THE FRIDAY FIVE: WORST MOVIES WITH THE BEST TRAILERS
Welcome to a new regular feature on our website! Every Friday, it’s a countdown of the top 5 of a random subject in the world of nerd! Prepare yourself for… The Friday Five!
This week, it’s the best trailers for the worst movies! Thanks to the power of modern marketing, ad executives have been able to put a shiny bow on some colossal turds. Here are the top 5 nerd movies that were terrible, but at least they had a great commercial!
5) X Men: The Last Stand
Let’s get started with number 5, X Men: The Last Stand. So Wizard Podcast nemesis Fox completely screwing up Fantastic Four wasn’t something new for the studio. Off the back of two successful and well received X Men films, they needed a part 3 and we all hoped and dreamed of an adaptation of The Dark Phoenix Saga. With one of the greatest X-Men stories from the comics how could they go wrong? Well, they set a release date before they started working and director Bryan Singer was busy so they brought in Brett Ratner on short notice. The result was a movie so bad it nearly killed the franchise and was completely erased by time travel in Days of Future Past. Just in case you thought Singer dodged a bullet, he was busy making Superman Returns, a movie so bad that Man of Steel is seen as an improvement! At least Famke Janssen looked amazing in that red dress and we got this trailer to imagine what could have been!
4) Prometheus
The Alien franchise has had more down than ups, despite starting off with two movie masterpieces. After four straight god awful movies, fanboys rejoiced as director Ridley Scott was returning to the franchise to right the ship! After this trailer dropped, anticipation was at a fever pitch… and the movie was a mess. Thanks to a script from Damon Lindelof (you know him as the guy who wrote the TV show Lost into a giant confusing disappointment) the movie was filled with half baked ideas and dumb characters. Two scientists are mapping a structure that’s shaped like a circle with a laser map device. They get lost. Then they touch black goo and die. Why? I don’t think even Ridley Scott knows. At least we got this awesome trailer and the knowledge for future generations of space explorers that if you have a robot abortion of an alien squid monster, you should probably tell people about it.
3) Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace
The world was a different place in 1999. People payed full price for a movie ticket to simply watch this teaser trailer. Brave souls with dial up internet spent eight to ten hours downloading this trailer. Personally, I wept openly in the movie theater over the return of Star Wars. The first glimpse of footage from Episode 1 had people out of their minds in anticipation. To be fair, I don’t think ANY movie could have lived up to the hype, but especially not this movie. Jar Jar and his grand Gungan army dealt Star Wars a huge blow in terms of popularity and cultural relevance that it’s finally regaining by completely ignoring just about anything from the prequel films. The funny part? It’s not even the worst movie in the prequel trilogy, *cough* Attack of the Clones *cough*.
2) Alien 3
Oh look, it’s the Alien franchise again! This little teaser showed up on movie screens to let us know that a sequel to Alien/Aliens was on the way and it sure sounds like the titular creatures are coming to Earth! After the last movie, I can only imagine how awesome an all out war between the xenomorphs and the Colonial Marines will be! Oh. Wait. Instead the movie languished in developmental hell and was never going to deliver on the promises of this trailer. In fact, it was a boring and dull movie that aped the first film and killed off beloved fan favorite characters Hicks and Newt in the first ten minutes. Thanks to the vortex of suck of this movie, we now live in a world where there are more bad Alien films than good by a large margin. The behind the scenes documentary on the making of this mess, Wreckage and Rage: The Making of Alien 3, is actually better than anything on the screen. I’m still waiting for my Marines vs Aliens on Earth movie, Fox.
1) Terminator: Salvation
In what seems to be a pattern here, the first two movies in the Terminator franchise are classics. Literal masterpieces of sci fi action. After a very meh part 3, the franchise looked to be getting back on track with Terminator: Salvation. The first part of a planned trilogy about the future war between man and machine, this trailer makes me want to run through a brick wall. I’m in. Christian Bale, hot off Batman and using his Batman voice to tell us “YOU ARE THE RESISTANCE”, cool looking action and robots, Terminators with Gatling guns….this was going to be the return to form for Terminator! Then it came out and hoo boy did it suck. Wow. I remember going home afterwards and re watching this trailer and thinking “Whaaaaaaa?” Bale is barely in the movie, the story is terrible and it’s flat out boring. The movie did so poorly that the planned sequels were scrapped and events were set in motion leading to another bad movie, Terminator: Genysis. Genysis was also so bad it killed a planned trilogy of its own! The only good thing to come out of this garbage was an Xbox 360 game adaptation with some of the easiest achievement points this side of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Don’t worry, much like everything Terminator touches since part 2, the game sucked too.
And that is your Friday Five for this week. Come back next week for another list of things in numerical order from the world of nerd! Have an idea for a list or feedback/angry comments? Feel free to comment below or email us at sowizardpodcast@yahoo.com!
