I make a point of only including positive reviews in my Year in Review posts, because it feels like a time for celebration, and generally I’d rather draw people’s attention to things that I think deserve it. But I do write negative reviews when called for, and occasionally I can get quite…passionate about my distaste.
In 2022 there were three pieces of media that made me so mad I was unable to sleep, that were so bad that it took me hours, days, even weeks to put together reviews that adequately described how awful they were. Having put that much work into them, it seems a shame not to post them here.
It also just so happens that these three works have some similarities. All three were based on properties that I’d previously enjoyed. All three contain within them the seeds of what could have been a good story. And all three cost over $100,000,000 to make.
I’m not attempting to make a definitive statement about some inherent link between budget and quality. Obviously there are huge projects that are great and tiny projects that are terrible. But I think it’s valuable to look at why some projects fail even when they have seemingly all the resources they could possibly need.
This failure will look different in each case, and many of the criticisms I have will not have any obvious connection to the work’s price tag. But I think that connection is in there, whether it be the restrictions of a carefully- (which isn’t to say well-) crafted franchise, the pressures of following up a success with something bigger and better (but also exactly the same), or just a fundamental conflict between the story they wanted to tell and the story they actually paid for. And I think looking at these failures through this lens is interesting. I hope you do too.
So gather ’round and join me for $torytime.
The Reviews
- How the MCU Broke Spider-Man: No Way Home
- How Horizon Forbidden West Broke Me
- How Rings of Power Broke Its Own Story
NB: These reviews were all written separately, before I had conceived of this series. While they have been revised with the series in mind, certain inconsistencies in tone and style (and length) have inevitably remained.
Certain of Eventual Failure 