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Sometimes a film is exactly what you think it will be. Other times, it's a completely different beast. Here are 10 movies that defied all expectations.
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00:00Sometimes a movie does everything it says on the tin.
00:03Take Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy for instance.
00:06It adapted J.R.R. Tolkien's literary saga as faithfully as possible
00:09and kept surprise deviations to a minimum.
00:13And that's perfectly fine.
00:14The fans were expecting to see an epic fantasy adventure with large-scale battles,
00:18a ring-shaped MacGuffin, and a few hobbits here and there.
00:21And that's exactly what Jackson delivered.
00:23There are, however, those occasions when movies end up being two and a half hours of pure WTF madness.
00:30Times when the universe's collective expectations were way, way off the mark.
00:34Sometimes this is great.
00:36A case of a cinematic underdog story defying the odds and reaching a level of excellence nobody thought possible.
00:42But often the reverse is true.
00:45I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com and these are movies that turned out nothing like you were expecting.
00:50Super Mario Bros.
00:51When Rocky Morton and Annabelle Jankel were hired to bring video game franchise Super Mario Bros. to cinema in the
00:57early 90s,
00:58fans had no idea what to expect.
01:01The end result, however, was still something nobody could have predicted.
01:05Nintendo's twee world of mushrooms, turtle shells, and bright colors became a Blade Runner-esque dystopia,
01:11and a Briton and a Latino were cast as our Italian-American leads.
01:15Nothing about Super Mario Bros. resembled the games,
01:19beyond the core concept of having two plumbers rescue a princess from the clutches of evil in a fantasy world.
01:25One of its biggest deviations was casting the late Dennis Hopper as reptilian baddie King Cooper,
01:30who appears, for some reason, in human form in the film.
01:34But it was the scene where Bob Hoskins' Mario plants his head right between the breasts of a rotund leather
01:40-clad woman
01:41in a dino nightclub that killed every fan's childhood.
01:45Mario, apparently, in this universe, is a lads-lads-lads sesh monster.
01:49Even after a plate-load of super mushrooms, this doesn't resemble Mario Bros.,
01:54and that's kind of why it's great.
01:57How's it going, everyone?
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02:18Now, back to the video.
02:20Prometheus.
02:20Movie-goers can be forgiven for thinking that an alien prequel might actually, you know,
02:26have some aliens in it.
02:27And when Prometheus arrived with absolutely none,
02:30all right, bar one in the final scene that's kinda like a xenomorph,
02:34the fans were left flummoxed.
02:36In all truth, there's plenty of extraterrestrial life forms in Ridley Scott's movie,
02:40and you know what?
02:41I actually think the film is nowhere near as bad as people say it is,
02:44but everyone was expecting the kind of alien that bursts from human chests,
02:48bleeds corrosive acid everywhere, and kills anything that moves.
02:52Fans were also bracing themselves for some insight into the enduring mysteries of the alien universe,
02:58but left theaters with yet more unanswered questions.
03:01The reason Prometheus proved so divisive is that it wasn't the alien prequel the diehards were after.
03:06Fans wanted answers and the ends to meet,
03:09rather than a lecture on theology, however fascinating it might have been.
03:13Rise of the Planet of the Apes
03:14Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a classic case of a movie exceeding expectations,
03:19even if its name is still a complete mouthful.
03:22It was a prequel nobody really asked for that had big shoes to fill in the shape of the classic
03:27original,
03:28and a tarnished brand to repair after Tim Burton made a monkey out of the franchise a decade earlier.
03:33Needless to say, nobody was expecting it to be any good,
03:36Nevermind launched one of the best franchises of the 2010s,
03:40but director Rupert Wyatt delivered a blockbuster with heart, soul, and freaking amazing special effects.
03:46After the trailers hit, film fans were expecting a visual spectacle, but they got so much more.
03:51A touching man-ape bond between Simeon Caesar and James Franco's good-natured scientist
03:56is the lifeblood of the story, and the spectacular CGI is merely the icing on the banana cake.
04:03Man of Steel
04:03Truth, Justice, and The American Way
04:06Those are the ideals that we expect Superman to embody,
04:09and while the true meaning of the latter element is a little blurry these days,
04:13you won't find any of the above in Man of Steel.
04:15The last son of Krypton has always been a clean-cut hero, full of sunny optimism and altruism.
04:21He's the day to Batman's knight.
04:23However, you wouldn't know that if you purely knew him from Zack Snyder's DC Extended Universe launch vehicle.
04:28Right at the foot of the list of things fans were not expecting to see in Man of Steel comes
04:33snapping a bad guy's neck and leveling half of Metropolis with zero regard for the collateral damage.
04:39The only thing more surprising the filmmakers could have included would have been, like, if Clark just straight-up murdered
04:45Lois Lane or something like that.
04:47Snyder likes to deconstruct his heroes, but this approach is a better fit for some rather than others.
04:53As an archetypal good guy, Superman isn't a wholly great candidate for this treatment, and, as is often the case
04:59with Snyder, it felt like he just didn't quite get the character at all.
05:03The Dark Tower
05:04Stephen King's mind-bending fantasy-horror-western hybrid thing, The Dark Tower, should have been so, so good.
05:12It genuinely had the potential to be cinema's next Lord of the Rings, if only it had been given the
05:17kind of careful treatment the fans were banking on.
05:20There were claims that the saga is unfilmable, but nobody was expecting its in-depth story and layered characters to
05:26arrive on a screen stripped to their bare bones.
05:29However, Sony Pictures made some pretty bad calls during The Dark Tower's production, such as reducing the runtime to little
05:35more than an hour and a half and attempting to make a sequel to the books rather than simply adapt
05:41them.
05:41It ended up being a confusing, disjointed mess of a film that bore only a passing resemblance to King's beloved
05:47novels, and it has probably killed Sony's ambitions to tell more stories in this universe.
05:53It could have been someone, it could have been a contender, but it ended up being made essentially for... nobody.
05:59Fantastic Four.
06:00If there's ever a superhero film that should be family-friendly, colourful and fun, it's The Fantastic Four.
06:06That's what everyone was kind of expecting when Fox announced it was taking another stab at bringing Marvel's first family
06:12to the big screen.
06:13But, of course, this was the early 2010s, and Chris Nolan's Batman movies were still more talked about than the
06:19MCU.
06:20So Fox thought, actually, let's just do that instead.
06:23When the trailers came in, all dark and serious, expectations shifted, but they were still cautiously high nevertheless.
06:29Josh Trank, the man who brought us the excellent found-footage flick Chronicle, was handling the project after all.
06:35It seemed to be in safe hands.
06:37But not only did the final product bear no resemblance to The Fantastic Four, it appeared to actively shun all
06:43things good and decent in the world.
06:45This was a gloomy comic adaptation utterly devoid of anything positive.
06:50So bad that it actually made the previous Fantastic Four movies look competent.
06:54Now, who among you saw that coming?
06:57Cabin in the Woods.
06:58Pretty much nobody had any idea just how subversive Cabin in the Woods was going to be when it first
07:03came out.
07:04Shiver fans assumed that there'd be some kind of twist involved, as it couldn't have been as run-of-the
07:09-mill as its premise indicated.
07:10But nobody expected it to have anything that would elevate it above being an alright slasher film.
07:15Fortunately, the marketing successfully hid its biggest secrets.
07:19And just when the audiences were rolling their eyes at the slasher cliches before them, the movie mutated into one
07:24of the most original horrors of its generation.
07:27Stereotypical teens and done-to-death backdrops quickly made way for force fields, a chamber of horrors containing every monster
07:34pop culture has ever dreamed up, and sacrifices to appease the dark gods of old.
07:39The Cabin in the Woods trailer only hinted at the tip of the iceberg, positioning the film as a generic
07:45slasher movie with a trick or two up its sleeve.
07:47Who'd have thought it was hiding a full black magic emporium up there, though?
07:51It's just a shame Cabin in the Woods didn't embrace one more horror cliché by spawning any sequels.
07:57The Guest.
07:57In The Guest, Spencer and Laura Peterson's marine son Caleb is killed in Afghanistan.
08:02And while they struggle to cope with their loss, the arrival of his former squadmate and best friend David Cullen
08:08seems to soften the blow.
08:10David comes across as a kind, charming man dedicated to helping the family.
08:14As The Guest appears to set itself up as one of those films, you know, the ones uplifting, positive and
08:19all that jazz.
08:20I mean, he's played by Dan Stevens, who wouldn't trust and love him unconditionally.
08:25But things do take a turn for the darker when David helps his fallen comrade's younger brother out with a
08:31bully problem,
08:32leaving the original aggressors with, well, a terrible hiding.
08:36After a blossoming romance with Caleb's sister turns fatal attraction,
08:39it becomes apparent that The Guest isn't the heartwarming lesson in love and loss it was made out to be.
08:45The movie arrived on the scene to little fanfare, and its subject matter and endgame caught everyone off guard.
08:51Cloud Atlas.
08:52After The Matrix and Speed Racer, fans were expecting the Wachowskis to put some kind of zany adrenaline-soaked spin
08:58on their adaptation of Cloud Atlas, but no, that's not what we got.
09:03It was, admittedly, an ambitious take on David Mitchell's beloved book about life, the universe and reincarnation,
09:09but this was the last thing anyone was expecting from the directorial duo.
09:13With a stellar cast led by Tom Hanks and Jim Broadbent, many were tipping it for Oscar success,
09:19though somewhere between its clunky editing and excessive three-hour runtime, it failed to secure a single nomination.
09:26With the Wachowskis, since returning to more familiar territory with 2015's Jupiter Ascending and Netflix series Sense 8,
09:32it feels as though Cloud Atlas happened in a strange alternate universe.
09:37One that I fully embrace, however, because even when they're not great, the Wachowskis make some undeniably interesting projects.
09:43Probably because it came along at a time where every single film Liam Neeson was starring in was a two
09:49-bit taken derivative,
09:51everyone was expecting The Grey to be yet another half-baked action romp.
09:55Having Joe Carnahan's name attached didn't really help matters either,
09:58as they're the kind of movies he specializes in,
10:01but anyone who actually went to see it soon realized that the taken comparisons to The Grey do not apply.
10:07Neeson had to use an entirely different set of skills when his plane crashed in a remote Alaskan wilderness,
10:13and a grueling tale of man versus nature ensued.
10:16The Grey is emotionally charged and full of subtext about the indomitable human spirit,
10:21holds one of Neeson's most memorable performances post-Batman Begins,
10:25and arguably Carnahan's greatest cinematic accomplishment to date.
10:29However, everyone just expected it to be the daft movie when Neeson punches a bunch of wolves in the face,
10:35but it was so, so much more.
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