YMMV / Wish Upon

• Cliché Storm: A double case. The film uses clichés from both high school romantic comedies and horror films and plays them completely straight without any hint of irony. In fact, the whole movie is just Final Destination meets The Monkey's Paw with a sprinkling of Mean Girls. That being said, this contributes to the film's unintentional entertainment value.
• Designated Hero: Clare is arguably the worst person in the story. Even after being aware the box might be killing the people around her, she decides to keep it and keep using it. According to Word of God, the idea is to make her unable to stop herself from making more wishes even after she knows its murderous nature. But the film doesn't portray her as tormented as it only makes her come across as petty. As her friends call out, she used the box's immense power for the most vapid reasons, like becoming popular, making her father cool and getting a boy to fall for her when she could have wished for things like world peace with it or even to just wish for something for her friends.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Meredith is well-liked, mostly because despite her roughness, she's the only one to rightfully call Clare a bitch for continuing to use a mystical item that kills people when wishes bare made. Most viewers could rest easy knowing that the last wish was able to resurrect Meredith from her death earlier in the film.
• Fanon: It has been commonly accepted among fans that this film takes place in the same universe as the Conjuring film series and its spin-offs due to the fact that the director also directed Annabelle.
• I Knew It!: Upon watching the trailers (which included many death scenes in the film), many people accurately predicted that Clare would die at the end of the film.
• Memetic Mutation: If you are familiar with YourMovieSucks.org, you may know this as the movie with "the Asian guy from 13 Reasons Why".
• Narm: The movie is riddled with this to the point that it has its own subpage.
• Nightmare Retardant:
  • Most deaths in the film, which isn't helped by how they're clearly tailored to get the film a PG-13 rating, as well as being largely caused by the victims' own stupidity. Particularly hilarious deaths include Uncle August really clumsily slipping in the tub and hitting his head on the edge of the tub and finally doing himself in by banging his head on the nozzle and Clare's body flying after getting hit by Darcie's car.
  • The film also includes loads of Jump Scares, all of which fall flat due to how unsubtly foreshadowed they are.
• Questionable Casting: An uncredited Jerry O'Connell as one of the previous owners of the music box.
• The Scrappy:
  • Clare. Despite being the main character, viewers found themselves unable to sympathize with her when she continued to use the box for herself even after knowing that its effects kill people after making a wish.
  • Tyler, Darcie's Ambiguously Gay friend/minion, whose primary character traits are being an extremely campy bully and impulsively taking photos of anything embarrassing he sees and uploading it on Instagram. The latter even extends to taking pictures of Darcie as she's rotting alive. Also, at the start of said scene, he is seen literally sleeping in the closet.
• So Bad, It's Good:
  • This appears to be the overall critical consensus for the film, as indicated on its Rotten Tomatoes page:
  Wish Upon is neither scary nor original, but its fundamental flaws as a horror movie may make it destination viewing for after-midnight camp genre enthusiasts.
  • Chris Stuckmann and Matthew Brando's review also mocks it as the best unintentional comedy of 2017.
  • RedLetterMedia followed suit in a lean-back video they did in 2023, considering it a masterpiece of something so entertaining on meta and technical levels due to the ineptitude of its makers.
• Special Effect Failure: In one scene where Clare gasps in shock at Paul cutting himself, said gasp is blatantly a Stock Sound Effect.
• Tainted by the Preview: The film's trailers state that it is directed by the director of Annabelle (another poorly-received horror movie), and said director also directed the critically panned Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. This led viewers to decide not to see the film, which wasn't helped by the trailers including many overdone horror clichés and giving away significant plot details.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Claire's wish to undo her mother's suicide also gives her a new life with two new sisters that didn't exist before and a living mother that still owned the wish box at some point. Unfortunately, by the time this happens, there are only 15 minutes of runtime left until the credits roll, so this never gets explored.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Any sympathy Clare could have gotten from the consequences of using the music box is lost when she continues to use it in spite of those consequences and hurts her friend June over it.

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