QFT.
Tim Burton’s Batman.
I was so pumped for this. Went to see it opening night with a bunch of friends. I was expecting an edgy, gritty Batman movie and it was just so… corny? cheesy? schlocky?
It felt like I was watching a Batman stage play where everyone’s acting was so theatrical and the scenery all looked like props. Zero emotional impact in any of it.
Thank god Christopher Nolan revived the series over a decade later and made the Batmans I really wanted to see.
The Dark Tower, though I’m arbitrarily limiting myself to movies from the past ten years. It goes beyond “not sticking with the book” bad and is just an incomprehensible, poorly-made, uninspiring piece of dreck. I’ve seen other really bad movies, but never one for which I originally had so much hope.
Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice. Nothing whimsical about it at all. Really predictable dreck. The only adaptation I’ve ever liked of my favorite book is the Disney version.
The most recent Fantastic 4 film. I’m a fan of Miles Teller ever since Whiplash, but god that was an awful film. A structural and tonal mess.
The 1995 Stallone Judge Dredd. I’d been a huge fan of the comic since the early 80s, there had always been endless fan speculation about what a movie would look like, and we’d had a teaser with the very Dredd influenced *Robocop * a few years before. Then an actual movie was announced, with a proper budget, terrific production values, the readers and publishers were foaming with anticipation - and it ended up stinking. It wasn’t even a terrible film, if you like 90s cheese: it was essentially made of bits of better films, but it rattled along gamely enough, and it looked gorgeous. They used artists from the strip on the production design, and it showed: Mega-City One looked like the comics, and there were gems like Mean Machine and the ABC robot. The problem was that Stallone’s Dredd was nothing to do with the implacable embodiment of Law that readers knew from the comic: he was just another Stallone-by-numbers “grumpy but wisecracking cop learns how to feel”, and it totally missed what the strip was about. The Dredd of a few years back was much smaller scale film but got the character dead on: tragically, only about a dozen people saw it, which sank the chances of a sequel.
Tim Burton isn’t really gritty though, more like dark, but still childlike, fantasy. Burton’s Batman was good IMO, and SO Burton, and probably the best mass appeal Batman you could have gotten in 1989. At that time, there were only two ways to approach Batman and actually make money: Tim Burton’s way, or something akin to the 60s TV show but with more directorial skill and production values. Which is where the series went(and died) under Joel Schumacher.
As good as the Burton and Nolam Batmans are, I still feel this property hasn’t met its potential. I’m really optimistic that as part of the DCEU Batman might be better than ever. Extended Universes at the very least seem to cause the owners of the property to take better care crafting stories than they do when they just want to get a movie out and cash in. DC for awhile was taking precisely that route, but now they seem to have figured it out.
Ever see a movie called Dreamchild? That there is some creepy shit, what I saw of it. I am not sure I will ever be able to appreciate AiW again after that.
Dune and Starship Troopers spring to mind when I think about films I highly anticipated that fell far short of those expectations. I also agree with the Hitch Hikers Guide…I thought that would be really good, and it, well, wasn’t. The first Judge Dredd was also a huge disappointment.
The biggest let down for me was Raise the Titanic, I was a big fan of the Dirk Pitt novels at the time and was really looking forward to the movie but it was absolute boring garbage, even being a fan of the novel I couldn’t raise any interest in the characters or the story line in the movie, it’s one of the few movies I have walked out on
My husband was so disappointed by X-men Origins: Wolverine that he has since refused to ever get his hopes up about another movie again.
It was pretty bad.
Oh, and X-men Apocalypse was also pretty bad. Only Fassbender made it bearable.
I haven’t seen “The Passion of the Christ” here yet. When I finally did see it on TV, I was glad it was free because it was AWFUL. Not because it was violent and gory, but because it was just so BORING.
I did a search but didn’t see this come up. Yeah, I have one: American Beauty. It was Oscar buzzing so hard and was being lauded as this hugely, deeply profound statement about Life in Suburban White America™. I had gotten enough pings on my radar from reasonably-trusted sources that I decided to check it out.
I didn’t walk out, but mentally did. What a predictable, incredibly immature attempt at Deep Thoughts. Oy. The added Kevin Spacey factor in hindsight is really just the cherry on stop of a movie I just want to smack the face of. I kept thinking to myself WTF?! The pretty bag? The stupid gay plot twist out of a mistaken-situation Three’s Company plot? The hot girl who wants the pathetic dad? Who’s stupid fantasy is this?
A few years after it came out, people seemed to wake up and start saying “you know, that really is not good” - kinda like what happened with Crash. I was like “hello! welcome back to reality!!” 
not having read any of the comics/books, I expected Watchmen to be along the lines of your typical ensemble superhero film. What I saw instead was a too-long, drawn out, boring slog.
Probably my biggest disappointment is from many years ago. (1978, I just checked.) It was the TV miniseries version of “Wheels”, by Arthur Hailey.
There had been good movies made of Hailey’s books “Airport” and “Hotel”. A very good miniseries had been made of “The Moneychangers”. So I had high hopes for “Wheels”, his novel about the auto industry, which I loved.
It was a disaster. The plot was completely changed, so that much of the point of the book was lost. For example, one character in the book is a poor black kid who manages to get a job on the assembly line. In the show he became a football player.
Watchmen is not a good film. The graphic novel is a masterpiece, but the thing is, I think it’s impossible to adapt to film. There are things it does with pacing, space and perspective that can only be done with a graphic novel. There are pages that visually mirror one another. There are narrative excerpts and allusions. It’s actually the first graphic novel I ever read, and made me realize just how artistic they can be. But Moore is a crazy genius and what he does is hard to replicate, on film, or otherwise. I can kind of understand Moore being pissed about the film adaptation, but on the other hand, what could you reasonably expect? This was not a story made for film.
Sometimes I think it’s worth doing something as best you can than not to do it at all. Could Watchmen have been better? Probably not. It was still worth doing though.
The fourth and fifth Star Wars films, maybe the sixth too. The prequels. Just awful shit.
Where to start:
-Every Star Wars film that followed the first one
-Every Batman film that followed the first one
-The Hobbit
-Most of the Star Trek films -
-Avatar
-Independence Day
The list would be a lot longer if not for previews. I don’t like CG imagery inserted as a plot substitute and that can often be seen in the previews.
If it isn’t misuse of computer generated images it’s the same thing with the audio. I don’t need the sound jacked up and down like a roller coaster to emphasis every little thing.
Actually, superb movies. Just a let down for Star Wars. I’ve found that people who weren’t raised on Star Wars are more generous to the prequels than those who were.
I wasn’t “raised” on Star Wars since I was almost 20 when the first one came out. I loved that one. I loved the next two. So much so that I had high expectations for the following ones and found them completely boring pieces of shit.
Liked the last two though.