Which movie do you feel has the most wasted potential?

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Any movie "based on the novel...". Almost always the novel is butchered.

Downsizing: It was a very interesting premise (people choose to shrink themselves in order to continue being able to afford living) but it is squandered on a pretty bland plot that wastes the premise to tell a mundane story.
- Literally came in here to say Downsizing. Great premise ruined by being nothing but a not-so-good romcom.
- I was so salty after watching that movie. All the trailers billed it as a comedy. Maybe the first 10 minutes had me laughing. Bored to tears after that.

Star Wars VII, VIII and IX
- It still absolutely baffles me that they bought the franchise for so much money, yet couldn't even come up with a coherent story for the trilogy. Absolute tragedy.
  
  Imagine a timeline where Lucas didn't chicken out with Darth Jar Jar.
- I deleted my previous replay because my brain is broken and roman numerals fuck me up, what I meant to say was Star Wars I, II, and III (not IV, V and VI, though Return has always been a lesser ran in my book)
  
  Haha, I figured that's what you meant when I saw that comment the first time, but then I was just like "maybe it's just that this guy's got some bold-ass movie opinions. Respect"

Borderlands

I thought In Time had a really cool premise and could have been a great commentary on wealth disparity, but it didn’t do much with it.

League of extraordinary gentlemen.
If they would have just stick to the awesome plot of the graphic novel, instead of sitting the budget on hiring Sean Connery, who understood less about the role than he did with Gandalf it could've been great.

I loved Prometheus, I thought it was going deep canon on the Alien franchise, and even though it wasn't perfect I so very much dug it, Ridley Scott saw some bad reviews, pussied out, and put Alien:Covenant out there to undo all the stuff he began with Prometheus. Covenant was such a garbage forgettable movie, followed by Romulus which was garage/fan service waste of time. Oh for the timeline we could have had, had they built upon the canon/story of Prometheus.
- So true, Prometheus did a lot of the hard stuff right and then really made a mess of pretty basic things like dialogue and believable character motivations. Instead of tightening that stuff up in the sequel he just completely dumbed down the entire franchise again in Covenant to the extent that it is once again a complete waste of time (see Romulus).

Jupiter Ascending was doing some awesome stuff with worldbuilding that you can tell the studio just wimped out on. Can't get too sci fi, might scare away audiences.
- My theory is that Jupiter Ascending was supposed to be a trilogy, but the studio would only approve one movie with a wait-and-see approach to the second and third installments, and the Wachowskis just said "Fuck it," and crammed 6+ hours of plot and world building into a two-hour movie.
  
  I got that vibe too, and that vibe with a lot of movies now. Everything has to become a trilogy, nothing can just be good on it's own

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_live
A very funny movie with good actors and everything, except for one major disappointment: at the end of the movie, you understand that some humans collaborates with aliens, they get magical watches, free money, and the aliens even have some kind of interplanetary door to teleport yourself to zombie-land. But they don't go further in that explanation because the movie is already over.
They could have made a whole sequel with that new world, but instead we are left with a few pictures, and the ending credits of the movie. It felt like "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet. The End."
- How about instead we do close ups of the gun barrel over and over?

Every Michel Gondry film other than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I think Charlie Kaufman saved that one.
He has such fun premises but the execution is just dull and lifeless. Be Kind Rewind could have been fun and silly but just fell flat.

Matrix: Revolutions. I didn't even see the fourth one.
- I actually encourage a watch of the fourth film, but not as a Matrix movie.
  Lana Wachowski took her beloved franchise, executed it, pissed on its corpse, and left it unburied.
  The film explicitly states that Warner Bros threatened to make it without her, so she decided to produce it in a way that would guarantee fans ignored it, and the franchise would be definitively concluded.
  The entire movie is a "fuck you for making me do this" and I applaud it for that. It's such a shit film, but I need to give it credit for its stance.
- I honestly never minded the matrix revolutions. It was fine. The 4th Matrix movie completely sucks though.
- You should continue not seeing the fourth movie. I want my time back
- The fourth one fixes the plotholes of the third

A more recent one: The Gorge. Good premise and setting, but it becomes bland when the mystery is unraveled.
- This was one that popped into my pre coffee morning mind as well.
  Instead of exploring the mystery of the gorge and it's workings and using it to maybe explore the sticky situation characters find themselves in, americans and russians just do their favourite pastime and genocide the local populace for fun.

Daybreakers (2009)
Excellent premise: vampire post-epidemic society trying to deal with the scarcity of blood, ethical ramifications of keeping the remaining humans sedated for blood harvesting, technical challenges like adapting infrastructure and vehicles to be sun-proof, etc.
The only thing I clearly remember is the premise, cuz the plot, characters, dialogue, action, etc. was all dog trash
Actually, I do remember how badly it mangled the social commentary on the vampires who couldn't afford blood. Perfect setup for depicting the inhumanity of artificial scarcity and they botched it.
- Agreed. I like the film but it feels like two movies stuck together.
  One about the vampire society which is really interesting and novel. And another which is just a run of the mill “rebel faction finds the cure and restores humanity story” that you could find in any zombie film.
  I sorta get it though because I think it’s a problem a lot of comments in this thread deals with. An interesting world is not an interesting story. You have this cool vampire society, but then what’s the story? I sorta get why it always ends up being the hero’s journey just in a cool world, because otherwise the comments here are “super cool world but nothing happens”
  
  Yeah the only example I can think of that doesn't fit that mold is American Mary
  the cool premise in which isn't a world, but a hypothetically possible situation (desperately broke medical student turns to stripping, which leads to back alley surgery for gangsters, which leads to black market body modification surgery) and the letdown isn't the characters or plot, it's the hamfisted script and acting lol

Assassins Creed
For the uninitiated, this is based on a game series with the premise of people in the modern day using a simulation to relive the memories of their ancestors. And in every day, the modern day is the frame story that sucks and the real, cool story is the simulation.
So of course they made the crappy frame story like 90% of the movie and it sucked. Obviously it’s hard to capture the entire feel of a game on film, but what they could have done is had the entire movie in the past and actually focused on telling a good story, and then revealed it was a simulation right before the credits. Heck, they could have just stolen the ending from Assassins Creed 2 and then cut to modern day Callum with a setup for a sequel.
Instead we got an entirely forgettable film.

The 2024 horror movie 'Out if Darkness'. I was really disappointed with where they decided to take it in the end. So many cool possibilities, and I felt they went with the most boring option.
- That's like 90% of modern genre pictures, where the filmmakers have a terrific concept but then have no idea where to go with it. MADs was like that recently.

The Dark Tower (2017, dir Nikolaj Arcel)

65, a movie where humanoid aliens crash land on earth in the time of the dinosaurs and get out right before the asteroid hits. It's a generic survival/monster movie where dinosaurs are just obstacles in the way of the heroes escaping the planet. The movie should have shown the beautiful parts of the Dinosaur world and we should have been sad when they're wiped out at the end.

A recent example is Conclave, which had an ending that felt very rushed and not really consistent with the tone of the rest of the film. I left feeling quite disappointed despite the majority of the film being one of the best I have seen. Another film I saw recently with almost the opposite problem was The Prestige, which I feel shows far too much of its big twist hand throughout the film and has an extremely predictable ending as a result. I think the thematic idea of the twist is very clever but it almost underestimates the ability of the audience to follow along. Although, having said that, there are seemingly a lot of very stupid or distracted people out there who had no idea what was coming and think it's a masterpiece so maybe it was made for them and not me.
- I think that's intentional and setup nicely in the dialog.
  “You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special.”
  It's hammered home that the secret isn't interesting but what the magician goes through to maintain the secret is the interesting part. You are supposed to figure it out but reject the idea because nobody would go through that for a trick.
  It sounds like you were like the boy in the beginning who figured out the bird trick and wasn't buying the more fantastic explanations in favor of the truth that the magician is just willing to be that cruel.
  
  It's definitely intentionally setup in such a way that the thought enters, and then exits, the audience's mind at least once - as all great twists and reveals are. The best mysteries are always the ones that give you the solution, but do so in a way that make you second-guess your intuition and instead follow a bunch of red herrings and completely unrelated events down a different rabbit hole that ultimately lead to the wrong conclusion. My problem with The Prestige is that it repeatedly gives you the solution again and again throughout the entire film in an almost taunting/mocking fashion that insults the intelligence of anyone who figured it out, with the idea being that anyone who hasn't will be completely shocked at the end when they see the montage of how many times they were presented with the answer. It's so fixated with setting up the biggest "gottem" moment ever at the end that it doesn't even try to re-engage the viewer like myself with the mystery. Your comparison to the bird trick scene with the young boy is quite accurate in a sense, because Nolan is sort of like the magician just going "oh well, you figured it out...don't really care though because everyone else is dumb enough to believe me and think I'm a genius". That attitude is what holds it back from being a truly great film.

There was this alien invasion B-movie like 10 years or so ago that I don’t remember the title of. But it was your typical main character and a couple of friends trying to find a way out of the city. Very generic. Then in the last 10-15 mins of the movie, he gets abducted and it gets far more interesting. But it ends there as a cliffhanger. I would’ve loved to see a version where that happens in the middle of the movie instead and we see more.
- Skyline.
  
  That’s it! And I was off by 5 years lol.

Recent one for me is Love Hurts.
Had a few things going right for it. The early fight scene between Ke Huy Quan and Marshawn Lynch's characters was really fun and cool. You could see the bones of a really fun John Wick clone but with a bit of an 70's/80's kung fu twist to it. But then they completely ruin it with the love interest plot and the boring bad guy and boring later fights. Take that early part of the movie and expand on it, and drop the love interest crap, and it might have been pretty good.

The Eternals - Could have been amazing if they weren't trying to tell like six origin stories AND THEN a team-up story in the same film
Honorable mentions:
The Marvels - The first act was some of the best post-Endgame stuff in the MCU, the bickering between the three leads really reminded me of how the Avengers fought in the first Avengers film. It really was a shame that they just said "sorry" in a cornfield and released all the tension right at the end of the first act.
The Substance - Had the potential to be a timeless classic but it forgoed poignancy for 40 extra minutes of absurdist, overindulgent and redundant body horror
The New Mutants - They should have never hired the director of The Fault In Our Stars for a movie like that
LEGO: The Adventures Of Clutch Powers - Too much setup without payoff
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair - HORRIBLE pacing really hurts this movie even though the story, atmosphere and worldbuilding were incredible
- Eternals should have been an 8-10 episode series which each episode focusing on one or two characters
  
  This!

Battlefield Earth

Parallels (2015)was a pretty good movie, but was originally going to be a TV series. There was a lot of setup that was never paid off because of this, but it's still a pretty good Sci Fi movie, just ends on a cliff hanger. Wish they made the series.

Millennium, 1989.
Basically a terrible disaster movie with a time travel plot. But John Varley's short story and novelization were fantastic. They could have made a great movie, but...didn't.
- Wasn't this also adapted as a pretty decent show?
  
  No, the show with the same name had nothing to do with the book or movie.

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