Dracula Untold

Vlad Tepes is a great hero, but when he learns the Sultan is preparing for battle and needs to form an army of 1,000 boys, he vows to find a way to protect his family. Vlad turns to dark forces in order to get the power to destroy his enemies and agrees to go from hero to monster as he's turned into the mythological vampire, Dracula.

Critics largely dismissed this origin-story reimagining as a superhero film in vampire clothing, arguing that making Dracula a noble, self-sacrificing hero drains the character of his menace and leaves little dramatic tension in its action sequences. A small handful of reviewers found it passable genre entertainment, and audiences rewarded it more warmly than critics did — a gap that has only widened over time as the film developed a retrospective defense as an underrated humanizing take on the legend.