What movies have had the worst screenplays? Movies that, irrespective of how well they were directed or acted, just had a bad screenplay.
What made them among the worst?
I’ve heard that The Room and Battlefield Earth had bad screenplays but not having watched them or read their scripts, I can’t say for sure.
Avatar! Yuck.
Seconding Avatar. I’m assuming you mean A run movies. Because there is no shortage of bad B movie scripts.
Either screenplays which are the worst among A movies or B movies which are well-known enough. The Room, for example, is definitely not an A movie yet its script may be instructive.
What made Avatar’s screenplay bad?
It’s Alive
I Sailed to Tahiti With an All Girl Crew
While Battlefield Earth is indeed painful to sit through, there’s a great payoff at the end: Travolta’s character, who has spent the movie trying to hoard gold, ends up trapped in Fort Knox.
Let’s restrict it to films that weren’t nominated for Best Original Screenplay by the Writers Guild of America.
The Swarm, an Irwin Allen movie that is bad for a lot of reasons, the screenplay chief among them. It was by Stirling Silliphant (who wrote the screenplay for In the Heat of the Night, fer cryin’ out loud!), and it’s embarrassing to listen to the dialogue. This was when Allen was doing his Big Budget Disaster Movies, each with a Cast of Stars, so you have the added attraction of famous actors and really good actors mouthing this dialogue. It’s painful.
The Wikipedia entry on its reception doesn’t single out the screenplay as the reason this film is a fiasco, but it should:
Oh yeah – another one, which I’m sure I’ll catch flak for
Invaders from Mars
The 1953 original, not the Tobe Hooper remake. Yes, this critically-acclaimed film, directed by the visionary William Cameron Menzies. I’ll agree that it was well-made, and that Menzies sets up his paranoiac shots beautifully. But anyone who thinks the film is well-written hasn’t been paying attention to the dialogue. (Screenplay by Richard Blake – probably not THAT Richard Blake – from a story by John Tucker Battle. I know nothing about either of these two.)
I attended a screening of this at the Dryden Theater at Eastman House in Rochester. This is the kind of Art Movie theater that’s so classy that people dress up to attend. No refreshments are allowed in (so the floors, for once, aren’t sticky). This is a cinema-hip bunch. There’s a good chance most of the attendees knew who Menzies was.
So I was surprised when this classy bunch started yelling abusive comments at the screen, MS3K-style, during some of the more ludicrous chunks of dialogue (such as when the scientist explain that the brain Martians might be using “mutants”, pronounced "MEW-tants, as laborers.) I’ve been to lots of screenings there, and never saw this reaction at any other film.
There is one cute bit, though – at the end, they set the timer on an explosive at three minutes. As they’re running away, it feels as if they’re padding out the scene interminably with flashbacks. But I checked my watch – it actually did that three minutes from the setting of the explosive until it went off. It’s the only film I know of where they actually had the explosion time match the detonation time on screen.
Batman and Robin.
Now, I know the director (whose name escapes me at the moment) gets a lot of the (dis) credit for this awesome bomb of a movie, but whoever wrote the screenplay for a cast of actors that should have, based on prior performances, been able to deliver at least an adequate movie if someone had actually written a decent screenplay.
Instead we got ridiculous plots, virtually no interesting character development, and some of the worst dialogue it has been my displeasure to sit through. Batman: The Antimated Series, did a better job of developing characters with real dialogue in 22 minutes than this mess ever did.
And if the director made them do the screenplay that way…well, it is a shame that ‘hang, draw, and quartering’ has fallen out of favor these days…
Any of the Sharknado movies.
First one that popped into my head was Maximum Overdrive. Stephen King directs a screenplay by Stephen King from a short story by Stephen King. Granteed, the problems didn’t end with the screenplay, but however you slice it, something went badly wrong there.
“Avatar” isn’t one of the 1,000 worst scripts ever produced as an A-list movie. It probably isn’t one of the 1,000 worst scripts produced as a movie with a title that starts with “A.” It’s a better script than “The Avengers,” for one.
“Avatar” has all the elements of a GOOD script. It has a clear beginning, middle and end, a clear protagonist who acts in a manner consistent with his motivations and who goes through a learly explained character arc, and clearly defined other characters who behave in accordance with their personalities and roles, and who affect the story in logical ways. The story is coherent and understandable throughout. There are essentially no loose ends or story errors at all. It may be simple and it’s not terribly original, but as a script it works very well. You can walk into any multiplex this very weekend and see several movies with scripts that don’t hold a candle to “Avatar.” There are other movies that have been up for Best Picture with inferior scripts.
The script for “Return of the Jedi” is demonstrably a worse script than “Avatar.” And it’s not even the worst “Star Wars” script and I loved the movie, but it has a lot of weird holes and it’s very patched together. As a movie it works fine, and has many great, iconic scenes, but the script is very weak in many respects.
Seconded.
(Ya know, rumor has it that George Clooney will reimburse anyone on the spot who tells him that they saw it in the theater.)
True enough.
I’m not a fan of The Avengers nor of Star Wars, but I’d put the script for Avatar lower than either of them. Fundamentally, the goal of a script isn’t to be free of plot holes, to have a tightly defined order, or whatever else, it’s to be entertaining. If you had a script reading, with no special effects, both The Avengers and Star Wars would probably be reasonably entertaining (Star Wars moreso). Avatar would put people to sleep.
Meet the Stupids
I’ve seen plenty of B movies and home-made movies and whatnot. None of them insulted my brain like Meet the Stupids.
Judging a movie script out of the context of being a movie doesn’t really make a great deal of sense.
For one, the reading of the script would be, by necessity, mostly just dialogue. It’s a common misconception that script=dialogue, but the most important part of a movie script isn’t the dialogue, it’s the way it structures the movie.
Agreed. The script for this movie is 90% hacky one liners. There’s almost no actual dialogue, that is, there is very little talking between two characters. It is literally mostly action movie throaway lines based on bad, obvious puns.
Star Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Great visuals, but the dialog is soggy and filled with cliches and the plot is just plain stupid.
Plus Stephen King is one of the films biggest critics. His usual excuse being he made it during the period he was out of his skull on drugs.
TCMF-2L