The era of high concept cinema revolutionized the industry to a certain extent, with so-called “elevator pitches” that delivered an intriguing premise within the space of a sentence or two helping make it easier to sell big budget studio movies to the masses than ever before.
Of course, that doesn’t mean the execution is always going to match up to the strength of the initial idea, as history has disappointingly shown on far too many occasions for our liking. Countless films that sounded awesome on paper, and even demanded interest via attention-grabbing trailers, ended up living only to disappoint by the time they hit theaters.
The discourse has now migrated over to Reddit, with users making some excellent points when it comes to naming titles that squandered their boundless potential to present viewers with nothing but mediocrity, and occasionally outright disaster.
Highlander might prove to be a point of contention among fans of the franchise, but Adam Sandler’s Pixels definitely won’t. The $100 million fantasy was marketed as Ghostbusters for the video game age, but turned out to be just another Sandler joint, this time with added CGI.
Danny Boyle’s Yesterday comes up more often than not, as does David Ayer’s turgid Netflix fantasy Bright, which barely even scratched the surface of its mythological procedural setup. The second half of Will Smith’s Hancock went down in a ball of formulaic flames, too, but for our money we’d like to add The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and In Time to the list, both of which could have been incredible in different hands.