FRIDAY'S SCRIPT TIP:

DEFUSING THE BOMB - MADAME WEB (part 2)

We are going to look at one of the Biggest Blockbuster Box Office Bombs in the past couple of years, where it went wrong, and what we might have been able to do to make it better. That terrible movie had a big budget, was made by a studio, had names in the cast, and was part of the SPIDER-MAN branch of the Marvel Universe.

MADAME WEB (2024)
Budget: “Low $100 million range” (after it bombed they said $80m) and neither include P&A which might be as much as $40 million - $100m.
Worldwide Theatrical Gross: $100,298,817 - it will never reach profit.

You might think this is “Superhero Fatigue”, but the other movie with Marvel in the opening credits, DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE is on track to Break a Billion Bucks in Worldwide Box Office. So it’s not the genre, or type of hero, or brand name or anything other that crappy work. Probably by people who worked hard and thought it was great... and never noticed the obvious problems. Things that “civilians” in the audience on the night I saw it were vocal about while the film was playing. Yelling at the screen. So I am guessing that they knew this was a stinker, and hoped that it would make money because of the Marvel brand... and were proven wrong.

I have always advocated for a three tiered system at studios, like in the old days: Big Budget Films, medium budget “programmers”, and low budget genre flicks. You can work your way up from the farm team to the minor leagues to the big league... and be sent down if you can’t cut it. We have Blumhouse, which makes $5m budget horror films, and some of those make a lot of money. Studio films in the $50m range are rare these days, but exist. What we don’t have is sending people down to the minor leagues - if you make a $100m film that flops? You get to keep making $100m movies. There are no demotions in any industry these days, and we need to reinstate those. The closest we have in this business is being “aged out”, so the great Billy Friedkin made a couple of big studio flops in the 1990s and resurfaced in 2006 with the low budget BUG, directed some CSI episodes, the great low budget flick KILLER JOE and proved that he still had it. Maybe if we sent the key creatives from MADAME WEB down to Blumhouse where problems couldn’t be solved with money? They could work their way back up.. and make some great movies along the way?

Yesterday we looked WEB’s problem with Dialogue and Characters. Today we are going to look at the Tone, Plotting, Villain’s Plan, and Conclusions for this bomb.

PROBLEMS & SOLUTIONS

TONE: If the purpose of not making the villain into a Latin Lover type was to avoid cliche (they should have focused on the dialogue, too) - then why is the tone of this film often so silly it's like the old BATMAN TV show? I think that the best of the Marvel movies are grounded in reality and have clever characters with a sense of humor. This new round of SPIDER-MAN movies are John Hughes High School movies... but our lead character has a secret. They take place in the real world... and WEB doesn’t take place in any form of reality.

One of the great things about THE MARVELS was that the story might have been out of this world, but Ms Marvel brings along her completely realistic parents and brother who are funny because they are reacting how our parents would react if they were in a superhero movie. They take everything that is weird and react to it as we would react, and that's not just funny, it's realistic. So you need the mix of fantasy and reality in a way that makes the fantasy seem real.

They didn't do that in MADAME WEB...

And I suspect that it was in some version of the script (or maybe just the comics). Cassandra is a paramedic who seems to (in an earlier draft) not give a shit about anyone. Burned out by all of the pain and suffering and death that she has seen in her job. There's a scene where a little kid thanks her for saving the kid's mom... and she is uncomfortable. I think that her character arc required her to not give a shit in this scene, and the traces are there. This might have been changed due to a bad script note, but it removes the reality elements that could ground the story and prevent it from being a cartoon. This needed to be a character who has seen so much death that they have ceased caring about anything... And now they have this power that allows them to change the future and help people. And they are forced to care.

But just as the dialogue is bland and the characters are bland and everything else in this screenplay is bland... it seems that anything that might have been interesting was dulled or removed so that it’s all bland and boring. Nothing is taken seriously. Nothing matters. Nobody seems to care.

SOLUTION: The silly comic book tone just doesn't work in comic books films. The first THOR movie had problems, but the tone was Shakespearean and serious and that made a silly comic book movie into something better than it might have been. WEB needed more gritty realism to counteract the comic book stuff. It needed more of an edge. By making it goofy, they lost all sense of reality and character and *danger*. The more unrealistic a genre is, the more you need to ground it. Make us believe that it could happen. That what we are watching on screen is *real*.

I don’t think there is a less serious comic book movie than DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE, but even though it makes fun of itself and everything else, at the core of the story is a heartbroken Deadpool who is about to lose all of his friends, all of the people he loves, because his world is coming to an end. Before the story kicks in, Deadpool is selling cars, broken hearted and trying to win back his ex unsuccessfully, and basically has a lot of realistic problems that we can identify with. Crappy jobs, broken hearts, trying to make rent in a tough economy. Oh, and being a failure. Despite all of the super stuff that will happen later, DEADPOOL 3 is a grounded story.

One of my Visual Storytelling Techniques is the “Twitch” - an object that symbolizes the character’s emotional struggle. In THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY Bronson’s harmonica, in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE it’s the musical pocket watch. This technique is used in a lot of movies, and in DEADPOOL we have a great picture of all of his friends at his birthday party that the character looks at a few times in the film to remind the character (and the audience) of what is at stake in this story. It’s always about saving the people he loves, even when he’s making jokes about Marvel and Disney.

And the version of Wolverine he finds that can help him? One who let his entire world down and everyone died. These are two character who have lost hope, suffered great loss, and now might have one final shot at redemption... except then things get even worse! So the jokes and gags are funny, but the story itself is serious and takes itself seriously. DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE is a freakin’ dark film where everyone that Deadpool loves is going to be killed. WEB needed to take the story seriously, make the characters real instead of silly. Dancing on tables is not a good way to distract people if you are trying not to be discovered. WTF? It’s as if this screenplay was written by 13 year old boys!

PLOTTING: Tied to the silly tone. Things that would make us think "That's not the way it works!" in a better movie has us forgiving absolutely stupid and anti-dramatic stuff like putting the entire story in WEB on hold - with characters in danger and the villain actively searching for them to kill them... For a week while Cassandra flies to Peru for a big stinking pile of exposition. She has to search the jungle for a guy who is going to tell her everything about the villain. This whole scene seems like it was caused by someone dropping the script on the floor and putting a chunk of pages in the wrong order. Civilians in the audience were saying it was stupid! Out loud to the screen. In the suburbs. I can’t imagine what they were yelling at the screen in Oakland.

I often fear that we are losing the ability to plot.

SOLUTION: Everything is a story is Cause & Effect. Newton’s Third Law (For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction). But characters also need to be able to logically prioritize what needs to be done first... what is the most pressing problem. If the villain is actively hunting the three people you are supposed to be protecting, taking a one week vacation to Peru, even if that will result in you learning some backstory stuff about the villain, isn’t the most pressing problem or need. You lose the audience if your protagonist does something of lesser importance first.

There’s a thing that I call the A-B-C of the story, the logical order of events. One thing leads to the next. If the hero needs to stop the villain from throwing a school bus off a bridge, study for a history test, and save the woman they love? Two of those are going to be more important than the third, so you don’t want to do the third one first... and you can turn the other two into a dilemma. A terrible choice that Spider-Man has to make. You know that he’s going to pick the school bus full of children... and regret that for the rest of his life. Look at every point in your story - what is the logical and natural reaction? Are the events in the logical order? Do the characters make the best decision for the situation... or make the wrong decision and are “punished” for it?

VILLAIN’S PLAN: In my “Secrets Of Action Screenwriting” book I note that the villain is the most important character in your story - they bring the conflict. So you need a great villain with a great plan. We looked at the villain in our last part, so let’s look at his plan now...

PROBLEM: The villain’s plan makes no sense - his plan is to kill these three girls who will grow up to become superheroes (but probably not after the box office of this film) and kill him... And that's it! He doesn’t seem to have a larger plan. Which (tone) makes him evil for the sake of evil. Nothing world changing that his death would prevent. He exists only in this bubble. Which adds to the cartoon issue and adds to the character issue and makes you wonder why he works out of his apartment and has one employee (who is a recent hire off Craig’s List, I think... and doesn’t seem to question why her boss is trying to kill three high school girls - more tone problems).

What is the villain's plan (aside from living, which is everyone's plan)? Casandra’s mother found a species of spider with great healing powers and the Jungle Guide villain stole it. He’s a passive antagonist - except for wanting to kill the three girls who will kill him sometime in the future. The plot doesn't make sense and seems pointless. The villain is wealthy based on the spiders he brought back from the jungles of Peru, but that seems not to really matter in this story. In fact, if the three high school girls kill this Jungle Guide turned Medical Millionaire, that might be a *bad* thing. Maybe the healing properties of the spiders is lost forever? Most likely, someone else just takes over the company - the Craig’s List girl? She seems to be the only other employee in this millionaire dude’s company. Maybe there were scenes that explained all of this, which were cut because someone who should not be in charge of story notes thought that it was unimportant?

SOLUTION: The Villain needs a Plan that must be stopped or there are consequences. So stopping the villain is *important*. Curing cancer with stuff from rare spiders? Not something that we want to stop. Now, maybe there was a line about a plan in there somewhere, but I read three different synopsis and it didn’t pop up in any of them. So what is the Villain’s Plan that Madame Web trying to stop in this story? Killing the girld? Okay, then what Villain’s Plan will the three high school girls stop if the kill the Villain? Hey, maybe there’s something - but it’s not part of *this* story. So it doesn’t matter (and no one who saw it and wrote a synopsis seems to know what it might be). We need a *tangible* serious villain’s plan that must be stopped (in this film). Or else... serious consequences.

In DEADPOOL we have Mr. Paradox from the TVA who believes that with Wolverine dead, this version of time is no longer important and he has built a device to end it... just destroy this entire version of Earth and everyone who lives there (including all of Deadpool’s friends and the woman he loves). The Villain’s Plan is to destroy the world... well, this version. Paradox thinks of this as “pruning” a branch that is probably going to die in order to make the rest of the plant stronger. So it’s a plan that makes sense from the Villain’s point of view, but will kill everyone... Unless Deadpool can find another version of Wolverine in one of the other versions of Earth that will be willing to come back with him. So we have a quest to find a Wolverine (and a zillion funny or interesting versions of the character) who will come back to our timeline and save our world. Or else Mr. Paradox will end our world. We all die!

Okay, that needs to be stopped! Everyone in the cinema will die!

Your Villain’s Plan doesn’t need to be the end of the world, but it needs to be something that needs to be stopped. Something that the Villain is *actively doing* that will cause major problems.

PLUS: I know that MADAME WEB is based on a comic book series and that (in the film) Peter Parker (Spider-Man) is born... But the villain's SPIDER-MAN 3 suit and all of the Spider-Man powers and skills are distracting and confusing. I would have altered those things and made them original and unique to *this story*. Instead we get kind of a parody of evil Spider-Man as the character, and that torpedoes both plot and tone. Think of all of the interesting and unique Villains from the 8 Spider-Man movies we've had so far... why couldn't they have come up wiith something like that? I'm sure there are even interesting character in the Madame Web-verse. Why use the Dark Spider-Man costume?

Even if your script is the third or fourth film in the series, it still needs to be its own story and work on its own. They needed to distance this as much as possible from the Spider-Man movies instead of seeing how much they could ride the coattails. The VENOM movies are part of the Spider-Man universe, and each of them is its own story in its own world, with a little tease of a battle with Spider-Man sometime in the future. Trying to ride the coattails of the Spider-Man films with this Spider-Suit is just lazy writing... which I’m sure they thought was a way to make it part of the SPIDERVERSE.

CONCLUSION: I think that the problem is that nobody is looking at these comic book films and thinking "How can I make this into a Shakespearean epic that stands on its own?" How can I make a superhero movie that gets nominated for Best Picture?" Instead they think of these films as "product" that they are mass producing at $200 million a unit (budget in the $100m range, marketing for this film another $40-$100m). And whether it's "In Association With Marvel" or an actual Marvel movie from Disney, the quality control has been in the crapper.

They aren't trying to make great movies, they are just trying to make money.

And you know how you make money? Make great movies!

It's time for all of these producers to realize comic book movies are a dangerous gamble like any other film, and they need to do the best possible work and try to make the best possible movie...

Instead of just another comic book movie.

No matter what your genre or what your budget, this needs to be the best movie ever made. One that makes us laugh and cry and tell everyone that they need to see it. Always do your very best work. Don’t think that just because it’s got the Marvel logo up front people are going to pay to see it.

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ADVICE FROM 1920!

*** VINTAGE #1: HOW TO WRITE PHOTOPLAYS *** - For Kindle!

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Screenwriting books have been around as long as films have. This series reprints vintage screenwriting books with a new introduction and history, plus new articles which look at how these lessons from almost 100 years ago apply to today’s screenplays. Anita Loos book is filled with information which still applies. In addition to the full text of the original book, you get the full screenplay to Miss Loos' hit THE LOVE EXPERT, plus several new articles on the time period and women in Hollywood.

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I WRITE PICTURES!

*** VISUAL STORYTELLING *** - For Kindle! (exclusive)

Show Don't Tell - but *how* do you do that? Here are techniques to tell stories visually! Using Oscar Winning Films and Oscar Nominated Films as our primary examples: from the first Best Picture Winner "Sunrise" (1927) to the Oscar Nominated "The Artist" (which takes place in 1927) with stops along the way Pixar's "Up" and Best Original Screenplay Winner "Breaking Away" (a small indie style drama - told visually) as well as "Witness" and other Oscar Winners as examples... plus RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES. Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is over 200 pages!

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BEST SELLER!

*** YOUR IDEA MACHINE *** - For Kindle!

*** YOUR IDEA MACHINE *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more ways to find great ideas! Your screenplay is going to begin with an idea. There are good ideas and bad ideas and commercial ideas and personal ideas. But where do you find ideas in the first place? This handbook explores different methods for finding or generating ideas, and combining those ideas into concepts that sell. The Idea Bank, Fifteen Places To Find Ideas, Good Ideas And Bad Ideas, Ideas From Locations And Elements, Keeping Track Of Your Ideas, Idea Theft - What Can You Do? Weird Ways To Connect Ideas, Combing Ideas To Create Concepts, High Concepts - What Are They? Creating The Killer Concept, Substitution - Lion Tamers & Hitmen, Creating Blockbuster Concepts, Magnification And The Matrix, Conflict Within Concept, Concepts With Visual Conflict, Avoiding Episodic Concepts, much more! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is over 175 pages!

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PRO DIALOGUE TECHNIQUES!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Kindle!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Nook!

Expanded version with more ways to create interesting dialogue! How to remove bad dialogue (and what *is* bad dialogue), First Hand Dialogue, Awful Exposition, Realism, 50 Professional Dialogue Techniques you can use *today*, Subtext, Subtitles, Humor, Sizzling Banter, *Anti-Dialogue*, Speeches, and more. Tools you can use to make your dialogue sizzle! Special sections that use dialogue examples from movies as diverse as "Bringing Up Baby", "Psycho", "Double Indemnity", "Notorious", the Oscar nominated "You Can Count On Me", "His Girl Friday", and many more! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is over 175 pages!

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FINAL DRAFT SOFTWARE

Use your creative energy to focus on the content; let Final Draft take care of the style. Final Draft is the number-one selling application specifically designed for writing movie scripts, television episodics and stage plays. Its ease-of-use and time-saving features have attracted writers for almost two decades positioning Final Draft as the Professional Screenwriters Choice. Final Draft power users include Academy, Emmy and BAFTA award winning writers like Oliver Stone, Tom Hanks, Alan Ball, J.J. Abrams, James Cameron and more. * * * Buy It!

copyright 2024 by William C. Martell