Random Superhero Movie Sequels That Just Didn't Live Up to Hyp (11 items)

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  (#11) Thor: The Dark World

  • Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Anthony Hopkins, Stellan Skarsgård, Idris Elba, Christopher Eccleston, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Kat Dennings, Ray Stevenson, Zachary Levi, Tadanobu Asano, Jaimie Alexander, Rene Russo

  In all respects, Thor: The Dark World is still better than most of the other movies on this list. However, compared to the splendid Shakespearean drama weaved by director Kenneth Branagh in the original, The Dark World comes off as a rote sci-fi adventure that drastically underused its awesome characters. Natalie Portman is basically needless, Thor has no character arc, and the villain is a regrettable waste of talent.

  Listen, when you’re trying to one-up Tom Hiddleston as the bad guy, you don’t hide your villain under fifteen pounds of make-up and auto-tuned gibberish. Especially when that guy is Christopher Eccleston. Directed by Game of Thrones vet Alan Taylor, The Dark World seemed more concerned with staging intricate battles than it was with giving audiences a reason to care why Thor was swinging his hammer in the first place.
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  (#9) Dark Phoenix

  • James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Sophie Turner, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters, Jessica Chastain

  Have you ever heard the phrase "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result"? When 20th Century Fox hired writer and director Simon Kinberg to film this most recent adaptation of the seminal comic arc The Dark Phoenix Saga, it almost feel like they had forgotten that Kinberg had attempted to tackle the material in the near universally disliked film X-Men: The Last Stand. Effectively butchering the source material for a second time (although to a lesser extent) this film was a huge let down for what would be the last film released in Fox's X-Men cinematic continuity thanks to the Disney buyout in 2017. 
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  (#6) Superman III

  • Richard Pryor, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Annette O'Toole, Robert Vaughn, Pamela Stephenson, Jackie Cooper, Annie Ross, David Winning, Marc McClure, Gavin O'Herlihy

  What happens when legendary comedian Richard Pryor jokes about wanting to be in a Superman movie? The producers take him super-duper seriously and then offer him $5 million to do the worst Superman movie ever. If the script itself isn’t excruciating enough, Pryor’s attempt to play it PG-13 is so strained it’s positively painful.

  If there’s any actor who could give Toby Maguire a run for his money in terms of being awful at playing the bad man, it’s Christopher Reeve, and that is never more true than when he’s hamming it up as the evil version of the Man of Steel. Where Richard Donner knew how to use Reeve’s talent to harness the stalwart purity of Superman, his successor Ricard Lester didn’t have the same gift. As a result, Superman III comes off as a misdirected, awkwardly restrained movie in which everyone looks out of place.
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  (#1) Batman & Robin

  • Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney, Uma Thurman, Alicia Silverstone, Elle Macpherson, Vivica A. Fox, Jesse Ventura, Chris O'Donnell, Coolio, Vendela Kirsebom, Sandra Taylor, Michael Gough, Patrick Leahy, John Glover, Pat Hingle, Dick Shawn, Nicky Katt, Doug Hutchison, Eric Lloyd, Michael Paul Chan, Robert Swenson, Veronica Grey, John Ingle, Ralf Möller, Jack Betts, Kimberly Scott, Alex Daniels, Peter "Navy" Tuiasosopo, Christian Boeving, Jim McMullan, Dennis Keiffer, John Fink, Harry Van Gorkum, Greg Lauren, Neill Calabro, Joe Sabatino, Dean Cochran, Michael Reid MacKay, Elizabeth Guber, Takis Triggelis, Stogie Kenyatta, Jim Palmer, Steve Boyles, Matthew Hurley, Michael Bernardo, Mark Chadwick, Eva Ford, Isaac Mayanja, Steven Ito, Mark Leahy, Julie Michaels, Steve Blalock, Jean-Luc Martin, Elizabeth Sanders, Robert Powell, Jeff Podgurski, Danny Costa, Marc Glimcher, Jay Luchs, Chris C. Mitchell, Todd Grossman, Paul Sklar, Roger Nehls, Christopher Caso, Khristian Lupo, Bruce Roberts, William Victor Skrabanek, Chris Sayour, Spitfire Brown, James Kim, Simon Kim, Jon Simmons, Christopher Nelson, Tobias Jelinek, Don Sinnar, Azikiwee Anderson, Anthony E. Cantrell, Lucas Berman, Jim Hardy, Uzi Gal, Gabriela Tollman, Stephan Desjardins, Andy LaCombe, David Cardoza, Dennis Lefevre, Cory M. Miller, Casper Brindle, Howard Velasco

  Question: how do you ruin Arnold Schwarzenegger’s uncanny ability to land puns? Answer: Surround him with anatomically correct latex and then give him literally nothing else to do. 

  When Joel Schumacher took over for Tim Burton as the Batman series helmer, fans were rightfully nervous. Then, Schumacher delivered Batman Forever, a film that - while by no means perfect - isn’t a steaming pile of crap, thanks mostly to Jim Carrey’s inspired casting as the Riddler. 

  What is a steaming pile of crap is the follow up to Batman Forever, Batman & Robin. It’s hard to pinpoint what went wrong, here, because so many things did. Schumacher moved away from Burton’s old school noir-style Batman in favor of a more Adam West-inspired take on the subject matter. It didn’t go well. Then there’s George Clooney, who’s somehow an even worse cast for Batman than Ben Affleck. Finally, comic villain Bane is reduced to a monosyllabic troglodyte whose only function is to lumber around a scene-chewing Uma Thurman. It was so bad that it even lost Schumacher his gig as the franchise director.
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  (#4) X-Men: The Last Stand

  • Halle Berry, Hugh Jackman, Anna Paquin, Ian McKellen, Kelsey Grammer, Rebecca Romijn, Ellen Page, Famke Janssen, Patrick Stewart, Dania Ramirez, Stan Lee, James Marsden, Eric Dane, Vinnie Jones, Ben Foster, R. Lee Ermey, Olivia Williams, Bill Duke, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Shawn Ashmore, Haley Ramm, Ken Leung, Daniel Cudmore, Michael Murphy, Chelah Horsdal, Cameron Bright, Julian Richings, Omahyra Mota, Meiling Melançon, John Pyper-Ferguson, Aaron Stanford, Anthony Heald, Makenzie Vega, Alex Ferris, Brenna O'Brien, Chris Claremont, Aaron Pearl, Connor Widdows, Benita Ha, Mi-Jung Lee, Julian Christopher, Adrian Hough, Cayden Boyd, Christopher Fosh, David Smith, Mark Helfrich, Bryce Hodgson, Kea Wong, Lance Gibson, Denis Corbett, Tanya Newbould, Emy Aneke, Brad Kelly, Shauna Kain, Lloyd Adams, Richard Yee, Zoltán Buday, Desiree Zurowski, Geoff White, Donna Goodhand, Peter Kawasaki, Robert Hayley, Justin Callan, Ron Blecker, Luke Pohl, Ed Appleby, John Andrew Vaas, Via Saleaumua, Ron James, Clayton Watmough, Dan McPeake, Chris Duchaine, Ryan Kenneth King, Tony Stef'Ano

  Perhaps the third installment in the original X-Men trilogy wouldn’t necessarily rank as a truly horrible comic book sequel (after all, Elektra exists), but The Last Stand very likely ranks as one of the most disappointing comic films ever made. 

  Coming off the titanic critical and commercial success of Bryan Singer’s X-2: X-Men United, fan hopes were sky high. Then, Singer left the production to work on the disappointing Superman Returns and Fox made the colossal mistake of replacing him with Rush Hour director Brett Ratner. Ratner, in turn, mashed up two amazing comic book plots into a soulless, incoherent 90-minute piece of junk that breaks protocol with canon at every turn and undervalued the contributions of basically every actor whose name wasn’t Hugh Jackman.
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  (#8) Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

  • Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg, Diane Lane, Laurence Fishburne, Jeremy Irons, Holly Hunter, Gal Gadot

  Zack Snyder is the worst thing to happen to beloved nerd properties since Uwe Boll. As a director, he seems to think that juxtaposing incomprehensible, ear-splitting violence with long scenes of gruff dudes brooding will make up for the fact that his films have zero substance. Batman v Superman is just the latest victim of his flashy take on classic heroes.

  Though Man of Steel saw its fair share of critiques, fans were still hopeful that Snyder could turn things around with Batman v Superman. He did not. Beyond the fact that the script is weak and the star of the film only has 43 lines of dialogue, the film is stuffed to the gills with new superheroes, the planted seeds of a new extended Universe. These additions cut both ways. On the one hand, they serve little to no purpose in the overarching plot. On the other hand, Gal Gadot’s needless Wonder Woman is literally the only watchable part of the film. 

  Batman v Superman is such a muddled, chaotic mess critical reviews scored it, on average, 50% lower than the original.

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