’t even get us started on the CGI either.
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice
Rounding it off with another spectacular DC failure we have Batman V Superman. For a film that sets itself up as the answer to the most hotly debated question in comic book history, you would think they would actually have the two heroes duke it out and settle some arguments.
Oh no, that would be too easy. The much-hyped dark, edgy showdown between Ben Affleck’s Batman and Henry Cavil’s Superman turned into some soft bromance film after the pair realise that their mum’s have the same name (the basis of any good friendship). Putting the two biggest legends in all of pop culture together for the first time had to be done exactly right and this was very, very far from the mark.