21 Movies That Were Everywhere One Minute and Forgotten the Next

If Hollywood’s insistence on learning the wrong lessons tells us anything, it’s that it’s all but impossible to predict what will make a movie successful. If you look at recent box-office toppers, the answer might seem to be “money,” but there are plenty of shoestring-budget indies that triumph beyond everyone’s wildest dreams. There are also plenty of expensive spectaculars that flop, or worse, do perfectly fine numbers before vanishing down the memory hole.

“Try to think of relatively high-budget movies that came out in the last 15 years or so with big star cast members that were neither praised nor criticized enough to be really memorable (and) instead just had a lukewarm response from critics and audiences all around and were swept under the rug within months of release,” Redditor Emeraldsinger told r/Movies. “Just to provide an example of what I mean, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (if anyone even remembers that).”

They then asked, “What are ‘big’ movies that were quickly forgotten about?” and their fellow Redditors were more than happy to go down the memory hole with them.