Speculation Is Disney Capable of Learning the Lessons of John Carter and Phantom Menace?

I suggest you keep it that way, it's healthier.

 

Is Disney capable of learning the lessons of The Black Hole?

 

I had similar thoughts about "The Karate Kid" when I first heard about it... but there actually IS justification for it from what I heard later (still haven't watched it, so maybe the info's wrong). It's not "the Karate Kid" because he learns karate--it's "The Karate Kid" because before moving to China, his character had taken a couple karate classes, and tried to use what little he'd learned to stand up to the bullies at first. So they teased him by calling him "the karate kid". That's it. THEN he goes on to learn kung-fu by putting on & taking off a jacket and other stuff.

EDIT: not defending the choice, really, just explaining it...

 

Will Disney learn from the lessons of Plan 9 From Outer Space?

 

^ That movie has an unjustified reputation as the worst ever, the Turkish B productions beat Plan 9 any day.
There's a turkish movie about evil Spiderman who strangles people in the shower, forces rodents to eat people's eyes through tubes and decapitates people by burying them in the sand and shoving a boat propeller in their face.
The production values are that of a piece of cardboard and a stub of crayon.

 

Clearly a lot of lessons to be learned from those films...

 

I want the villain to go "Your stupid Jedi minds! Stupid! Stupid!"

 

I still find it ironic that a movie about one of the worst movie makes of all time was so well written and directed.

 

Well, seeing as Touchstone, which released Ed Wood, is owned by Disney, I'd have to say Disney HAS learned lessons from Plan 9 after all...

 

Yeah Ed Wood is easily my favorite Tim Burton film. Landau was perfect and literally disappears into the role.

 

These characters are not real people, but a good character does act very much like a real person would.

Stories that have relatable characters have an instant leg up on "suspension of disbelief" as the audience understands the character's point of view and "gets" their actions etc. Stories that don't have relatable characters have a much harder path to walk as the actions by said characters are never understood and often times thought to be absurd etc.

Relatable characters help the audience get sucked into the story and forget that they are indeed watching a movie at all.

 

GREAT POST! You forgot to mention the dialog full of gibberish through the entire film! You start out trying to remember what terms are for what, but then after a while when they just keep piling on the gibberish, you just throw your hands up and say who gives a crap what any name/term/reference is supposed to mean anymore...

 

Yes, terminology can become the treknobabble of your movie if you're not careful, and it can produce the exact reaction you cited if you're buried in it. Star Wars did have some new terminology to learn, of course, but notice that it comes at you pretty sparingly, all things considered, in comparison to a film like John Carter. Just as with the music, Lucas chose to go with familiar terms, more often than not, in order to ground people in an unfamiliar environment, and it worked. A chieftan character would have been just called a chieftan, rather than a "Jeddak," (whatever the hell THAT is), and a prophesied character would be called the Chosen One, rather than a "Dojar Sodat." Furthermore, the objectives are clearly spelled out in Star Wars: find the plans to the Death Star; simple, over and done. But John Carter? I have no idea what the "ninth ray" was supposed to do, or even what the previous eight rays did, for that matter. It's a rather arcane kind of McGuffin for the characters to fight over when set against a simple computer file stuck inside a robot.

Which brings us to another lesson to be learned: Keep your terminology nice and simple. The kind of complex terminology in John Carter, unless explained REALLY well, can easily cause a general audience to tune out and fail to connect with your movie at all.

 

Since we're discussing turkeys made about turkeys, allow me to recommend Poultrygeist. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll seriously consider never watching another movie ever again...

 

If that's true, then keep that damn thing the hell away from me...

And OK, if we're going to scrape the bottom of the bad-film barrel: do you think Disney can learn any lessons from Manos: The Hands of Fate?

 

Yes! Manos for the win!

But to be serious for a brief moment, this actually could lead the discussion in an interesting direction. Why confine ourselves to TPM and John Carter, particularly when we've had sixteen pages to discuss those two particular films? Why not pick any science fiction/science fantasy film (bad or good, old or new, doesn't matter to me), and think of at least one thing that Disney/LFL could learn from it, whether positive or negative? We've discussed a bunch, at least partly in jest (and After Earth had it coming), but I'm quite convinced there is a good serious discussion (done with some humor, of course) to be had from it.

For instance: what can Disney learn, whether good or bad (or both), from, say, the Total Recall remake? Or even the original one, if you want to broaden it up?

 

Yeah, no need to limit ourselves to those two movies. Pretty much any movie can be an interesting influence, depending on the people involved.
At first glance, many would dismiss that a historical-like samurai flick would influence a movie about people shooting each other with lasers in space - but, there you have it.