Star Wars The Rise of Skywalker. The movie was already getting a bad rep pre-release, and in response to potentially sales-damaging claims that Palpatine was coming back, Disney had Ian McDiarmid explicitly claim he wasn't. A bad movie where there was nobody to point a finger to became a bad movie where there was someone to do it to. Then he passed away shortly after. I witnessed this mess all go down in theaters.
Ian McDiarmid didn't pass away. But yes, this movie might be the single worst cinematic disappointment I've ever witnessed in my life. I'll never watch it again.
there were a couple things that I hated about their overpromising on the front end; the uniform procedurally built worlds (there’s no real variety of terrain like Earth), the repetitive assets for structures (they’re all the same), planets don’t actually revolve around anything And you can’t fly between systems (they’re boxes, it’s not open. The only way from one system to the other is a loading screen hidden behind a warp animation).
They didn't just mess up, it was straight up false advertising. It was even found to be such in court in a few chunks of Europe iirc.
But no, it was very much intentionally deceptive, and that's why people were rightfully pissed off.
They HAVE put a ton of effort into making things right since release, which surprised me - my guess was they were gonna laugh all the way to the bank, dissolve their company and rebrand, and never push a single update for it. They seem to actually want to make the thing they promised, so credit where it's due, but the initial uproar was proportional to their crime.
I always assumed the reason they repeated that line and only implied it was for headaches with the animation is because they knew it wouldn't work and wanted to avoid being called out for false advertising. Honestly if I was ever told it worked I would be absolutely astounded.