Every year there are plenty of movies that I go into with low expectations and I come out really enjoying myself. Not just because I had low expectations, but because it was a pretty good movie.

For the biggest surprise movie for the year, we give out the Gomer, based on Gomer Pyle, “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise”

Previous winners:

The Gomer for the Biggest Surprise

Previous Gomer Award Winners:  The Gift, Ferdinand, Edge of Tomorrow, We’re the Millers, The Campaign, Ouija: Origin of Evil, Bumblebee, Crawl, Greenland

Runners-Up: How about a spin off of a film from the very same year? It happened on Netflix with Army of Thieves, a prequel of the Dave Bautista vehicle, the zombie film Army of the Dead. Army of Thieves surpassed the original easily. Venom: Let There Be Carnage was better than the first film. Although as I reflect on it, I find my thoughts slanting toward the negative, it was a film that I liked when I first saw it and I did not think I would. How about a movie with Nic Cage searching for his kidnapped pig? Pig sounded ridiculous but was excellent. Two films I heard about from the Critically Acclaimed podcast included Werewolves Within and PG: Psycho Goreman, both wonderfully surprising. Bob Odenkirk starred in a surprising revenge film called Nobody. It was different than most revenge films. Then, who would have thought that Clifford the Big Red Dog would appear on this list? In fact, Clifford almost won this award.

The Gomer goes to: Free Guy

Who thought Free Guy might be a good movie, let alone one of the biggest successes of 2021? The film had been delayed and was coming out with little fanfare. A clever promo/trailer with Deadpool and Korg doing a trailer reaction helped get some word of mouth going, although honestly, the buzz was more about Deadpool with the MCU character than anything else. However, Free Guy came out and great word of mouth and became a gigantic success with Ryan Reynolds leading the film. Disney, which inherited this during the FOX acquisition, started working on a sequel.