10 Movies Everyone Wanted To Love (But Nobody Did)

Now absolutely detesting a movie that you were looking forward to for months, even years, is definitely one thing

but what about those movies that you had more mixed feelings about? We all have those films, whether sequels or original projects, that we just wanted to love with every fibre of our being

but the end result just didn't quite get there. So let's take a look at them

As I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are movies everyone wanted to love, but nobody did

Dumb and Dumber 2 Given that Dumb and Dumber is widely regarded as one of the funniest and most iconic studio comedies of the 1990s

everybody desperately wanted the 20 years later sequel Dumb and Dumber 2 to live up to it

And while Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels were clearly game for another go-around, the script that was written by a total of six people sorely lacked this smart, stupid charm of the original

reducing their characters to broad caricatures. Drowning in lazy callbacks to the first film and lacking even a single truly memorable one-liner or sight gag

Dumb and Dumber 2 is proof that some classic comedies are just better left off alone

While the sequel hardly retroactively ruins the original, and isn't without some fleetingly amusing moments

it's a little surprised that barely anybody talks about it almost a decade after its release

I mean, why would anyone bother watching this again when you can just watch the vastly superior original instead

You know, when the nights get here faster and the temperature starts dropping

and I'm in need of something cozy to pick me up, There's nothing I want to do more than spend some time with your friend and mine, Pumpkinhead

As in the 1988 supernatural horror movie Pumpkinhead, directed by Stan Winston

Obviously. And wouldn't you know it, you can go and do that on Prime Video right now

And if you sign up using our special link in the description or scan the QR code on screen

you'll get 75% off your first two months, which is as low as 99 cents per month

That includes both single subscriptions and bundles, so you can add stuff like Apple TV and HBO Max and watch all the movies and shows you want to your heart's content

Like, guys, they have all of Columbo on there. I'm about to go into a winter hibernation and come out talking like Peter Fork. I can't wait

Eternals. God, Eternals, man. I mean, talk about a movie that looked like it could not fail on paper

Between the incredible ensemble cast, the neat premise, atmospheric visuals, and having Oscar-winning filmmaker Chloe Zhao at the helm

many touted Eternals as the first MCU movie with a genuine shot at winning Best Picture

which definitely seems like a rather laughable statement in retrospect, doesn't it

Now, this isn't to say that Eternals is terrible, because it certainly isn't

but it is a disappointingly generic exposition bloated superhero epic that ultimately is more exhausting and ponderous than entertaining This had the potential to be an all MCU movie yet ironically ended up nabbing the series lowest Rotten Tomatoes score to date tied at 47 with the recent Ant and the Wasp

Quantumania. While Eternals absolutely has its passionate cheerleaders, more than any other MCU

film, it's one which invites a spate of mixed feelings. The highs aren't that high, the lows

aren't that low, and so we're just left with a watchable, over-egged blockbuster that really

doesn't invite repeat viewings. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Even the most energetic defenders of the fourth Indiana Jones film, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

will not try and pretend that it's on the same level as its three statuesque predecessors

Pre-release, hype was at an all-time high for Harrison Ford reuniting with Steven Spielberg

to don the fedora once more, and all the ingredients seemed to be in place for another

superb entry into the series. Yet while broadly well-received by critics, the fourth film went

down considerably less favourably with fans, who took issue with Shia LaBeouf's role as Indy's

son Mutt, the middling visual effects and the infamous sequence where Indy survives a nuclear

blast in a fridge. Is Kingdom of the Crystal Skull a crime against humanity like some fans and the

creators of South Park might have you believe? Well, not quite, but the gulf in quality between

it and its three prior sequels is huge, that's for sure. No, it didn't ruin your childhood and

Harrison Ford is still a lot of fun in the role, but there is no denying that it's a huge step down

from the first three films, as a good measure of charm just is not there. Elysium. After District

9, a rare sci-fi film to receive a Best Picture nomination, hype was through the damn stratosphere

for Neil Blomkamp's next sci-fi action flick Elysium. Yet, despite touting a tantalizing premise

superb visual effects, and a gay Matt Damon, Elysium fell far short of his mesmerizing debut

Though never less than entertaining, except perhaps for whatever the hell Jodie Foster

was attempting to do with that accent, as The Thinking Man's action film, its critiques of class

warfare and American healthcare just felt a little too on-the-nose and broad-minded compared to

District 9's inspired apartheid allegory. There's never any doubt where the story is going. The

characters are uninteresting archetypes, the world-building is weirdly underwhelming, and it's full of dramatic cliches. It's still pretty as hell and touts some fun action, but Elysium ultimately

provided a depressingly early indication that Blompkamp might sadly just be a one-hit wonder

Scream 3 Scream 3 was heavily hyped up as the hotly anticipated finale to Wes Craven's meta-slasher

trilogy, and after two great movies, it seemed like Craven would nail this three-peat. Yet

with series writer Kevin Williamson unable to return, Scream 3 ended up lacking the razor-sharp

wit and genre literacy of the first two films As playful and potential as shifting the setting to Hollywood was and as much as everyone loves Parker Posey and the role of Gail stab equivalent Jennifer Scream 3 eventually succumbs to many of the tropes the franchise was initially sending up With a wildly convoluted villain

reveal that feels like a dispiriting retcon of the series' lore, and a number of surreal

sequences that fall tragically flat, Scream 3 can't hold a candle to what came before

Granted, it's gotten a little better with age due to how ahead of the curve it was in calling

out sexual abuse in a Weinstein-era Hollywood, but it's still a dog's dinner of a movie that

feels relatively limp as a conclusion to a three-movie arc. Toy Story 4

You won't find many people who confess to hating Toy Story 4, because it is honestly

a very good movie, and by the metric of any typical animated movie, a damn good one at that

But Pixar, and especially the Toy Story franchise, is a storytelling powerhouse unto itself

Given the basically flawless nature of the first three Toy Story movies and how brilliantly

Toy Story 3 wrapped things up, nothing but another masterpiece would have quite sufficed for number

four. And Toy Story 4 ultimately was not a masterpiece by any means. A solidly entertaining

postscript to the trilogy with gorgeous animation and strong voice work, but still a movie that many

Toy Story fans fail to actually love. I mean, how many have felt a desire to go back and revisit

Toy Story 4 since 2019? It's a film that we all watched and probably enjoyed to a modestly decent

extent, but in a series renowned for its consistent brilliance, that actually isn't enough

Righteous Kill The marketing for 2008 cop thriller Righteous Kill relentlessly hyped it up as the first film

ever featuring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as co-leads, after sharing just a few scant

minutes of screen time together in Michael Mann's heat. And by God, the appeal of seeing

two screen legends starring together as grizzled aged detectives hunting down a serial killer

well, it speaks for itself. I mean, if you gave this to Dennis Villeneuve or David Fincher, you've got instant fireworks. But under the direction of the considerably less accomplished

John Avnett, admittedly working with a weak-sourced script, Righteous Kill was a spectacularly generic

cop romp, memorable only for a howlingly ridiculous last-minute plot twist. De Niro and Pacino

certainly tried to work with what they've got, but it's not much, ensuring that their much-ballyhooed

big-screen reunion ended up feeling like a garden-variety straight-to-video thriller joint. In 2019, De Niro freely admitted that both he and Pacino regretted making the movie

though at least they were eventually able to re-team once more for an altogether worthier

project, Martin Scorsese's masterful The Irishman. Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines

As much as Terminator 2 Judgment Day brought James Cameron's sci-fi action franchise to an

incredibly fitting conclusion, fans spent years excitedly awaiting a third film also to be

directed by Cameron Yet when Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines finally materialized in 2003 Cameron had no involvement with it at all but the returning presence of Arnold Schwarzenegger nevertheless gave fans hope for a worthy sequel

Ultimately, Terminator 3 was a solid movie in its own right, though like Toy Story 4

struggled to escape the long shadow cast by its vastly superior predecessors

Arnie was great, the action was fun, and the bleak ending was awesome, but the comic relief

largely fell flat. And overall, it was hard not to view the movie as Diet Terminator

lacking the technical ingenuity and strong character work of T2. Making a follow-up to one of the most important and popular blockbusters ever is no easy task

and while plenty of people like T3, you'll struggle to find anyone who puts it on the same footing as the first two movies

The Matrix Resurrections The Matrix's impact on action cinema over the last 25 years is undeniable

and though the two immediate sequels proved relatively divisive, the prospect of a fourth Matrix was a tough one for fans to resist

Between Lana Wachowski being back in the director's chair and both Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss returning to star

there was much hope that The Matrix Resurrections would put the dormant franchise back on firm footing

And there are certainly those who respect Wachowski for taking such a bold meta swing on this movie

I mean, it's undeniably ballsy to literally criticise the studio funding the movie Warner Brothers within the movie itself

while having such a blatant contempt for the never-ending mining of IP for content

Yet even the film's more amusingly cutesy flourishes can't compensate for the genuinely

unsatisfying muddied narrative, with the absence of both Hugo Weaving and Laurence Fishburne's

agents Smith & Morpheus, and the thunderously mediocre action sequences dominating the experience

In terms of technical execution, this felt like an imitation Matrix movie directed by a hack-for-hire

filmmaker, not the original director returning to their glorious creation with a colossal budget

It's a curious film for sure, but ultimately one that again saw the series fall far short

of the peerless original. Anchorman 2 The Legend Continues In the very least, Anchorman 2 felt like a movie made for the right reasons. The cast wanted to

make it and spent almost a decade trying to put it together, even if it fell shy of expectations

The original Anchorman is one of the most beloved comedies of the last 20 years, thanks to both its bevy of memorable one-liners and superbly drawn characters

Anchorman 2, though, well, it's fine as belated comedy sequels go. It's no Dumb and Dumber 2

I mean, it stays true enough to the characters and has some periodically hilarious moments, but it's also aggressively overlong at two full hours

and is decidedly more hit and miss than its predecessor. The news crew fight absolutely rocks, aside from Kanye West being in there

but for the most part, Anchorman 2 feels like too much of a warmed-over retread

with all of the predictably diminishing returns that it entails. Again, it's decent, but a movie that's hard to fall in love with

compared to the electrifying original