9 Movies That Should Have Been Delayed to ‘Fully Realize Their Vision’

By now you’ve changed your plans for July 17, 2015 and have scratched ‘Go see Man of Steel sequel’ from your agenda. If you hadn’t heard, Warner Bros. has pushed the release of the film back 10 months to ‘fully realize their vision’, which is code for ‘This movie is already a dumpsterfuck but we still want to add the Flash, a re-cast Green Lantern, two Hawkmans and The Greatest American Hero to the cast”.

This isn’t remotely the first time a studio has delayed the release of a high profile film, and it has occurred for many reasons. The official studio statement doesn’t always reflect reality, though. A recent example was the speculation over Paramount’s delay of G.I. Joe: Retaliation. The official stance was a bump back to convert the movie to 3D, but many believed the studio was unhappy with the film, or that they paused to add more Channing Tatum. Either way, they used a similarly canned “fully realize our vision” line of bullcorn at the time.

Whatever the real reason, the Man of Steel sequel will get to marinate for almost an extra year. We’ll have to wait and see if the additional time was worth it, but in the meantime here are 9 other then-highly expected movies that probably should have been pushed back to “fully realize their vision” (ie. “make them less crappy”) as well.

The Matrix Sequels

The Wachowskis could have pumped the brakes on filming parts 2 and 3 back to back and focused on creating an ending that fit the beginning of the story.

Green Lantern

Too easy.

Elysium

Thinkin’ they should have taken an extra few months to determine why Sharlto Copley’s character inexplicably went from self-centered hired muscle to big aspirations take-over-the-galaxy guy halfway through the film.

Prometheus

Take a couple months to decide if this is in fact an Alien prequel or not. We’ll wait. Seriously.

X-Men: The Last Stand

The third installment in the X-Men movie franchise debuted to high expectations but many agreed with Rolling Stone’s sentiment:

Last stand? My ass. Billed as the climax of a trilogy, the third and weakest chapter in the X-Men series.

Superman Returns

We waited 19 years between Superman movies, and then the “reboot” felt like a crappy continuation of the Christopher Reeve-verse Superman. We would have gladly waited a few more months if they had just taken the time to add in an actual fight scene.

Spider-Man 3

Even the longest of delays probably couldn’t have fixed the fact that Topher Grace (the opposite of Eddie Brock) played Eddie Brock, but I would have happily waited 6 months for this scene to be deleted from the film, and by extension, my brain.

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace

Bagging on Episode I never gets old.

What other movies should have been delayed in hopes of a better overall film?