Which movie do you feel has the most wasted potential?

Star Wars VII, VIII and IX

It still absolutely baffles me that they bought the franchise for so much money, yet couldn't even come up with a coherent story for the trilogy. Absolute tragedy.
- Imagine a timeline where Lucas didn't chicken out with Darth Jar Jar.

Downsizing: It was a very interesting premise (people choose to shrink themselves in order to continue being able to afford living) but it is squandered on a pretty bland plot that wastes the premise to tell a mundane story.

I was so salty after watching that movie. All the trailers billed it as a comedy. Maybe the first 10 minutes had me laughing. Bored to tears after that.

I thought In Time had a really cool premise and could have been a great commentary on wealth disparity, but it didn’t do much with it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_live

A very funny movie with good actors and everything, except for one major disappointment: at the end of the movie, you understand that some humans collaborates with aliens, they get magical watches, free money, and the aliens even have some kind of interplanetary door to teleport yourself to zombie-land. But they don't go further in that explanation because the movie is already over.

They could have made a whole sequel with that new world, but instead we are left with a few pictures, and the ending credits of the movie. It felt like "Poochie died on the way back to his home planet. The End."

How about instead we do close ups of the gun barrel over and over?

Jupiter Ascending was doing some awesome stuff with worldbuilding that you can tell the studio just wimped out on. Can't get too sci fi, might scare away audiences.

My theory is that Jupiter Ascending was supposed to be a trilogy, but the studio would only approve one movie with a wait-and-see approach to the second and third installments, and the Wachowskis just said "Fuck it," and crammed 6+ hours of plot and world building into a two-hour movie.
- I got that vibe too, and that vibe with a lot of movies now. Everything has to become a trilogy, nothing can just be good on it's own

Matrix: Revolutions. I didn't even see the fourth one.

You should continue not seeing the fourth movie. I want my time back
I actually encourage a watch of the fourth film, but not as a Matrix movie.
Lana Wachowski took her beloved franchise, executed it, pissed on its corpse, and left it unburied.
The film explicitly states that Warner Bros threatened to make it without her, so she decided to produce it in a way that would guarantee fans ignored it, and the franchise would be definitively concluded.
The entire movie is a "fuck you for making me do this" and I applaud it for that. It's such a shit film, but I need to give it credit for its stance.

This was one that popped into my pre coffee morning mind as well.
Instead of exploring the mystery of the gorge and it's workings and using it to maybe explore the sticky situation characters find themselves in, americans and russians just do their favourite pastime and genocide the local populace for fun.

Assassins Creed

For the uninitiated, this is based on a game series with the premise of people in the modern day using a simulation to relive the memories of their ancestors. And in every day, the modern day is the frame story that sucks and the real, cool story is the simulation.

So of course they made the crappy frame story like 90% of the movie and it sucked. Obviously it’s hard to capture the entire feel of a game on film, but what they could have done is had the entire movie in the past and actually focused on telling a good story, and then revealed it was a simulation right before the credits. Heck, they could have just stolen the ending from Assassins Creed 2 and then cut to modern day Callum with a setup for a sequel.

Instead we got an entirely forgettable film.

65, a movie where humanoid aliens crash land on earth in the time of the dinosaurs and get out right before the asteroid hits. It's a generic survival/monster movie where dinosaurs are just obstacles in the way of the heroes escaping the planet. The movie should have shown the beautiful parts of the Dinosaur world and we should have been sad when they're wiped out at the end.

The Dark Tower (2017, dir Nikolaj Arcel)

Skyline.

That's like 90% of modern genre pictures, where the filmmakers have a terrific concept but then have no idea where to go with it. MADs was like that recently.

I think that's intentional and setup nicely in the dialog.
“You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special.”
It's hammered home that the secret isn't interesting but what the magician goes through to maintain the secret is the interesting part. You are supposed to figure it out but reject the idea because nobody would go through that for a trick.
It sounds like you were like the boy in the beginning who figured out the bird trick and wasn't buying the more fantastic explanations in favor of the truth that the magician is just willing to be that cruel.

Recent one for me is Love Hurts.

Had a few things going right for it. The early fight scene between Ke Huy Quan and Marshawn Lynch's characters was really fun and cool. You could see the bones of a really fun John Wick clone but with a bit of an 70's/80's kung fu twist to it. But then they completely ruin it with the love interest plot and the boring bad guy and boring later fights. Take that early part of the movie and expand on it, and drop the love interest crap, and it might have been pretty good.

Every Michel Gondry film other than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I think Charlie Kaufman saved that one.

He has such fun premises but the execution is just dull and lifeless. Be Kind Rewind could have been fun and silly but just fell flat.

Parallels (2015)was a pretty good movie, but was originally going to be a TV series. There was a lot of setup that was never paid off because of this, but it's still a pretty good Sci Fi movie, just ends on a cliff hanger. Wish they made the series.

Borderlands

Any movie "based on the novel...". Almost always the novel is butchered.

Millennium, 1989.

Basically a terrible disaster movie with a time travel plot. But John Varley's short story and novelization were fantastic. They could have made a great movie, but...didn't.

Wasn't this also adapted as a pretty decent show?
- No, the show with the same name had nothing to do with the book or movie.

Battlefield Earth