The hype that surrounded this movie back in 1999

The people, who were children when the first Star Wars movie came out, were now adults and expected a Star Wars movie meant for adults. What they got was a movie meant for kids.

I think it had a lot to do with impossible expectations that no matter what fans wanted in the Phantom Menace it was never going to be good enough in their eyes. I fall somewhere in the middle of what I thought of the movie. There were elements to it that I liked and other parts that I didn't. It's certainly a better movie to me now compared to the Disney movies.

I don't think the hype was the problem. Most of it, as I remember, was that the expectation of the audience had changed for movies in general. Star Wars has always been as much about the storytelling as the action.

I was still a child when the OT was released. I was in my 20s when this was released. I loved it. I was legitimately shocked when I talked to people that hated it.

The most common reason at the time was that it was "boring" and that "they just talk a lot." Well, the same can be said of the original movie. There's a lot of dialog and exposition and story telling and world building. The lightsaber action in A New Hope is very limited.

tl;dr
Audiences grew accustomed to non-stop action, chase scenes, and fight sequences in their movies between the OT and the PT. They had no tolerance for dialog and story telling. They hated exposition - "MIDICHLORIANS!"

I think it was the biggest hype i had ever seen for a movie, it already started back in 1997 when they remastered all three originals, i remember recording them on VHS when they aired on tv eventually. There was a considerable marketing campaign behind it as well that even had Pepsi having us kids at school collect stuff (the soda venting machine had Pepsi cans where sometimes a can with merchandise inside it could be found, i once found a star wars tshirt, you had to put it in water for a hour and it would expand to normal size, example of some of the cans: https://www.shopgoodwill.com/Item/85701078). At one moment you could also collect small movie frames hidden in Lays chips bags and i even won a drawing competition and the main prize was a great looking Star Wars folder where i could put all the movie frames. I actually saw the actual movie twice, once because my father wanted to see it but a friend of mine could not see it at that moment so i took him for his birthday the next week.

Rick McCallum's face during the test screening said it all really, the sheer look of abject horror, shock and embarrassment at what he had just witnessed foreshadowed what audiences would experience themselves. And that was only an initial cut just imagine how much worse this already objectively bad film was.