To answer such a question we have to first rid it of equivocations. What do we mean by "bad"? Is that a pejorative or a compliment? Assuming it's a pejorative, what or who claimed the movie was bad? A critic? Box office gross? Awards season? A niche audience? Let's assume it's the box office. That means the movie did not connect with audiences, or it was poorly marketed. But let's generally say that it was marketed well, but audiences refused to give it word of mouth promotion—yes, it was a bad movie. So, why was is DOA?
Let’s look at 7 reasons, any one of which can minimize a movie’s success or ‘add’ to its failure, but only one of these will kill it directly
—(A) directing, (B) casting, (C) acting, (D) screen writing, (E) marketing, (F) distributing or (G) a poorly executed or false moral premise. (Moral Premise'ing.)
DISCLAIMER. Fully answering this question would require several big books or big film libraries...all of which have been written and rewritten. So, just the highlights, madam.
A. POOR DIRECTING - This includes in order of importance: cast selection, interpretation of theme, character inter-dynamics, intra-and inter-scene rhythm…and 14 or 18 other things. The direction is bad if there is little cohesiveness and purposeful intent in the various artistic elements. Ask yourself: Q1: Does every artistic discipline support and compliment the others, or do they battle for thematic attention upstaging each other? Q2: When two characters interact do you see actors reading lines or two real people physically and emotionally interlocked? Q3: Is the blocking so staid that the actors's feet are nailed to the floor with 10 penny nails, or is the blocking clever enough to let the actors move naturally and yet the camera easily finds them without calling attention to itself? Q4: Are you taken out of the story because the actions are awkwardly motivated (Why did she do that?), or are you caught up in the story and unconscious of how the many artistic decisions compliment each other? If you identify with the characters as real people and are not distracted by the ancillary elements, it’s good directing. The more inconsistencies that cause cognitive dissonance, the poorer the direction. Although direction effects EVERYTHING, if everything else works, poor direction alone will not kill a movie.
B. POOR CASTING - Good casting goes a long way to convince an audience that the characters are real people with real physical and emotional relationships. Good casting is noticed in the dynamics between cast members. The casting is good if you’re convinced the characters truly and deeply love or hate each other. Some of this is direction and some story. But good actors, well cast, will fall into deep, emotional relationships in front of the camera without much help from the director or the story. Why? Because a good cast figures such things out. Their emotions and words are truly the characters and not something they are pretending to be. This is why one of those rules of directing claims that 80% of the director’s job is casting.
C. POOR ACTING - Where “casting” is the inter-dynamics of the actors' reacting to other actors, "acting" is the intra-dynamics of the character interacting with the man layers of their character’s reality. The acting is good if you are convinced that actor is that character, and you cease to see the actor, and only see the multifaceted character. This is effected, of course, by direction, script, setting and casting), but the good actor will draw the audience into their inner-struggle regardless of all the rest. I’ve seen many movies where I anxiously await the next scene with such a character. While the rest of the elements are not convincing, THIS one actor is, and I’m swept away. To effect this, a good actor and a good director will work weeks or days before the shoot and ACTION the script. See ACTIONS: The Actor's Thesaurus.
D. POOR SCREEN WRITING - The most important aspect of the screenplay is its moral premise, but I’ll discuss a bit later. Otherwise, a poor screenplay can be made better on the set by the director and the actors. A good director will have “actioned” the screenplay (as just mentioned above) with the actors long before the film is shot. By doing so, a bad screenplay can be made playable and even good. A poor screenplay is never the principal reason a movie is bad. Why? Because a good director and good actors will FIX the screenplay long before it’s shot. So, if the dialogue is stilted and unrealistic, you might say the screenplay was bad. But I’d lay the fault at the director’s and actor’s lap. The screenplay is only a guide. Unlike a famous playwright’s playbook, the screenplay is not sacred. Change it in pre-production, change it on the set, change it in the edit. Never blame a screenplay, even if it was terrible to begin with.
E. POOR MARKETING - There are many great movies that were terribly marketed and consequently were box office failures. Ed Solomon’s LEVITY is a good example—all star cast, great script, everything is great about this movie that no one found out about because the studio did not understand the theme, the hook, or how audiences would love it. A good indication that the marketing is bad is when the movie has A-list actors but has a weak opening weekend. If the movie is actually good, while there may be poor or little marketing, the movie will gain screens and notice every week it stays in theaters, and eventually it can become a hit. Poor marketing mismatches the hype with the actual story. If the hype is over blown or under whelming compared to the film, then blame the marketing. Marketing also involves exposure to distribution, which is next.
F. POOR DISTRIBUTION - If a distributor doesn’t believe in a good film, it will do terrible in its theatrical release, but it could be wonderful on TV and on VOD or DVD. (IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE is an example.) It’s the whole idea of grocery shelf-space. A good product may consistently be shelved on the bottom shelf out of the consumer’s sight-line. Although the marketing and everything else may be good, sales may be bad because the consumer can’t find it. Ex: a national release film into all of 23 screens. Failure to get even a staged or platform theatrical release of a good film can kill it alone...but not forever.
G. POOR MORAL PREMISE - Now this is the most important, if for no other reason that I wrote the book: The Moral Premise: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success, I host the Moral Premise on-line workshop at Storycraft Training, and there's a blog with hundreds of essays and illustrative posts.
The Moral Premise is a statement of opposing values and themes that drives the story's physical action. Characters' values inform their decisions, which precipitate actions. What happens next is out of the characters' control—that is, the actions result in a physical consequence determined by the nature of the universe or the nature of the personalities present in the other characters. In other words, actions do not occur without a character’s mind making a decision that results in an action, that result in nature taking its course.
If you come out of a movie and you have no idea what it was about, or you can’t follow the character’s value-based motivation, or if things happen to the characters that don’t jive with natural law.then the problem is a poor execution of a true and universal moral premise. Other symptoms of bad moral premises are too many themes that do not coalesce.
The moral premise, if wrongly constructed or poorly executed in a movie will kill a movie, even if every other element is “A” List. I know this because I’ve worked on A-list (everything) movies where they had the moral premise wrong... and we correctly predicted the film’s failure. Here’s the deal: The Moral Premise is a single statement of a story’s value-based thematic opposition and the resulting, natural law, physical consequences of the characters moral decisions. That means, nothing reasonable or logical happens in the story unless it's built around a true moral premise.
I’m not going to explain it all here...although I guess I'm trying. That’s what the websites, the book, and the on-line training above are for. Ignore them at your peril.
The Moral Premise Statement effects E V E RY T H I N G is a story (every visual, every audio element, the casting, the art direction, the editing and the marketing.) If you get it right, even with mediocre everything else, the audience will likely connect with the story. If you get it wrong, even with a $120,000,000 budget, A-list actors and A-list director, etc and a $100,000,000 marketing budget the movie will fail.
Here’s the generic form of the moral premise statement that should effect every creative decision in a story:
[some moral vice] leads to [some physical detriment]; but
[some moral virtue] leads to [some physical betterment.]
Ex: Greed leads to isolation; but generosity leads to community.
Of course, there's some structure that's needed to make such a statement work well. (See: http://moralpremise.blogspot.com/search/label/13%20Major%20Beats )
In Brief:
- The Moral Premise statement defines the arch for the movie’s emotional, moral, and physical spines.
- The opposing values (the virtue and the vice) need to be universal and truly opposites.
- The opposing physical consequences must be true to Natural Law.
- A character has control over the values they embrace, the decisions they make and the actions they take.
- A character has NO control over Natural Law and the consequences of their actions.
- Audiences subliminally understand both physical and psychological Natural Law.
- You can’t force something that is not true to nature and keep your audience.
- EVERY character struggles with the same universal moral premise, but in a different way. That is, there are various ways you can be greedy or generous.
If a movie delivers an A-List party of actors, directors, marketing, special effects, etc but does poorly at the box office, I will guarantee the problem was a false moral premise or one that was partially true but inconsistently applied. See also the three posts at this link: BOX OFFICE FAILURES THE REASONS WHY.
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