What are some of the worst movie screenplays that have been produced?

It does if that’s the explicit question being asked. If all things were equal, budget, quality of direction, acting, special effects, etc. how much would the script bring to the table in terms of entertaining the audience?

Both screenplays and stage plays are perfectly readable things. If they’re not good to read, they’re probably not going to be good when performed either. The only qualifier to that would seem to be if you can snazz it up enough with special effects that outdo everything else to-date, that the audience forgets about what’s actually happening.

None of these three films would be a great read. Star Wars would probably be the best, but still pretty sub-par. All of them only have any chance in hell of succeeding on the screen by virtue of pulling the wool over the audience’s eyes. But, that’s not what the script brings to the table. That’s what the director and the money man bring to the table.

What the script brings to the table is what you get if you read through the script. Nothing more and nothing less. And what it has to bring is an enjoyable time for the reader.

But again, the key criteria of a script and of a movie is that it is entertaining. A script which is entertaining merely based on the strength of its dialogue is better than a script which carefully constructs a five act story structure, utilizes deus ex machina as an explicit homage to ancient Greek plays, and is boring as crap.

Having a story broken into acts, having each scene modulate the tone from uplifting-to-downbeat-and-back, creating a strong A plot and good B plots, using proven character archetypes, etc. aren’t aspects of a good script. People learn those in storywriting classes because they are useful tools for creating something entertaining. Following the rules allows you to construct something even when you’re out of ideas. You can take all the rules, roll a dice to decide from among the legal options, and come up with something that will be entertaining because it conforms to the list of options for known entertaining story structure. Writers learn story structure because a working writer needs to be able to generate content, regardless of how creative he is feeling, if he wants to eat.

Conformance to standardized story structure isn’t good scripting. An amazing script is one which conforms to no known rules and yet is still highly entertaining. That would be a script which is a masterful work and which should be applauded by anyone who feels like ranking this sort of thing.

That’s irrelevant to the movies under discussion, none of which is particularly marvelous. But the point remains that your argument doesn’t apply to any method of ranking of scripts outside, perhaps, of a classroom that is teaching story structure. Outside the classroom, scripts are ranked by entertainment, inventiveness, and artistic merit. For the movies we are discussing, the latter two are both a nill. For entertainment, the Avengers and Star Wars would probably be amusing but unimpressive reads. Avatar would be another nill.

I once read a quote from a fairly well-known screenwriter saying that it bothered him when people blamed bad movies on the screenplay when they’ve almost never actually read the screenplay. Like many other screenwriters, he’d seen things he’d written wind up being changed for the worse in the final movie and was annoyed at being blamed for bad decisions made by the producers, directors, actors, etc.

This isn’t to say there’s no such thing as a bad screenplay, but if a movie has terrible dialogue or gaping plot holes then it’s entirely possible that this is because someone other than the screenwriter thought the movie would be “improved” by changing the dialogue (or the delivery) or cutting scenes that would have explained things.

Star Wars Ep I: The Phantom Menace is a great example of a bad screenplay.

If someone wanted to make a movie to intentionally wipe out the 22 years of fan goodwill from the original trilogy, I’m not at all sure it would have been worse than TPM.

Here are some of the many horrible things that happened in the screenplay:

The movie opens with a plot line involving… trade route disputes. How exciting. It could have opened with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon on line at the DMV and it would have been more interesting.

Jar-Jar Binks. The worst comic relief character in movie history? Only Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s can really give him a challenge for that title.

Characters from the original trilogy appear in here, against all logic and conflicting with everything we know from the first three movies. R2-D2 doing more hacking? Anakin built C3PO? WTF?

Want a character that combines two ethnic stereotypes, for no reason? No? Well, you still get Watto.

Was there ANYTHING we learned about Anakin here that didn’t weaken the character of Darth? We find out that Darth is a whiny 9-year-old kid who flirts with a 15-year-old in an ooky manner; we learn he was (groan) a virgin birth, AND we get to see him win a poorly directed pod race against a baddie straight out of the cliche bin, PLUS he gets locked in a spaceship and proceeds to win a space battle BY MISTAKE.

This is a movie that could have SORELY used someone “improving” the dialogue. As it is, it reeks of Lucas being surrounded by yes-men who didn’t dare tell George he was pissing all over his franchise.

1978’s Rabbit Test is one of my favorite examples of anything and everything bad about movies. It was a bad idea that developed into a bad script and then, thru bad direction, bad casting, bad acting and bad production, was finally made into a really awful movie that got awful reviews and lost an awful lot of money.

I missed the edit window, but I remembered I wrote a review of Rabbit Test for IMDB; here it is:[

](Rabbit Test (1978) - User reviews - IMDb)

I’d say at least 30% of the reviews are, like mine, simply an attempt to warn people to stay away from this movie like it was a nest of demons on flakka with napalm laser pistols.

…Meet the Stupids is effin’ great! It’s pretty damn great adaptation of the children’s book series. It’s silly and fun.