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Fan Disliked Explanation / Live-Action Films

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  • Alien:
    • Some fans of the series are not happy with the backstory laid out by Prometheus, or lack thereof. Specifically, the Proto-Xenomorph is born from a seemingly random series of events, and can't be the first Xenomorph because it's too late in the timeline and a carving of the Alien Queen was already seen earlier. Also, neither of the ships seen are set up to be the ship from the first movie, making what happens in the film just unconnected events in the same universe.
    • A lot of the explanations surrounding the Engineers/Space Jockeys got this reaction. There was a certain animosity to new information about them coming out at all, as the whole thing had so much mystery built up from Alien that nothing could really equal what people were imagining, so this trope was bound to occur in many respects. However, the explanation that the strange appearance of the Space Jockey wasn't actually its own body, but rather a spacesuit covering up an otherwise mostly human-looking body, was generally seen as a weird and unnecessary twist that made the alien entity seem far blander and more mundane, and even a bit silly-looking (there is a level of story justification for it, but it's so laden with Unscientific Science that it doesn't really help matters).
    • Alien: Covenant makes matters even worse with the reveal that the classic Xenomorph is, most likely, the creation of Michael Fassbender's David. While it's at least not an outright Voodoo Shark, the Anvilicious thematic implications of the idea, along with many fans disliking adding a Greater-Scope Villain to the franchise this late, have caused it to be an outright reviled element of the film by many.
  • In the Live-Action Adaptation of Attack on Titan, it is revealed that the setting is a post-apocalyptic future and the Titans were a failed government experiment. Needless to say, fans of the anime thought the twist was stupid not only because it was a clichéd explanation for how the Titans came to be, but the manga had yet to reveal the origin of the Titans at that time, and it was seen as an example of the movie being In Name Only.
  • This is one of the biggest reasons why the director's/final cut of Blade Runner is generally considered superior to the theatrical cut. The narration present in the latter removes all the ambiguity that makes the film a classic in the first place.
  • Some people feel this way about the scene of Roy Neary inside the mothership from the special edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. One of these people is Steven Spielberg himself, who had never wanted to do that scene in the first place but could only get the money to create a special edition if he included something that a marketing campaign could be hung on. Years later, Spielberg created a director's edition, which removed that scene but kept the other special edition scenes.
  • Part of the point of Cloverfield is that it doesn't explain anything about the monster's origins. The associated Alternate Reality Game and manga do, slightly, but not necessarily for the better.
  • Fantastic Beasts:
    • Nagini's backstory, as revealed in The Crimes of Grindelwald got this from all sides. Nagini didn't have any relevance to the plot apart from being Voldemort's pet and Horcrux, and though she did show some signs of being intelligent, fans just assumed this meant she was either an unidentified species of magical snake (similar to Crookshanks) or that being turned into a Soul Jar rubbed off on her in some way. Fantastic Beasts revealed that she was actually a woman who had some kind of condition that caused her to turn into a snake, and by the time of the series, her condition had progressed to Shapeshifter Mode Lock. On the one hand, you had fans who were baffled at the fact that this backstory needed to exist to begin with. On another hand, you had fans grousing about the Unfortunate Implications: it's revealed that Nagini's human form is an East Asian woman (with an Indian name), and now an Asian woman was being turned into a white guy's pet. On yet another hand, you had people who were confused as to how the '30s Nagini and the '90s Nagini could be the same person when the '30s Nagini showed no signs of being a cruel and inhuman monster, and were horrified at the fact that Neville's triumphant victory over her in the last book was now him killing what was essentially a disabled human being. And on the final hand, you had people being disgusted that the mention of "milking" Nagini in the fourth book, rather than referring to the real concept of harvesting snake venom, actually meant that Voldemort was suckling her—something Rowling even confirmed with unreleased concept art!
    • Another explanation that let fans less that impressed was The Reveal of the reason why Dumbledore and Grindelwald took so long of a time to fight each other. The two made a magical Blood Oath when they were young of never fighting each other and the phylactery with the spell is in posession of Grindelwald to many fans this downplayed what could have being a grayer conflict with both of them having conflicted feelings about facing each other in favour of simply being caused by the MacGuffin of turn. Rowling probably catched the hint as the phylactery is gone by the third movie and their reasons seems to be more complicated that just the Blood Oath.
  • In The Forgotten, it turns out the cause of people's children being retgoned is aliens. Not only is this a clichéd explanation to what was happening, but aliens aren't so much as mentioned until the last five minutes of the movie when The Reveal happens.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: It's briefly speculated by Bernie in the film that there are two Ghidorah skulls in existence although only one is seen, with the second skull being inside Mechagodzilla; and the official novelization more explicitly confirms this. The vast majority of active viewers quickly rejected this, because it doesn't fit in well with how in the previous film, there was only one severed Ghidorah head (Kevin's head) leftover after Ghidorah's death by thorough vaporization reduced all three of his attached heads to molten sludge and confetti. Wikizilla, Godzilla Wikia and this wiki themselves have quickly called out how the explanation only creates more questions than it answers. Instead, viewers have found it more plausible to think that the unseen second piece of Ghidorah's DNA inside Mechagodzilla which Bernie speculated about, rather than being a second Ghidorah skull which comes out of nowhere as Bernie believes it to be, is actually one of the many missing chunks of Kevin's skull that have been visibly broken off or cut away since the previous film.
  • Halloween:
    • A subset of fans feel that revealing Michael Myers to be Laurie's brother in Halloween II (1981), giving a reason why he seems to target her specifically, removed some of the mystique behind his character, rather than simply killing random people persistently For the Evulz being what he does. Screenwriter John Carpenter himself came to regret the twist and Halloween (2018) would follow solely from the original film.
    • A much larger portion of viewers agree that revealing Michael as the muscle for an evil mystic cult was a terrible direction to take the character in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (and the two preceding movies that set up this story arc), since it effectively resulted in Michael being merely a tool and a small component in a complex sacrificial curse far outside his control, heavily undermining his unstoppable power in prior films. This is arguably even worse in the producer's cut where Michael is stopped in his tracks by a couple of rune-engraved pebbles on the ground in the end.
    • The Rob Zombie remake, Halloween (2007), has some similar criticism given for telling way too much about Michael's backstory, giving him a Dark and Troubled Past with a horribly Dysfunctional Family and then being treated cruelly in a Bedlam House, making him more of a tragic, sympathetic character than just an unknowable, unrepentant monster, which was what made him intriguing to begin with.
  • Hard Candy: Hayley accuses Jeff of raping and murdering a young girl. The screenwriter confirmed that Jeff is actually innocent of this murder. A lot of people prefer to believe that Jeff is guilty or, as in the film, that it's ambiguous and left up to the audience's perspective whether Jeff is guilty or innocent.
  • One of the biggest complaints about Highlander II: The Quickening was that it established a mythology that the immortals are aliens from a planet known as Zeist, which only serves to raise more questions. The re-edits establish them as wizards from Earth's distant past. Either way, the film is no longer considered canon with the rest of the series.
  • The King's Man: Critics and audiences were rather underwhelmed by The Shepherd's - aka Captain Morton's - reason for wanting to destroy England: He's a Scotsman who hates what England did to his country, plus how English aristocrats stole his family mill, and he wants to pay them back. While that's not to say that a vengeful Scot isn't an interesting plot device, the manner in which the film addresses it is half-baked and somewhat brushed over, since we never see how exactly he assembled an international coalition of supervillains and bent them all to his unquestioned will. Some have stated that an Irish nationalist would be a more understandable villain, not least because Ireland did gain independence shortly following (and arguably as a result of) World War I.
  • In a rare example of the fan-disliked explanation happening early in a franchise, George A. Romero's Living Dead Series explains where the zombies are coming from early in the first film. However, the explanation of a "Radioactive Space Probe" didn't quite catch on, and later zombie media generally refuses to concretely explain the origins of the living dead. The universally reviled Night of the Living Dead: 30th Anniversary Edition (a re-release of the movie with added scenes by John Russo, the original's co-writer) instead implies the zombie plague is demonic in origin.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Pacific Rim: Uprising: Many viewers had issue with the reveal at the end that the Kaiju had actually been headed to Mt. Fuji from the very beginning to submerge themselves into the Earth's mantle and cause a catastrophic chain reaction of volcanic eruptions because it comes completely out of nowhere (if they had been trying to do this all along, how come nobody noticed until a Kaiju was literally at the foot of Mt. Fuji?) and contradicts everything we've seen so far (if the Kaiju had been trying to do this all along, how come so many Kaiju in the first film attacked city centres nowhere near Japan? Why did they waste time attacking cities at all?) to make it a borderline nonsensical plot hole to explain something no one had ever even asked.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean:
    • The Word of God statement that the Captain of the Flying Dutchman could be freed upon the end of his ten-year service as a captain if someone remained faithful to him is controversial. Some fans feel it adds a lot to Davy Jones and Calypso's characterization and gives Will and Elizabeth their happy ending in The Stinger. But a major side of the fanbase thinks that the explanation makes no sense, given that the movies portray the Dutchman as a job that someone has to do that is commonly referred to in-universe as an "all eternity job", and the movies refer to the ten-year service as the period in which the captain has to serve the Dutchman before being able to be on land for a day. Most importantly, the fact that such an essential piece of information was not in the actual movies and no supplementary material has ever mentioned it, led to most fans believing it was something made up to appease angry fans for the Bittersweet Ending rather than something that was part of their original intention. Unsurprisingly, once Dead Men Tell No Tales decided to bring back the Flying Dutchman storyline, it decided to completely ignore the "freed after ten years" rule and focus on Henry trying to find a way to free his father, though even this is contested.
    • The Jack Sparrow prequel series contained one character called "Arabella Smith", who got her fair share of Ship Tease with Bill Turner, leading to them dating by the end of the series. The novels heavily imply she's Will Turner's mom, which Legends of the Brethren Court seems to confirm by stating he's married to an unnamed woman who has gone with Jack on multiple adventures. Then, The Secret Files of the East India Trading Company revealed that she's still alive by the events of At World's End, while Will's mother was long gone by the time the movies started. Some fans of the books were understandably disappointed at the build-up going nowhere.
    • For a while, the timeline of the series was undefined, with the only confirmed date being On Stranger Tides happening in 1750 and that there was a time difference of 1 year between the first movie and the two following sequels, leading most fans to believe the Time Skip between the third and fourth movies was of a couple of years at best. Then, complementary material for the fifth movie put the events of the original trilogy back in 1728-1729, making a time difference of 21 years. Not only do the characters not look much older in On Stranger Tides while they do look much older in Dead Men Tell No Tales, but it also means that Jack was separated from his beloved Black Pearl for twice as long as the period of Barbossa's first mutiny, which some fans feel makes his efforts in the original movie a Shoot the Shaggy Dog story even more that it already was.
    • Dead Men Tell No Tales:
      • The movie starts by revealing the existence of the Trident of Poseidon, an artifact that controls all the sea curses in a franchise focused on sea curses and apparently can also break the Captain of the Flying Dutchman out of his service. Not only is it bizarre that an artifact with such major relevance in all of the storylines from the previous movies was never mentioned before, but it completely contradicts the nature of the Flying Dutchman, which is not a curse but a job that someone has to do.
      • The flashback sequence is a bit infamous among the fanbase for being loaded with Fan Disliked Explanations, given that so much of the backstory contradicts previous information Explanation, making some of Jack's legend status less impressive, Explanation, making Beckett's feats less impressive, Explanation or some bits just not making any sense. Explanation
  • Predator:
    • The Predator states that the alien hunters were not simply Hunting the Most Dangerous Game, but taking the DNA of the victims to do improving modifications on themselves. Even if one could take the Predators of that movie as outcasts not representative of the species like the ones seen in Predators, seeing such a contradictory rewrite of a central piece of lore did not sit well with the fans.
    • More of a Fan Disliked Substitute Explanation but still. Predator 2 iconically ended with the Predator leader acknowledging Harrigan's skill and courage and giving him an antiquated pistol acquired in the early 1700s with the name Raphael Adolini before departing. According to a comic in the expanded universe, Raphael Adolini was a Badass Normal pirate captain that dueled and earned the respect of a Predator and most fans were fine with that explanation. Then, Prey (2022) went with a completely different take where he was just a random French tracker that died in an undignified way, with the pistol only ending up being a literal Chekhov's Gun for the true protagonist of the movie. You can guess which explanation fans prefer.
  • A common criticism of Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins is that is meant to be an origin story for the Mystery Gang yet it has them facing real ghosts in their very first case, which completely defeats the point of them going the rest of their lifes proving that supernatural beings aren't real.
  • Spectre revealing that the titular organization was behind the actions of all the prior villains in the Daniel Craig era James Bond films and that its leader Franz Oberhauser, a.k.a. Ernst Stavro Blofeld was the adoptive brother of James, who was jealous of him, has upset a number of people for reasons such as the fact that everything bad that has happened to James stemmed from his brother's hatred of him. Many also disliked this because it actually made the new version of Blofeld a shallower character than the original, since his entire motivation is so petty.
  • Star Wars:
    • Many fans felt that including midi-chlorians as a "cause" of the Force was an unsatisfying answer to an unasked question.note  Part of the backlash stems from genuine confusion: The Phantom Menace states that everyone in the universe has midi-chlorians and that they communicate with the Force rather than generating it, with Force abilities only accessible to those with high levels. But even those who take Qui-Gon's statement on its own merits feel it undermines some of the themes of the original trilogy, primarily how such random people as a farm boy, notorious smuggler, and princess of a destroyed planet all became heroes no matter where they came from; the introduction of midi-chlorians instead puts more emphasis on powers that are granted by birth.
    • Word of God's explanation that the "Balance of the Force" was not the Balance Between Good and Evil but rather the destruction of evil also got a frosty reception in some circles. This is mainly because the Dark Side had been firmly established as a cosmic force in its own right and so seductive that Force users have to resist actively falling to it constantly. How killing off one particular group of Dark Side users out of many constitutes "destroying evil" is never explained.
    • The prequel trilogy tells the story of the Clone Wars, the Jedi's destruction, the Empire's creation, and the rise of both Darth Vader and Palpatine, all of which had been alluded to but never fully explained. Dissatisfaction with how some or all of those stories turned out accounts for much of the prequel hate.To sum them up
    • C-3PO's origin in The Phantom Menace of being built by a young Anakin is fairly unpopular, due to it being seen as unnecessary (C-3PO is depicted as part of a mass-produced product line, making his origin self-explanatory), raising questions (why would a young Anakin looking to build a robot to help his poor slave mother build C-3PO, who is slow, foppish, clumsy, and meant to be an interpreter for the wealthy?), and having almost no impact on either character's relationship with each other (Vader never so much as sees C-3PO in the original trilogy, and 3PO's memory gets wiped at the end of Revenge of the Sith). It was fairly obviously just an attempt to involve him in the film somehow, but it would have made much more sense to have him be Padmé's droid rather than Anakin's.note  Notably, Robot Chicken mocked this in one sketch, where Vader drops a bunch of increasingly silly revelations—claiming that he built C-3PO as a kid gets a Flat "What".
    • After The Force Awakens gave some implications that Rey might have connections to previous characters, The Last Jedi threw it all away saying her parents were nobodies who sold her for drinking money. Such an Anti-Climax did not go lightly with certain fans. The Rise of Skywalker tried to fix this by revealing that she's Palpatine's granddaughter. This led to as many if not more dissatisfied fans, even some who disliked the original, for being the contrived, clichéd twist that the original was praised for trying to subvert and raising more questions as to how it happened than it answered.
    • The Last Jedi reveals that after Luke Skywalker sensed how strong The Dark Side was in his nephew Ben Solo, he reflexively attempted to kill him, immediately stopping himself and regretting it, causing Ben to become Kylo Ren and all the ensuing tragedy, and causing Luke's cynical attitude and deciding to stay out of the conflict believing he'd fail again. Many fans, including Luke's actor Mark Hamill, were dissatisfied with this explanation as clashing with Luke's Ideal Hero portrayal. Even those less critical found it flimsy given Luke had gone through a similar experience almost killing Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which had far better justifications for Luke attempting such.
    • The Rise of Skywalker: Many fans weren't impressed by The Reveal that Palpatine was behind everything yet again (including Snoke) arguing that it feels like a rehash of previous films, wasn't properly foreshadowed, cheapens the Original Trilogy and causes some retroactive Fridge Logic and plot holes (one of the biggest being just how Palpatine survived in the first place and that some of Snoke's actions appear to contradict Palpatine's plans in this movie).
      • In the film, a recurring moment is that Finn wants to tell Rey something but is reluctant to do so. Most fans were confused by this, as the plot is never really resolved and even by the end of the movie, it's not clear what it was supposed to be. JJ Abrams claimed at a convention that it was meant to be that Finn is actually Force-sensitive, which is hinted at a few times in the film (and Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, has also stated she is open to the idea of Finn becoming a Jedi in the future). The problem is that while it makes some sense as a plot point, it doesn't make sense in the context of something Finn was having trouble saying. It would make sense if it were something like a love confession, where Rey's answer would be uncertain and a negative response potentially hurtful, but there's no reason to believe that her response to Finn being Force-sensitive would be anything other than "Oh, you too? That's cool." Finn's also never agonizing similarly over Rose and Poe, who would surely have as much right to know, or Leia, the only person with actual Force discipline. Most pointedly, he considers almost telling her right when they're about to die horribly and then decides to hold off on doing so when they're safe—why on Earth would that be the time to tell her? Why not, you know, during Rey's actual Force training?
    • Solo: A Star Wars Story:
      • The explanation for Han's surname is often mocked, mostly for being seen as unnecessary (Han's name is far from the most unusual one in the franchise) and the scene itself being rather goofy (for some reason, the Imperial recruiting office has never heard of people with Only One Name, and is willing to accept a name that was invented on the spot by a suspicious individual). It also becomes retroactively rather messy in regards to the sequels, where his son is given the name Ben Solo rather than Ben Organa—as in, the name of a former royal family taking a backseat to the name made up by an Imperial desk jockey. Ironically, Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote the film, saw it as the idea that convinced him the film should be made.
      • The Kessel Run. One of the more famous trivia notes in the original trilogy is how Han seems to use "twelve parsecs" as a unit of time rather than distance, but it's also often given a pretty good explanation alongside it for why he's doing so, which is specifically cited in the original script: that is to say, Han is making up a bullshit number to impress a pair of people he thinks are backward hicks, and the fact that he's making said boast is meant to show he's a braggart who's not quite as impressive as he thinks (indeed, you can see Obi-Wan react essentially with a "really?"). Solo brought about the idea that Han actually did make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs, by taking a number of very risky shortcuts through an area of black holes to cut down on a longer route. For the most part, people who weren't familiar with that bit of trivia didn't get why it was necessary, while people who were familiar with it saw it as detracting from Han's character by making his wild braggadocio actually justified rather than comical.
  • Terminator:
    • The novelization of the second film, as well as Cameron's development notes, indicate that the T-1000 bypassed the "nothing dead can time travel" rule by being placed in a "flesh sac" that allowed it to fool the time machine. This explanation was disliked for opening a number of plot holes in the premise, and simply sounding silly. All subsequent entries into the series simply went with the explanation fans had assumed all along: that Mimetic Polyalloy is very good at mimicking flesh.
    • There have been numerous explanations for why Arnold Schwarzenegger's model of Terminator exists and is so popular. A deleted scene in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines indicated that it was modeled on a US Army soldier named William Candy, but not only is the scene it's revealed outrageously over-the-top, but the fact that the US government was planning on creating flesh-covered Terminators also makes no sense and undoes the premise that they were Skynet's creation to begin with.
    • The third film introduced the idea that mechanical Terminators are fueled by nuclear power cells, which have the ability to cause an atomic explosion if ruptured or overloaded. This was met with derision because it raised questions about why the I Cannot Self-Terminate rule exists; if a Terminator's target is trapped or incapacitated (such as Sarah at the end of the first film), that'd be a quick way to get rid of them. It was Hand Waved in that film by that Terminator being a T-850 (a slightly more advanced model), but Terminator Salvation and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles made it standard for every mechanical model.
    • Terminator Salvation introduced the idea that John Connor had to work his way up the ladder in the Resistance, as well as deal with a number of Arbitrary Skeptics in the chain of command. Many fans felt that this demystified Kyle Reese's explanation in the first film (whereas humans had no idea how to fight back until Connor showed up); there was no question that Kyle was an Unreliable Expositor, but his version of events carried the right mix of horror and faint hope.
    • Terminator: Dark Fate explained the premise of the first two films by revealing that Skynet sent far more than simply one or two Terminators back in time, all targeting John Connor. This caused a lot of fan backlash for several reasons. First, it makes the Resistance look incompetent for only noticing two Terminators were missing. Second, the first Terminator film took place in a Stable Time Loop where the first T-800 definitely existed, but it couldn't have sent the T-1000 or any subsequent Terminators because they never existed. Third, the time periods that Skynet sent them to makes no sense except the first; targeting Sarah Connor a year before John was born makes sense, but sending another model ten years after that gives too much time for the heroes to prepare. The ones sent after that make even less sense, because this would have been post-Judgment Day, where lone T-800 Terminators, even if more advanced than the ones on the field, would have been little else than Elite Mooks. Sending all the Terminators to 1984, 1995 or even other periods very close in proximity would have made more sense.
  • Tremors: At least a good number of fans have voiced their dislike of Aftershocks explaining that the Graboids are Precambriannote  lifeforms, believing that having no real explanation for their appearance would be scarier and that it would be impossible for them to be Precambrian lifeforms since the Precambrian era was made up of mostly single cell organisms. Some even argue Earl's comment about them being from outer space was a more plausible answer by comparison. (Later material stated the Precambrian dating was an in-universe error on the part of the character who did it, and that the Graboids are still prehistoric but originated in the Devonian era instead.)
  • Us, where it's revealed that The Tethered are the result of an abandoned US Government cloning program. This explanation raises a lot of questions, most of which aren't answered in the movie. It doesn't help that, earlier in the film, a Red Herring explanation that the Tethered are a supernatural punishment for humanity's sins is repeatedly foreshadowed but ultimately proves to be false. As a result, fans have had a worse reaction to it than the reveal in Get Out (2017) (which was crazy as well, but more clear-cut within the story).

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