Welcome to the 2011 CraveOnline Hype Awards! We have been gone for a few years but now we are back! With so many stories competing for your attention every day, we decided to look at the stories most and least deserving of you attention. Here you’ll find our picks for the year’s most over and under-hyped stories in our Film, TV, Music, Comics, Gaming and Sports channels.
Film Channel Editor - William Bibbiani
MOST HYPED MOVIE - Sucker Punch
It was a narrow call this year, since a lot highly anticipated films let us down over the course of 2011. Green Lantern broke the winning streak of Hollywood’s superhero blockbusters with its clunky plotting, and Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol was a big let down compared to Brad Bird’s animation work, at least. But Sucker Punch is in a league of its own. The film promised us the unfettered big budget id of Zack Snyder, the pseudo-wunderkind who brought us 300 and The Watchmen, but it was so abysmally conceived and afraid of its own sexual themes that the experience felt like watching a creepy, hyperactive 10-year-old play with his action figures for two hours. The only thing we got out of Sucker Punch was a disturbing premonition that Snyder’s upcoming Man of Steel reboot is going to suck.
LEAST HYPED MOVIE - (Tie) – Drive Angry and The Ward
It should have been Amber Heard’s year. She had starring roles in Drive Angry, the enormously entertaining whackjob of a movie starring Nicolas Cage as an escaped prisoner from Hell, and The Ward, John Carpenter’s impressively spooky return to feature filmmaking which featured Heard as heroic inmate at a haunted asylum. But Drive Angry fizzled at the box office – making studios question the value of 3D – and The Ward barely got released at all, with a simultaneous Video on Demand debut implying that it wasn’t worth your time at the theater. That neither film found an audience is a damned shame. Drive Angry is one of the most purely entertaining films of the year and The Ward is the best old-fashioned ghost story in I can’t remember how long.
