Why Do Bad Movies Get Made? 4 Patterns From 12 Film Autopsies

Why do bad movies get made? Rarely for mysterious reasons. After breaking down twelve films, from a $200 million sci-fi epic to the worst adaptation ever made, I kept finding the same four patterns: sequels with nothing new to say, heroes the audience can't remember, adaptations that betray their own characters, and scenes that serve the plot instead of the viewer. Learn these four and you can diagnose almost any flop before the credits roll.

The Goku who wanted a girlfriend

In 2009, 20th Century Fox released Dragonball Evolution, a live-action take on the most beloved anime property on the planet. The movie had money, a built-in audience, and one of the simplest hero cores in all of fiction. Goku is a boy who cares about training. That is the whole character. From child to adult, training is all he cares about. He has so little interest in anything else that even after he has a wife, he disappears for years to train, though he could teleport home at the end of every day.

The movie's first big decision was to make Goku care about getting a girlfriend.

Within the opening minutes, this Goku complains about high school bullies and begs his grandpa to teach him something he can actually use: how to get the girl. He gets bullied at school in a scene that comes from nowhere, with nothing before it to make it believable. The film opens with voiceover exposition about Piccolo being imprisoned deep within the earth, and eight minutes later he is walking around free. The voiceover contradicted itself before the first act ended.

The result is still talked about as the worst adaptation ever made, and not just because it is bad. As the breakdown put it, it has so little to do with the original property that you would not know it was a Dragon Ball movie unless you saw the title. Here is the line I keep coming back to: the motivational core is the one thing you can't mess up. Everything else in a film can be fixed in the edit. The core of who the hero is and what he wants cannot.

That was pattern one. Here are the other three.

Why bad movies get made: the four patterns that keep repeating

Across twelve autopsies, from Avatar: Fire and Ash to Valerian to a Jason Bourne sequel nobody asked for, the failures clustered into four repeatable patterns. Not bad luck. Not the market. Patterns.

Pattern 1: the sequel that re-records the hits. Avatar: Fire and Ash made a billion and a half dollars and still counts as a failure, because the franchise is trending down and the film gives nobody a reason to care about the next one. The diagnosis was brutal and exact: it is not a proper sequel that progresses the franchise to the next step, it is a stale tap dance on the same step, like paid DLC. The movie is called Fire and Ash, and yet the fire theme is wasted. The queen of the flame clan is fierce but has no purpose. The finale is another whale hunt in the water. Same beats, same chases, same structure, a new subtitle.

Jason Bourne (2016) is the same disease in a different genre. The film is not a new Bourne movie so much as a recycled compilation of older Bourne movies. The Las Vegas car chase is good, but you have already seen it done better as the taxi chase in Supremacy. The Athens foot chase is exciting, but Berlin did it first. The hand-to-hand fight is brutal, but Bourne versus Desh in Ultimatum was better. Even the emotional gut-punch, Nicky getting shot, already happened in Supremacy, where it worked better because the woman dying was someone we actually cared about. The whole movie is, in the breakdown's perfect phrase, the film version of a band re-recording its biggest hits into a new collection album. And the obvious question follows: why would I watch Jason Bourne when I can just watch the original movies and see everything it offers done better?

A sequel with nothing new to say is not a story. It is a re-recording of the hits.

Pattern 2: heroes the audience can't remember. A friend of the channel watched Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and, a week later, could remember nothing about it except some cool planet visuals and the lead actress's eyebrows. The movie had likable heroes, good chemistry, wild visuals, a Rihanna shape-shifting dance number, and a galactic murder mystery that should have been fascinating. It vanished anyway.

Why? Tiny mistakes that grow into major ones. The two heroes are introduced together, on a beach, in a vacuum, for the first ten minutes. They share every scene and never exist outside of each other, which quietly teaches the audience to file them as one unit instead of two people. Later, when the story splits them up, it is tougher to know who you are looking at, because their individual value was never established. The events look cool but have no moment-to-moment logic. The central mystery keeps vanishing in favor of irrelevant side quests. The parts work. The whole doesn't stick.

And the extreme version of the same pattern is the Goku problem from the opening: a hero whose core the film betrays on page one. Valerian forgot to make its heroes distinct. Dragonball Evolution forgot who its hero was. Both end in the same place: an audience that feels nothing.

The last two patterns, and what the winners did instead

Pattern 3: scenes that serve the plot instead of the audience. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has real craft in it, old-school blockbuster instincts, and a genuinely clever idea (set your set pieces on the borders of huge ongoing events so the movie feels bigger than its budget). It still stumbles because its connective tissue is plot glue. Villains who should be dead are doing more than fine. The bridges between central plot points are so clunky and forced it is like the filmmakers are reaching through the screen to hammer them into your head. Characters act on aspirations the film never clearly established, because the story requires them to act.

Prey shows the smaller, sneakier version of the same sin. Early on, Naru falls into a marsh, struggles free, and moves on. The scene exists for exactly one reason: to set up the marsh as the weapon she uses against the Predator in the finale. Take it out and nothing changes except the ending location goes unintroduced. Scenes like that are dangerous for two reasons. First, the audience can see the setup coming from a mile away. Second, the scene has no value of its own. Compare the clock tower scene in Back to the Future: it sets up the finale too, but its real job in the moment is Marty's fear of rejection. The setup rides on the back of a scene that earns its screen time.

Pattern 4: the franchise that starts chasing everyone else's identity. This one is my favorite because it comes from a video game. When Black Ops 4 was revealed, the Call of Duty fanbase revolted, and the diagnosis nailed something every film franchise should hear: this franchise once was the game every other shooter wanted to be. Now it is just the game that wants to be every other shooter. Health bars, hero classes, armor systems, borrowed from whatever the competition was doing. When you spend a decade making one thing and then start copying everyone else, the audience can smell that you no longer know what you are.

Infinity War shows the subtler version: sabotage that happens outside the movie. The ending, Thanos snapping half the universe away, was dark, brave, and genuinely emotional. It landed softer than it should have for one reason: Disney had already announced movies starring the "dead" characters. Watching Peter Parker crumble is heartbreaking until you remember he has a film coming out next summer. Sometimes a film's stakes die before a single frame is shot, in a boardroom.

Now the good news. The same batch contained the proof that the inverse works. Prey is the right way to handle a giant IP on streaming: make the smaller movie you would never greenlight for theaters. Tomb Raider survived a generic plot because the filmmakers nailed Lara Croft as a person, and Alicia Vikander carried two hours on that alone. Dune: Part Two became a genuine cinema event, the kind that gets a mother who visits theaters once every two years to ask for the best IMAX seat. Mission: Impossible Fallout is the rare franchise that gets better with age. Every one of them either evolved, or knew exactly who its hero was, or both. Ask why bad movies get made and the answer is usually the mirror image of one of these four.

Key points

• A sequel needs a next step, not a new subtitle. Fire and Ash and Jason Bourne failed the same test: everything in them had been done before, and done better.
• Forgettable heroes come from weak first impressions. Introduce characters as a unit and the audience will remember them as a unit, which is to say, not at all.
• In adaptations, the motivational core is the one thing you can't mess up. Betray who the hero is and no amount of budget saves the film.
• Every scene needs value in the moment, not just as setup. If the audience can see the strings, the scene is already dead.
• Franchises die when they chase the competition's identity instead of trusting their own, or when the studio kills the stakes in advance with a press release.
• The winners in the batch all did the inverse: Prey went small, Tomb Raider nailed its hero, Dune evolved the spectacle, Fallout kept raising its own bar.

Try this

• Watch the first ten minutes of Valerian and notice how the two leads never exist apart from each other. Then watch the opening of any film whose hero you love and compare how fast that film gives its hero a solo want.
• Watch the Las Vegas chase in Jason Bourne (2016) back to back with the taxi chase in The Bourne Supremacy, and ask one question: what does the new one add? That question is the whole sequel test.
• Watching assignment: watch the opening scene of Dragonball Evolution and write down, in one sentence, what Goku wants. Then write down what Goku wants in the first episode of the anime. If those two sentences don't match, you have found the exact moment the movie died.