YMMV / Muppets Most Wanted

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did the Muppets genuinely not notice that Constantine wasn't Kermit, or did they know but decide to go along with it because Constantine let them do whatever they wanted?
• Awesome Music: Pretty much every song. "We're Doing A Sequel" and "I'm Number One" are probably the best.
  • Special note to "Interrogation Song" for making exposition entertaining. And catchy.
  • And "I'll Get You What You Want", a cheery disco number featuring Constantine.
• Broken Base: The film itself. The response on Muppet fan sites has been fairly positive, opinions all over the place where it is on the Muppet movie hierarchy. Outside the internet, you'll find people who have opinions ranging from it being very good to it being the Spider-Man 3 of Muppet movies.
• Contested Sequel: "Everybody knows that the sequel's never quite as good" indeed. This movie has been well-received overall, but not quite as much as The Muppets (2011). However, as noted below, some fans prefer Most Wanted due to Kermit and Piggy unambiguously being the main characters (with Walter in a major supporting role)^note although the rest of the Muppets don't have any larger roles than in The Muppets and, consequently, the much higher proportion of Muppet songs to human songs. Outside Muppet fan sites however, Muppets Most Wanted has been nearly panned and ignored completely.
• Critical Dissonance:
  • Many critics are deriding this film because the human characters are being overshadowed by their Muppet counterparts... in a Muppet movie. Muppet fans, naturally, adore it for exactly that reason, with some considering it an Even Better Sequel.
  • The movie was well received by critics, with a 80% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately, it arrived to middling box office success, expected to get around $20 million but eventually getting crushed by the Sleeper Hit $55 million opening of the widely derided Divergent (a record for a young adult book outside of the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games series). Most Wanted did eventually make over $55 million, but by then it failed so much at gaining traction that the only real hope for the movie was home-video sales. This wasn't enough to take down the franchise as a whole, but it seems to have been enough to stop Disney from making any more theatrical Muppet movies for a while.
• Evil Is Cool: Constantine, the first truly evil Muppet, is just as much of a delight to watch as the rest of them, for being both amusing and legitimately threatening.
• Genius Bonus: During Gonzo's indoor running of the bulls act, ''Toreador en Garde'' is playing.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In 2016, Steve Whitmire was fired by Disney and it was announced that Matt Vogel would be taking over as Kermit. Then you remember that the entire plot of this film revolves around Constantine (played by Vogel) getting rid of Kermit (Whitmire) and taking over as head of the Muppets. Could also count as Hilarious in Hindsight.
  • The characters repeatedly acknowledge that the Muppets don't have the strength to pull in large audiences (at least without Dominic resorting to bribery). The film's dismal box-office performance demonstrates how right they are.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: "We're Doing a Sequel" mentions that "the studio considers [The Muppets] a viable franchise". Even following this film's middling box office returns and the axing of the subsequent TV series after one season, Disney is still working hard at keeping the Muppets that way, starting with a 2016 live appearance at the Outside Lands Festival (albeit with just the Electric Mayhem) and a VERY well-received concert at the Hollywood Bowl a year later, a Muppet Babies reboot , then another concert at the O2 in London, followed by the announcement of the short-form series Muppets Now for Disney+, and multiple other one-off appearances in between, it looks like the American public may never see the last of the Muppets anytime soon!
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • This Very Wiki used to feature an image of an evil Kermit as the page image for Evil Twin for quite a long time. Now this film actually does feature an evil Kermit look-alike.
  • This sketch from Robot Chicken had the Muppet Babies playing The Little Mermaid and Miss Piggy wanted to be the titular character. The song "We're Doing A Sequel", in one of that song's many swipes at popular Hollywood movies, shows Miss Piggy dressed as Ariel.
  • "We're Doing a Sequel" also contains this line: "We're doing a sequel, the studio wants more / While they wait for Tom Hanks to make Toy Story 4!" Months after the film's release, the real Toy Story 4 was announced... and then later delayed until 2019.
  • One of the movie's major plotlines is that Constantine tricks the Muppets into believing that he's the real Kermit. Three and a half years after the movie was released, Matt Vogel, who played Constantine, would take over the role of Kermit after Steve Whitmire's termination. The fact that Vogel's interpretation of Kermit sounds not unlike Constantine's Stylistic Suck Kermit-voice is what really emphasizes the "hilarious" part.
• Ho Yay: Parodied big time with Sam and Jean, who both break down blubbering, and have a big hug when they realize they have to part ways.
• Magnificent Bastard: Constantine, "the World's Most Dangerous Frog", fights and escapes from the Siberian Gulag he held a lot of power and authority in while setting other prisoners free and then setting explosives off too. Teamed with his underling Dominic Badguy/The Lemur, Constantine arranges to have Kermit sent to the prison in his place while pretending to be him with the Muppets. To divert attention and suspicion, Constantine not only allows the others free reign in their performances on their world tour, but also woos Miss Piggy and uses the performances as a means of distracting while he and Dominic commit a few robberies or thefts (leaving evidence to implicate the Muppets too). Constantine also plans to blow Piggy up at their wedding as a means of facilitating his own escape and manages to outsmart Dominic’s attempt to get the better of him while then trying to take Piggy as a hostage to get away in a helicopter.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Not really related to the film, but stemming from a tie-in ad for Lipton released shortly before the film was: Kermit drinking tea.
  • The image of a cloaked Constantine staring at Kermit right before slapping the fake mole on him has been a source for what amounts to "good side, bad side" posts such as this. The umbrella name for such posts is "Evil Kermit".
  • The scene with Constantine practicing Kermit's voice and way of speaking, is generally considered now as Matt Vogel's audition before taking over Kermit.
  • "My name first, and then spacebar, spacebar, spacebar... your name." Even funnier, the track containing the audio of that scene was featured on the soundtrack album under the title "My Name..." followed by a large blank space (literally three spacebar strokes), then "...Your Name."
  • "We're doing a sequel."
• Moral Event Horizon: If Constantine didn't cross this by stealing Kermit's identity and having him sent to the gulag, he definitely crosses it when he proposes to Miss Piggy under his Kermit guise, then attempts to have her (and the rest of the Muppets) blown up with a time bomb disguised as a wedding ring after the ceremony. He totally deserved the beating he got from Piggy and Kermit slapping him in the face during the climax.
• Older Than They Think: There was an episode of The Muppet Show where a bunch of pigs performed a Hostile Show Takeover, one even impersonating Kermit like Constantine did, though his disguise wasn't very convincing, especially compared to Constantine nearly being identical to Kermit. Piggy went along with it since they offered her a song. Ironically, years later here, the more convincing Kermit impersonation who offers her everything she wants winds up making her feel like something is wrong.
• Questionable Casting: Many people had this reaction to learning Ricky Gervais was to be the human lead of the movie — more specifically, Moral Guardians in particular felt the openly atheistic Gervais had no place alongside the kid-friendly Muppets (perhaps overlooking his memorable moments on Sesame Street).
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Inverted, the film opens moving too fast, but as it goes on it reaches normal pacing.
• Spiritual Successor: To The Great Muppet Caper, both being much more tongue in cheek heist films, with a much heavier focus on comedy than their respective predecessors.
• Special Effect Failure: While it could be mistaken as CGI at first, Constantine's parkouring is actually really bad bluescreening. Which, considering how the first movie did such techniques quite successfully, is pretty bad. Averted for the rest of the movie, in which almost everything is done with the puppets and not computer animation^note one of the only computer animated sequences in the film is when Constantine breaks the mirror in his room just before the climax.
• Unexpected Character: Many people were surprised by the reappearance of the yellow creature from the "Hugga Wugga/You Are My Sunshine" sketch during the "I'll Get You What You Want" number.
• The Un-Twist: The ending reveals that Dominic was The Lemur the whole time! Which would be more shocking if he hadn't had it as his e-mail on his fake business cards, been referred to as #2 by Constantine all movie as an explicit dig on him being the #2 most wanted man, and openly left his Lemur calling card at the first crime scene. Naturally, this is lampshaded, and the bigger twist of the scene is actually Dominic's ridiculous costume, which had not been foreshadowed as much.
• Woolseyism: Dominic Badguy is named Dominic Fieslinger in the German Blu-ray version (Dominic Bösewicht in the German DVD version) in order to retain the joke.

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