10 Movies That Had Low Expectations But Became Huge Successes, According To Reddit
The movie business is one of the riskiest industries to work in, and though general audiences might not know it, more films are failures than successes. And more often than not, the writing is on the wall too, as troubled productions and negative responses to trailers are indicative of a box office bomb.
However, sometimes, a movie can defy all expectations, and despite all of the above problems, they can end up becoming phenomenal successes at the box office and spawning tons of sequels. Whether it's a video game movie or a screenplay based on a theme park ride, these films proved everybody wrong.
RelationshipSouth667 believes that The Terminator had low expectations based on the budget. The Redditor exaggerates a little, explaining that "the budget was around $8." And while it wasn't $8, the movie did have a budget of $6.4 million, which was incredibly low for an action film at the time.
But James Cameron stretched the budget as far as he could, and the film looks like it had a production cost more than Dune, which is another 1984 action movie but had a budget of more than $40 million. The Schwarzenegger-led movie ended up making $80 million worldwide and has become a billion-dollar-grossing franchise.
While the X-Men series had been financially successful, X-Men: First Class has everything working against it. Studboi69 makes a great point that the movie "was supposed to be X-Men Origins: Magneto, but they ended up retooling it after the critical bombing that X-Men Origins: Wolverine received.
And as it was following two of the most critically panned X-Men movies ever, the film didn't have the best odds. It may not have been the highest-grossing X-Men movie, but it saw some of the best reviews the franchise had gotten in a long time and it put the series back on the right track. Not only that, but while fans debate over who should be the next Wolverine, the movie features one of the best cameos ever, as Logan is found in a bar and has one line, "f*** off."
While Superhero movies are expected to make billions of dollars at a time these days, Batman overperformed at the box office and surprised even the studio. Batman is one of the most iconic movies ever, and director Tim Burton turned the character into a brand, but it wasn't always looking like it'd be that way. AdamSMessinger claims that the film had low expectations before its release due to its casting.
The Redditor explains that "the announcement of Michael Keaton as Batman got a lot of backlash." At the time, Keaton was best known for playing Beetlejuice and his appearances as a comedy actor on Saturday Night Live, and that doesn't exactly sound like the perfect actor to portray a masked vigilante.
Sometimes, movies are spawned from random sources, and in the case of The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, it was a Disney theme park ride. LiveJournal explains that "I remember the idea of a movie based on a theme park ride being panned pretty hard when it was first announced."
However, despite being based on a theme park ride, the 2003 movie has no right to be as entertaining and riveting as it is. Screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio had to take some liberties with the source material, and they were somehow able to write one of the most entertaining movies of the 21st century. Not to mention that they created Jack Sparrow, one of the best movie antiheroes.
Divesh_sam notes that Venom "became a sleeper hit despite the negative reviews. It managed to make more money than Justice League." The 2018 release is the ultimate movie that critics hate but fans love, and though it might have been a failure in the eyes of the critics, it was such a success in every other area.
And, interestingly, given that Justice League is a team-up movie featuring the most iconic superheroes of all time, including Batman, the film's failure at the box office just further heightens Venom's sensational result. But even without comparing the film to other blockbusters, not even Sony could have expected the film's phenomenal success.
Everybody knows the name John Wick, and the action series, and the name has almost become better known than Keanu Reeves' other big franchise, The Matrix. That's certainly the case when it comes to box office gross, as The Matrix Resurrections was a box office bomb.
However, Just_my_opinion7 points out that the series seemingly came out of nowhere. The Redditor explains that the 2014 movie "didn't have massive marketing but it grew to a successful franchise." The first John Wick movie is one of the best examples of word of mouth, as the fairly low-budget movie was barely promoted by the studio.
At the time, there were so many reports of the disaster movie going over budget, and as Cactusmaac points out, "everyone was expecting Titanic to be a huge flop like Waterworld or Cleopatra, but it ended up being the biggest movie of all time."
Waterworld and Cleopatra are notorious for their astronomical budgets only to perform abysmally at the worldwide box office, but Titanic defied all expectations and broke so many records. The disaster-romance movie became the highest-grossing film of all time, and it held that record for 12 years until another James Cameron-directed movie replaced it, Avatar.
Doc_55lk recalls that "as a videogame movie, the prevailing opinion was that it'd suck, like every other videogame movie in the past had." However, there's an even bigger reason as to why fans had such a low bar for Sonic the Hedgehog, as the original trailer saw a different design of Sonic from the one in the final cut of the movie.
The character looked like a human/hedgehog hybrid, and the trailer became ridiculed. However, Paramount actually listened to the negative reception, and they spent millions of extra dollars redesigning the character. And, after barely escaping development hell, the movie was a success, fans loved the more faithful character design, and a sequel is even on its way later this year.
Hungry-Paper2541 notes that Jaws "was being talked about as one of the biggest disasters in movie history before it came out." Jaws' production problems are just as well documented as the movie's success. Between Spielberg originally thinking that John Williams' score was a joke and then breaking the mechanical shark, there was no way a cohesive movie could have possibly been cut together based on Jaws' behind-the-scenes facts.
However, the movie is one of the film industry's biggest success stories in terms of net profits, as it only cost $9 million to shoot, and it ended up grossing close to half a billion dollars. It also spawned several sequels, but the less said about them the better.
TheOwlBlind notes that between early negative reviews that described the movie as "supernatural schmaltz" and a completely unknown director, The Sixth Sense was pretty much doomed. The Redditor even explains that instead of it being released by Touchstone Pictures, Disney made the last-minute decision to release it via Hollywood Pictures, which is the imprint that the studio uses for movies they have no faith in.
However, the word-of-mouth surrounding the shocking twist ending, which is still excitedly discussed to this day, helped the movie excel. It also turned M. Night Shyamalan into a sought-after director almost overnight.