I've got a doozie of a pop cultural challenge for you today - make the most hyped and most disapointing movie in cinematic history, the Phantom Menace, flop, by any means nessasary aside from ASB.
Have at it!
Have at it!
AHC: Phantom Menace Flops
- Thread starter thekingsguard
- Start date
Oh, boy. I think this requires an early POD. You need to crush the Star Wars brand ahead of time, otherwise the anticipation itself will guarantee dump trucks full of tickets. It had been 15 years since anybody except the geeks had seen anything Star Wars related, and people were more than willing to give it a chance to tap back into their childhood (or young adulthood) fun.
What we need is a long string of atrocities like the Holiday Special to kill the franchise. How can we get Lucas to keep pumping out crap like that after ROTJ? No Indiana Jones trilogy, perhaps, and a much earlier surrender to hackery and yes-men?
What we need is a long string of atrocities like the Holiday Special to kill the franchise. How can we get Lucas to keep pumping out crap like that after ROTJ? No Indiana Jones trilogy, perhaps, and a much earlier surrender to hackery and yes-men?
Social Media technology leaps ahead in advancement so that 1999 has the social media infrastructure 2009 had. Social media murders bad movies. It terrorizes Hollywood. It used to be a movie could string along an audience for a while, but social media has made it so that word of mouth leads ticket returns to drop right after the first few people see a movie.
Whether that could happen, I don't know, but I do believe you could create Facebook and Twitter back then. It's not high-tech, though a problem easily could be fewer people with computers and certainly no one with iPods where social media becomes ubiquitous beyond the home computer.
Whether that could happen, I don't know, but I do believe you could create Facebook and Twitter back then. It's not high-tech, though a problem easily could be fewer people with computers and certainly no one with iPods where social media becomes ubiquitous beyond the home computer.
No one would invest that much effort into the internet at that point. Just bandwidth-wise you'd need huge ass buildings just to run a Facebook type website, like they still do today.
Mark Hamill's accident is fatal. Star Wars is still a huge hit, but with the film's lead actor dead, Lucas decides against doing a sequel, not wanting to recast the role of Luke Skywalker. Years later, during the 1990's 1970's revival, Star Wars becomes popular again. Lucas decides to finally make the long awaited sequel to Star Wars. He entitles the film the Phantom Menace. It is not nearly as hyped, since the original movie does not have the same fanatical core fan base. Lucas fails to convince either Harrison Ford or Carrie Fisher to sign on. The film is viewed negatively from the beginning. Even fans of the original film deride it as a transparent cash grab. The film flops.
I don't know if it'd be impossible in that era. It was the time of the internet explosion and just before the Dot-com Bubble burst; an era of the internet being a place for companies to do anything to make money.
John Fredrick Parker
Donor
I think this is the right idea, though making it work with a proper PoD, without piling on butterflies to completely alter Episode I, might be tricky -- though maybe, maybe, something could get started in the early phases of the dot com bubble, combined with a devastating leak prior to release, so that Lucas is on the defensive when the early bad press starts getting confirmation following release.
This could actually happen fairly easily. The Phantom Menace had a budget of $115 million, plus $20 million advertising, and it took five days to break $100 million gross. It actually is possible for it to make a loss. Like Hugo.
Maybe it's previewed a month in advance with horrid reviews? Or copy gets out over Napster?
for. the. love. of. Christ.
I disagree with your anger. It was the most hyped movie ever (Sweet Christ, a fanatic fan base, everyone in the civil world loving the franchise, a generation and a half raised on it, and a 16 year build up) and was a massive, MASSIVE let down. It's the cinematic equivalent of your prom date getting run over by a bus.
i sincerely disagree; it would need a 0% approval rating as opposed to 57% (according to Rotten Tomatoes) to be the most disappointing film of all time. Original Trilogy Purists may have been pissed, but i think the average moviegoer wasn't as much (i myself am an average moviegoer and Ep1 is what introduced me to the franchise, which i thought was pointless and boring shit before Ep1)
to put that in perspective, Jurassic Park /// had a worse critical reception than both Phantom Menace AND the previous JP film, and yet it's both Ep1 AND The Lost World that receive more flak than the one that's ACTUALLY weaker than EITHER of them
Quite frankly, when I first saw The Phantom Menace I loved it. (Full disclosure: I was eight years old at the time.) And there's a reason why it made close to a billion on its first run: even if the die-hard nerds were disappointed, kids loved it and your average moviegoer liked it as well. Dislike for it has been magnified over the past thirteen years due to the echo chamber effect of Teh Interwebz.
Judged purely on its own merits as a movie, it's the best of the prequel trilogy. In terms of it being ill-conceived (i.e. "They should've done something else") it's probably the worst. However, Revenge of the Sith has got to be the biggest letdown.
Well, that's my two cents. Anyway, to address the question of how to make The Phantom Menace unsuccessful: I think the best way to do that is by two methods:
1. Change the movie to make it boring. The Phantom Menace is disjointed and immature, but it's entertaining. Put in more boring shit and take out the exciting stuff, and people will either skip it or only see it once.
2. Change the content of the EU. More direct-to-video movies like the Ewok ones, to reduce the anticipation for new Star Wars on screen; also perhaps open up the prequel era for EU writers a year or two before the film's release.
Judged purely on its own merits as a movie, it's the best of the prequel trilogy. In terms of it being ill-conceived (i.e. "They should've done something else") it's probably the worst. However, Revenge of the Sith has got to be the biggest letdown.
Well, that's my two cents. Anyway, to address the question of how to make The Phantom Menace unsuccessful: I think the best way to do that is by two methods:
1. Change the movie to make it boring. The Phantom Menace is disjointed and immature, but it's entertaining. Put in more boring shit and take out the exciting stuff, and people will either skip it or only see it once.
2. Change the content of the EU. More direct-to-video movies like the Ewok ones, to reduce the anticipation for new Star Wars on screen; also perhaps open up the prequel era for EU writers a year or two before the film's release.
I understand the critics of 1999 to the early millenia lauded it, but frankly I don't understand why. I remember watching that movie as a kid and being somewhat fine with it, but that was as a dumb kid. And even back then, I could sense problems with it, and that it wasn't like the Original Trilogy in the strengths and qualities of the Original Trilogy. It was only as I got older and kept going back that I picked up on that it was not a good film. Why the critics then liked it, I have no clue. Maybe it was because they bought into the hype and any elements that were passable (which there were) were overlooked in lieu of all the problems with it like the totally outlandish moments (that space-NASCAR announcer was not something that is of the Star Wars universe), and the dull screen play and the lifeless villains and the lousy characters and characterizations and a plot based on the uninteresting political mush stuff. Maybe they got taken in by the visual effects. Certainly Star Wars I, being in 1999, was on the brink of when CGI would explode, so perhaps critics still were not used to special effects and giant battles and mistook those for film quality while ignoring the story. On a similar note, I feel that was George Lucas problem in this era as a director; he is an extremely capable traditional director who knows the ropes and the to-dos and not-to-dos, but in the digital age he came in fresh just like everyone else at square 1, but still thought of himself as the square 10 director he was in the traditional film era, and he tripped on that ego. Maybe the critics reviewed it positively as somewhat of a pity-f**k; I do recall vividly mentioned that "well, it's not all that great, but you know it's only the first one, and it just has to start out before it gets really great in 2 and 3". I frankly can't put my finger on it, but I do believe they were enticed by something, and something they mistook for an excuse for the movie's flaws or something they mistook for quality. Regardless, the movie was not that good. Plinkett of Red Letter Media dissected that film and eviscerated the pieces for more than I can explain here, or need to given he has already done so, so I recommend looking at that. I will tell you truly what I think is George Lucas' problem, and I believe this comes from an article someone wrote on why the Disney merger was good: George Lucas doesn't understand Star Wars. He likes some things, like Flash Gordon and Samurai films, and he used those as the basis for his 1977 film, but he doesn't understand why he likes them. He just knows that he likes them. When it came time to do the prequels, he was doing what he thought Star Wars was from his interpretation of what his own film (and the other two originals) meant, but he still didn't understand, and what the prequels ended up being was an homage to the original Star Wars set in the same universe, and it failed miserably.
And you cannot claim this as an Original Trilogy purist thing. There was no such thing. Every Star Wars fan was revved up for the prequels and they had been anticipated for eons since even when Empire Strikes Back and later Return of the Jedi were still in production themselves. Original Trilogy purists came into being when Episode I turned out to be what it was, and when in spite of all hope, Episode II turned out to be the same as Episode I in all of it's flaws, if not worse. And then George Lucas came out fighting against the criticism, saying his fans needed to get a life (even though they have them and they gave him his), that the films were made for children (even though Star Wars has always, always had a mass appeal to all ages and was evident from 1977 that it was not a kiddie movie), saying that it was just nostalgia (which is a cop-out of anyone who screws up a franchise now; it's not nostalgia, because we have DVDs and if it were, we'd see the Original films had the flaws the Prequels do, but they don't), and I do believe he said at some point that the Prequels were better. And then he does things like refuse to release the Theatrical cuts in any form but a lazy copy of the laser disc as a bonus feature on a limited time DVD, allowing the film to rot away, and he even refuses to allow the Library of Congress, for the future generations of mankind and the benefit of eternal preservation, to have prints of the original theatrical cuts of the original films. This is something you'd never expect from the man who stood up for film preservation and against the likes of colorization and alteration of classic films back in the 80s. THAT is the kind of stuff where the distaste for Lucas today, as you will find among Original Trilogy purists as you have called them, comes from. And it's not even distaste most of the time; it's disappointment in George Lucas, and the anger at him -where there is anger- comes from when he does things like insult the audience or wave off critiques and continue to do the same problems time and again, and when he does like what appears like trolling the fans of the film trilogy just to displease them and let them down. But, every single bit of that came AFTER Episode I, and II. In 1997 when the public was getting ready for that film, up until 1999 when it was released, every Star Wars fan was waiting it expecting it to be just like the original films in quality, but it wasn't, and it was a flawed mess from Lucas because he didn't critique himself, he didn't go over and over the script, and he surrounded himself with Yes-Men who either just agreed with him on everything or were too in awe of him to ever say no or offer a differing opinion.
Just watch the Plinkett review:
http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars-episode-1-the-phantom-menace/
EDIT:
Actually, we were both wrong on the reviews. The reviews of the time were mixed, with some prominent critics like Roger Ebert lauding it, but mixed. And that is a 57% Rotten, meaning 57% of critics do not like it as of that rating, with only therefore 43% liking it.
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Nope, that's not how it works. The 57% rating is the percentage of positive reviews out of the total. A film is "Certified Fresh" if it gets 60% or more positive reviews (i.e. a supermajority) -- any less than that, and it is classified "Rotten".
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Then I stand corrected, though I also submit my previous points. I also wonder how much this rating was affected by the recent 3D rerelease. I can very easily see the films being treated as a theme park ride in that area and the 2012 rerelease being given a positive review based on feeling like you're in all the scenes (and a positive review on that basis does have merit if that's what you're going in for).
EDIT:
By the way, another flop possibility: Have Lucas decide to go retro 1950s/innovative and release the film in 3D in 1999, either in the traditional blue/red version or a very flawed and broken attempt at modern 3D that just annoys the audience.
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That's the reason I actually released this - some people are saying a big reason Lucas sold the Star Wars franchise to Dinsey was the 3D rerelease of Episode I underperformed ($100 million worldwide on top of all the advertising is kind of pathetic when Titanic's 3D rerelease made more than that with next to none) and Lucas figured he'd milked all he could from it.
Also, I do agree Episode I isnt the worst - I think that would be Episode II, which boils down to Twilight with a lightsaber battle or two.
