Nine Would-Be Blockbusters That Were Seriously Underrated

It’s been said by pundits, critics, and many discontents about the internet that Hollywood is experiencing a slump of creativity. It doesn’t take a very sophisticated observation mechanism to notice that the bulk of big-budget studio product consists of remakes of older movies, and adaptations of kid-friendly pop products. But it’s easy to see why the studios have been whopping this horse for so long: it’s working. Audiences are gathering in flocks to watch Hunger Games movies and Marvel movies, which are still making literally billions of dollars worldwide. Many are beginning to complain about the creative stagnation of the filmmaking higher-ups, but that didn’t stop a movie like Avengers: Age of Ultron from making about $190 million in just a few days.

And yet even though some people are longing for creativity, audiences seem to be rejecting a lot of the recent original movies to come from the big-budget machine. Some filmmakers are brave enough to present audiences with something new, based on original characters and possessed of original stories, but audiences appear to be ignoring them as a matter of principle. As such, a lot of perfectly decent (not to mention a few outright excellent) big-budget genre movies have been pushed aside, ignored, and dismissed by audiences who equate financial success with quality. Some of these films were technically based on an existing property, but not ones that were currently popular with young demographics, and for Hollywood that counts as “original” nowadays. (It’s close enough for government work.)

Well, we here at CraveOnline strive to fight prejudice in all of its forms (we are nothing if not warriors of justice), so we would like to stand up for some the unjustly maligned big-budget studio films of the last few years. Many of these movies are assumed to be terrible by the uninitiated, and most certainly deserve your attention. Here are nine in particular that are worth checking out.

Gallery: Nine Would-Be Blockbusters That Were Seriously Underrated


Witney Seibold is a contributor to the CraveOnline Film Channel, and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. You can follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind.

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