Financially, I'd say this is right. The only thing that could've helped would have been positive word of mouth - and even then, that can only change so much.TheSecondComing wrote:Godzilla: Final Wars didn't cause the hibernation decade. Toho burnt out the public with the stunningly dull Tezuka Trilogy, it took good word of mouth for GMK to reach the level of success that it did, and pretty much any movie they would've put out for the 50th anniversary would not have done well because they had 4 boring Godzillas and 1 pretty good one in the 5 years prior.
I feel like the vast majority of Final Wars hate comes from those with preconceived expectations. I'm not that big a fan of the movie, and I'll admit it's pretty poorly written; but let's be real. From a purely critical point of view, it trumped most of the films preceeding it by a landslide - if only for being interesting. Say what you will about typical characters or far too fantastic plots, but essentially the same issues had been pursued far worse between GxMG and TSOS alone. Compared to those, at least FW was fully aware of it's mood, taking advantage of it at every turn.
In short - I fail to see why FW struck such a negative chord when the movies before it were hardly gold anyway, especially by comparison. I assume it must have to be thanks to preconceptions.