Yeah, Daybreakers is on my guilty pleasure list too. Probably seen it half a dozen times or so. Chronicles of Riddick too -- probably see that a dozen times. It has one of my favorite movie lines, "I hate not being the bad guys!"

A few of those 'flopbuster' titles weren't all that bad and in the case of Equilibrium can your movie really flop when it never gets a real release? A few of the movies it would be interesting to see what went wrong like Priest and Gamer as the former had decent source material and the latter just went off the rails in a bad way. Death Race and Doomsday are definitely guilty pleasure titles for me as they're not really good, but fun to watch.

Chronicles of Riddick is 100% what you get when a studio/money people start messing with the movie. They didn't want it to be rated R because it would "limit the audience". Their focus groups also came to the conclusion they had to remove all of the Furya flashbacks because they were "confusing" despite that giving context to his motivation. I'm sure there was more, but that's all I remember from when I dived in to finding out what happened because the movie didn't seem right when I first saw it.

I really enjoyed Paycheck. It wasn't bad at all in my opinion.

Bring back the 2000s-era sci-fi flopbuster - Polygon.

I'm all for it. Most of the movies on that list are quality "turn your brain off and just have fun" popcorn flicks.

Really liked daybreakers and dredd.

It's really too bad we didn't get another dredd.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Mar 18, 2025, 12:02:
Adding to what TFP said, Priest was great, as was Dredd, Equilibrium, The Chronicles of Riddick, and even Death Race. The latter jettisons the goofy camp of the original and makes it an awesome, loud, bombastic blend of cars and guns. What's not to love?

However, missing from the list is Pandorum which is criminally underrated and underwatched, Event Horizon (though technically a 1997 release, I'd argue that it was the jumping off point for the 2000s flopbuster sci-fi era), Cargo, Timeline and Mission to Mars. There are probably a dozen more I could list that were expected to be blockbusters but ended up as flopbusters but were still enjoyable films nonetheless.

Oh yeah, Pandorum was a surprising movie when I first saw it. Went into it not knowing what to expect. Need to put that on my rewatch list.

I'm almost certain that answer is obvious, and I'm still grinding my beans too finely.

Paper filters with Chemex are suppose to be thicker than 'traditional' drip filters. That extra thickness allows for a more coarse grind without a dramatic swing in flow rate (therefore less impact to extraction).
So I think your hunch is right about grinding too finely.

Adding to what TFP said, Priest was great, as was Dredd, Equilibrium, The Chronicles of Riddick, and even Death Race. The latter jettisons the goofy camp of the original and makes it an awesome, loud, bombastic blend of cars and guns. What's not to love?

However, missing from the list is Pandorum which is criminally underrated and underwatched, Event Horizon (though technically a 1997 release, I'd argue that it was the jumping off point for the 2000s flopbuster sci-fi era), Cargo, Timeline and Mission to Mars. There are probably a dozen more I could list that were expected to be blockbusters but ended up as flopbusters but were still enjoyable films nonetheless.

I was stoked to see Daybreakers on that list - it's one of my guilty pleasures. It was a VERY different idea for a vampire movie. The plot: It's 10 years after a plague that made 95% of all humans on the planet into vampires. Life, and corporate America goes on. Starbucks sells coffee with blood in it instead of cream. People work in office buildings with the windows blacked out and take tunnels and subways. People drive to work in cars with blacked out windows using a VR driving system, The few remaining real humans are owned by pharmaceutical companies who keep them alive in comas, while harvesting their blood.

But all is not well. The supply of blood is inadequate and one pharmaceutical company (whose CEO is Sam Neill) is trying to develop an artificial blood to make up for the demand (and make massive profits of course). One of the hematologists working on the artificial blood project (Ethan Hawke), a vampire who feels guilty about the plight of the humans, accidently crosses paths with some humans living in the wild, being hunted by the army and led by William Defoe. In the process he discovers clues to a possible cure for the vampire virus but, of course, the powerful pharmaceutical company, and vampire governments, are not interested in a cure, but in maintaining the status quo. In fact, since the artificial blood project may never go anywhere, why not use the cure to turn some vampires into humans to feed the rest of the vampires?

It's a fun movie with a very original take on vampires.

This comment was edited on Mar 18, 2025, 13:18.