Biggest Tragedies of Film

Been following the Biggest Tragedies of gaming thread that's pretty active now, and it made me think of similar instances of recent movies. So, what do you guys think are the greatest tragedies of the film industry. I'm thinking more dissapointments or things that could have been, rather than actual real world film industry tragedies like McCarthyism invading hollywood or things like that.

Anywho's the first thing that came to mind was how much I wish we got to see Edgar Wright's Antman. Edgar Wright is one of the most interesting filmmakers alive right now, and Antman was such a project of love for him. The whole falling out between him and marvel upset me so much it honestly has made me a lot less likely to root for marvel as of late.

Another thought that came to mind (not intentionally being so marvel focused) was Spiderman 3. If Raimi hadn't been pressured to shoehorn in venom and had made the movie he wanted, well I might have gotten a proper sequel to Spiderman 2 which is maybe my favorite superhero movie of all time.

Finally (I swear I didnt intentionally make this about marvel) I wish X3 had been directed by Bryan Singer and he had been free to make the Pheonix-centered horror movie adjacent film he had been planning to make.

That they never tried to make another Speed Racer movie.

@kingbonesaw: I know it's not based on a video game franchise (in fact it's based on a comic book), but I think Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is really, at its heart, an amazing video game movie.

Smokin' Aces was a great concept but they blew the execution.

That all we got after thirty years was a safe remake of the previous Star Wars movies, with misplaced humor and bland characters. I liked it, but it left me disappointed. They had one chance to continue the story and bring the old characters back and they kind of blew it.

That Oliver Stone directed Natural Born Killers instead of Tarantino-same with True Romance, but the version we have of that is better than the version of Natural Born Killers.

Star Wars Prequels and the 4th Indiana Jones movie seem like obvious ones.

The falling out between Kenneth Anger and Jimmy Page over the soundtrack to Lucifer Rising, which led to Kenneth Anger cursing Jimmy Page. Who then only did heroin after Zeppelin disbanded; instead of something new and interesting. Ok that one is a little fantastical and requires belief in the power of the Occult. But, if you can make those logic jumps, then it explains why Page did nothing but beg the living members of Zeppelin to get back together every 5 years....and do a lot of heroin.

The reception of Star Wars. While entertaining and Empire Strikes back being mildly okay, they are all bad movies. Like, seriously bad. There are so many things wrong with them that aren't a matter of opinion so much, it's just nuts. Take that first movie, A New Hope. 'Nah, don't shoot that thing there are no life forms on board'. What was your current objective admiral, or whatever rank you are? Destroy life forms? No. Recover the data. Is data a life form? No. Can data be stored in the capsule? Yes. Was it an expected or otherwise authorized emergency pod launch? No. And you're doing nothing to intercept it at all? Additionally, dude, you live in an era where droids are common and used everywhere. Why the fuck would you not think a droid could be on it in the first place? That's literally like someone telling you to look for a cool action movie to watch and you telling them you don't want to go to the store to buy a dvd.

Also:

That one is the first actually good Star Wars movie ever made.

James Bond AKA 007 was amazing, until they ripped off Daniel Craig with £60,000,000, looks like he was too greedy.

I'd have loved to have seen Kubrik's Napoleon biopic, which he was planning for years.

Kubrik thought Napoleon was one of the most interesting, word-changing men in history, and I've little doubt he would have got that across on screen. He did lots of planning for the movie, and at one stage had enlisted the Romanian army to 'borrow' tens of thousands of troops to stage the battle scenes.

He was convinced no-one had made a good historical epic - pretty humble for the guy who directed Spartacus - and I am convinced he would have produced one of the best.

The project was eventually abandoned after a long gestation period, and the failure of a similar film, but I understand the archives of all his research and planning exist in the hands of the Kubrik estate.

Also, whilst we're on the topic... Whilst I think A.I. generally deserves a better reception than the one it got on release, I will always wonder about the pure-Kubrik version, and how it would differ. I can't help but feel Spielberg softened all sorts of edges which the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey would have left coldly, indifferently blunt.

Not sure what you mean. I think it's a tragedy that the best Bond movie (Casino Royale) was followed by a series of by the numbers spy/action movies. It made me realize that I actually dislike 007. If I were in charge of Eon Productions, I would have removed writers Neil Purvis and Robert Wade ten years ago. Before adapting Casino Royale (most of the work was already done for them), they made the bad Die Another Day.

Guillermo del Toro's long list of cancelled/in-development films is a pretty great tragedy. Especially At the Mountains of Madness. He had everyone on board, he just couldn't get the money because hollywood is scared of expensive R-Rated Horror movies, and it was right in the middle of Paranormal Activity being the most popular horror franchise.

On a slightly related note, everything about the Hobbit movies is a tragedy. Something good could have come of it, but the studio messed it up.

In terms of potential tragedies, the news that Benicio Del Toro has dropped out of the new predator film sucks really bad.

That Transformers got stumped with extremly bad movies. They don't just suck, they really really blow. Like totally. Transformers 2 is a pain to watch.

Sitting through all 112 minutes of Thor 2.

Not a tragedy in terms of the supposed quality of this film, but the behind the scenes sleaziness of Sausage Party is a tragedy for the animators. According to reports, the animation company behind the film, Nitrogen Studios, didn't pay or credit half of the animators who worked on the film. Also these animators claimed that the studio forced them to work overtime without pay. This all got attention when CartoonBrew did an online interview with two of the directors for Sausage Party, and the comment section was loaded with comments made by animators of the movie describing the terrible working conditions. This is up there with modern day Konami when it comes to companies treating their employees this poorly and they deserve better.

Edit: For tragedies on the quality of movies, The Last Airbender movie is perhaps the worst movie I ever saw (that or Epic Movie). I hadn't seen the TV show at the time, but saw a showing with friends who loved the show and they came out of the movie furious at how horrid the film was.

Really not that much of a tragedy because even as a huge fan of the games I'm not that upset by the reality of it, but that Ratchet and Clank movie coulda been really good.

Heaven's Gate is probably the historically correct answer.

Aliens 3 and 4.

Alien and Aliens were both amazing films in and of themselves, but their dichotomy made both more brilliant, imo.

I don't even hate them, but even if one likes 3 or 4 they're still fairly straightforward sequels to Aliens. I think going deep left field for each sequel in the same way that Alien to Aliens did would've created an even more epic and memorable franchise.

@ghost_cat: People have no idea how bad that movie did, and how much it meant to the producer. He wanted nothing else than for that movie specifically to do well, specifically so that the Speed Racer series could go through some sort of a revival. Sadly, it didn't turn out that way at all and now is like an unmentionable film title around him.

The moment Micheal Bay was tapped to helm the Transformers movies. Those movies could have been so so so so so much better

Pretty much any Jurassic Park sequel, those movies don't need to exist.

Bryan Singer is still helming X-Men stuff.

David Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo sequels probably won't get made.

Apart from the deaths of filmmakers who clearly had a lot more to offer (Vigo, Murnau, Fassbinder, Yamanaka, Pasolini), all the films that were lost in the silent and early sound era.

A reddit thread reminded me about the dissolution of the Bill Murray/Harold Ramis team after Groundhog Day. Tragedy on both a personal and cinematic level. Who knows what would have resulted if they kept working together throughout the nineties.

The tough thing about doing a follow-up to Casino Royale is that the second book in the James Bond literary series, Live and Let Die, was:

1. Already made into a movie
2. A bad book not remotely in the same league as Casino Royale, and
3. Super, super racist

I think they actually were going in an interesting direction with Quantum of Solace, but the tragedy there is they got hit with the writer's strike and that whole movie is completely under-cooked. Which then led the producers to the incorrect conclusion that people wanted Bond to get back to the classic formula, which I don't think is true at all. I think most people did want a continuation of Casino Royale, they just wanted it to be done well.

Now they're trying to get back to a more Brosnan-style formula, but they have an actor who just isn't well suited for it. Quantum may be a bad movie, but at least the story fit with Daniel Craig's Bond. At least I can see what they were going for, even if they fell short. I don't know what the hell they were doing in Spectre...

Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash. It coulda been something! It coulda been a contenda!

Seriously though, I'm still disappointed that Jodorowsky's "King Shot" and "Abel Cain" never got made. Especially King Shot.

Not so much a tragedy, but it hurts my little heart just the same:

Killer Klowns 2. The Duke Nukem Forever of cornball sci-fi horror comedies, in which I'm sick of looking forward to it and just want it to come out already, good or bad. But maaaan... I want a new Killer Klowns!

Everything that happened to the Crow franchise. Apparently it *can* rain all the time. (I do like the show, at least. It was awful, but in a fun way)

...

And of course, the greatest misstep in cinema history, one so bad that the film industry nearly imploded: The fact that Big Momma's House 4: Big Momma vs. Juwanna Man doesn't exist.

Law Abiding Citizen was about 3 minutes away from being a fucking classic thriller, fuck the god damn ending

@zevvion: What is like, a sci fi adventure movie that you like if you dont like Episode 4,5, etc.?

That the last major film of both Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielsen's career should be Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

David Fincher not directing the Steve Jobs movie and Christian Bale not playing Steve Jobs.

TheFincher "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" Trilogy not continuing is also tragic.

Probably the one I am the most passionate about is The Dark Knight Rises. That movie is bad and it blows me away that that movie reviewed well and is still highly regarded. This isn't the end all be all, but this movie currently has an 8.5 / 10 with a million votes on IMDB. That's crazy talk. It's a long boring, bloated movie that is never that excited, with characters mopping around without any real interesting drama, filled with cliche subplots. The central conflict comes from a perfect, uninteresting villain who sounds like an Deckard Cain only if you couldn't discern anything he said, who turns into a cuckold so an even worse villain can walk around for the last third of the film. And that's not to mention the logic leaps, all the times where nothing is happening, how this feels like the least Batman movie that perhaps has ever existed, or how they randomly told you how the movie was going to end like 90 minutes before it actually did. And I really enjoyed Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. I also really like/love most of Christopher Nolan's movies. I thought that if there was anybody who would have pulled off a trilogy like this without dropping the ball at the end, it would have been this trilogy, but oh well. (As a side note, I have lived my life since then. This movie doesn't haunt my dreams or anything. Although that doesn't stop my brother from randomly bringing this up, which ends up with me complaining about this movie way more than I actually care for)

I wouldn't call this a tragedy, but throughout this year I keep thinking about how it's sad there aren't any more Matrix movies. The sequels are what they are, but the first movie is masterclass in my mind. I sincerely love that movie. More movies like that, in that style, with that type of action would have been incredible.

Also, I have been waiting over 10 years for a Battle Angel Alita movie. The thing is it looks like that is finally getting made. Fingers crossed on that happening, and if that movie turns out to be good.

John Carpenter's apparent loss of interesting in making movies. He seems happy occupying himself with other things, but it's a shame for audiences. Although staying away is probably better than the alternative if he's lost the spark. Wait, Ghosts Of Mars and Escape From LA happened. Maybe he should have quit sooner. Now I can't decide.

Maybe that Dark City must have been a fluke, because the rest of Alex Proyas' oeuvre is really not good.

That we'll never see 'The Day The Clown Cried'.

I like a lot of sci-fi movies. It's just that almost nothing in Star Wars made sense, at all. It was 'I need to obtain A so I'll go ask B how to get to C' type reasoning in there. Like I said though, I'll admit Empire Strikes Back doesn't have a lot of that nonsense, but I still didn't like it that much just because it came on the heels of garbage and it was just OK. I will say I definitely liked parts of those movies but them being regarded as this insanely awesome thing is just nuts considering how mediocre or bad they are.

If you want a good sci-fi movie of the same ilk, then I'd say The Force Awakens. That's an actually good movie. Can't really name any other comparable sci-fi movie of the top of my head, but I like most sci-fi movies generally.

David Cronenberg not making grizzly body horror movies anymore...or even the more normal, but still grizzly movies. I guess that might still happen, but it's already been almost 10 years since Eastern Promises, so not holding my breath.

Terry Gilliam not being able to make his Don Quixote.

One Crazy Summer (1986)
Imagine "Better off Dead" except none of it works despite the movie being full of stars and character actors that were in EVERY OTHER 80s comedy movie. You should only watch this movie as a drinking game where you drink whenever anyone says, "hey...I know that guy." A truly terrible movie.

@clagnaught: Personally I like The Dark Rises. Bane is awesome, Batman is still awesome, Catwoman is pretty much perfect. But it sure has a lot of stupid things. Off the top of my head, that Marion Cotillard death scene is laughably bad. It's straight out of Days of Our Lives.

Anyway, I do think Nolan lacked interest in that film. I don't know how much of the post Dark Knight-stuff you've read about, but Nolan clearly had a completely different third Batman movie in mind, focused on Ledger's Joker once more. And when life conspired against him and he didn't get to make that movie, he used a lot of time to find out how to make a third Batman movie. And when he finally did, it ended up being four hours long. The studio of course couldn't have their huge Batman film be four hours, so they made him cut, cut, cut. And so he did, and we ended up with the movie we have today. And as Nolan never releases extended cuts, the apex version of that film will never be seen, which probably is a huge tragedy.

That hardly makes the movie bad or negates the positives. What else you got?

I'd have to agree with @zevvion here. There is one good Star Wars film, and that is The Force Awakens. Obviously the prequel trilogy is terrible and needs no further explaining, but the original trilogy is just as bad. The amount of plot holes, bad characters, bad direction and terrible writing is just so blatant. I really have no idea how Star Wars is so popular.

@ezekiel: I don't know what you mean to be honest, could you elaborate what you mean by 'that hardly makes the movie bad'? If you're referring to the points I mentioned, I'd have to disagree. Having plot holes and huge logical errors stand at the foundation of your movie: that's bad.

Of course, a large part of it is subjective too. For instance, I thought the acting was largely bad. The only actually good actor in that first movie is Harrison Ford. Especially Carrie Fisher was just bad in the action sequences. She's squinting her eyes as she shoots a rifle. Also, what's up with Stormtroopers missing? We all know it as a joke, but they seriously miss shots entirely because the plot dictates that they should. Scenes are not set up in such a way that the constant misses make any logical sense. In one scene they have an elevated position, Han and Leia have no cover and they still miss them.

As I said, that's a matter of opinion I guess and you can say the logical errors don't bother you, but you can't say they aren't there. It should speak for itself that I'm not saying you should think those movies are bad. I'm just explaining why I think they are bad and why I think it's weird they are so highly regarded. I mean, I get it, I do really like Star Wars. But liking something and saying they are actually good movies can be two different things.