Totally Pointless Movie Prequels

Ridley Scott's original Alien is one of the greatest movies of the 20th century, blending elements from horror, science fiction, and thrillers into one amazing package. Prometheus, however, is a ridiculous, poorly written mess from start to finish, serving as an unnecessary foundation for the rest of the Alien franchise. Prometheus looks great, and Michael Fassbender is always a blast, but this movie has no reason to exist.

On that same note, there are a whopping 14 books set in Oz, the fairytale land created by Frank L. Baum. Every single one of them takes place after the original book—and, consequently, the 1939 Judy Garland classic based on it. Still, someone thought it was a good idea to fill us in on the backstory of the Wizard of Oz, probably the least interesting character in the entire franchise. We already know he's a BS artist by the end of the first movie! Why would we want to watch a BS artist figure out how to manipulate everyone else into believing he's a friggin' wizard?

There are folks who like the Hobbit trilogy, and that's fine—they're not the worst movies ever made by a long shot. But they do stretch a short book into three ridiculously long movies. What's much, much worse, though, is that they don't quite adapt JRR Tolkien's Hobbit novel as much as they simply set the scene for the already-made Lord of the Rings Trilogy. And those movies didn't need setting up. It's a shame Peter Jackson had to go to the trouble of making three unnecessary movies when one would've sufficed.

On the face of it, this is a no-brainer. Wolverine is arguably one of the most popular comic book characters ever created, and his portrayal by Hugh Jackman only cemented that status when he hit movie theaters in the first X-Men movie in 2000. But the big problem is that part of Wolverine's popularity comes from his mystery—if we know too much about who he is and where he came from, a big part of what makes him cool falls away. Making matters worse, the official comic book origin for Wolverine—2001 and 2002's appropriately titled Origin—is godawful. The movie relied on this piece of trash for part of its plot, and then managed to mangle plenty of other characters and the entire X-Men franchise's continuity along the way. This movie sucks.

Obviously if you click on something about pointless prequels, you know that George Lucas's ridiculously bad Star Wars prequels have to make the list. It's become pretty hip to hate on these movies, so one might wonder whether or not they're really as bad as people say. Well: they are. They are so, so bad. They are long, and confusing, and the fact that about 85 percent of them were shot in front of green screens on sound stages is impossible to ignore. We learned that before Darth Vader became an evil, unstoppable, badass-space-wizard, he used to be a whiny creep who actually invented C3PO somehow. We learned that Boba Fett was a sad little kid who was actually a clone for some reason. We learned that one of the greatest threats to the galaxy was an old guy with a crooked lightsaber named Count Dooku. Let's just pretend these movies never happened.