Zack Snyder's amazing feat...
We bash Hack Snyder a lot on this page, but I have to give him credit for pulling off something that is EXTREMELY rare in Hollywood: he directed a PURE CRAP TRILOGY.
A PURE CRAP TRILOGY is the opposite of an equally rare Hollywood phenomenon: THE PERFECT TRILOGY.
In a PERFECT TRILOGY, all three films of a continuing saga are considered to be EXCELLENT movies in their own right and all three were critically acclaimed with rave reviews and extremely popular when they were released. Very, very few film trilogies can pull this off – even stuff that’s considered iconic (like Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather Trilogy) has at least ONE film that wasn’t the amazing classic that the other two films were. There’s probably less than half a dozen examples of PERFECT TRILOGIES. Examples include Sergio Leone’s The Man With No Name Trilogy (A Fistful of Dollars/For a Few Dollars More/The Good, The Bad and The Ugly), The Toy Story Trilogy, and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
A PURE CRAP TRILOGY, of course, is the opposite effect: ALL three films in the saga got theatrical releases, but opened to poor reviews, ended up being CERTIFIED ROTTEN on Rotten Tomatoes, and under-performed box office expectations and failed to live up to the hype. Again, less than half a dozen film trilogies probably meet these criteria. Usually they have at least ONE good movie in the trilogy (even if the overall trilogy is considered pretty lousy, for example: Meet the Parents got highly favorable reviews from critics and was a huge hit, even though the follow-up films Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers both got scathing reviews and under-performed). This is very rare because studios are unlikely to keep churning out big budget theatrical releases if the movies keep sucking and getting ridiculed.
Of course, Hack Snyder managed to pull off this feat, with his Henry Cavill “DCEU” trilogy: Man of Steel/Batman vs. Superman/Justice League ALL being CERTIFIED ROTTEN on Rotten Tomatoes, and being disappointments for Warner Bros. expectations.
This puts Hack Snyder’s trilogy in the same category as classics like Martin Lawrence’s Big Momma’s House Trilogy, the recent 3-film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (which abruptly changed casts every movie because they couldn’t keep their actors!) and the Troll trilogy (which is a Trilogy In Name Only, since all three films tell completely different stories, and Troll 2 and Troll 3 don’t even have trolls in them!)
Congrats Hack, you’ve earned it!