My Movie Ideas - by Tom, age 29

Dear Hollywood,

I don’t know your phone number so I just wrote my movie ideas on this website. Everyone else, please disregard.

I have a lot of ideas for movies. Don’t worry, I know that about 105% of the movies you’ve made in the last ten years are not original and are all based on previous franchises. I’ve taken that into account and categorized them by type.

If you want a totally original idea for that minus five percent niche market, let me know. I have plenty of those too.

Obligatory Sequel

The last movie ended with a totally blatant set-up for the next movie, so let’s give the fans what they’re expecting. Also, the last movie might have left them with a lot of questions. Let’s answer all of them and take away any semblance of interest they might have had about the series and leave them tired of the entire franchise.

Cloverfield 2

When the first movie ended, the monster was being nuked and the heroes died under a collapsing bridge. But it was also heavily hinted that the creature didn’t die. Audiences were asking questions about where the monster came from and how it came to exist. How stupid of J. J. Abrams to not include a scene where the heroes are given a long, detailed lecture about the creature that slows down the frantic pace, takes away all the mystique and terrifying nature of the creature, and forces them to pretend they care more about a giant monster’s childhood than their possibly-dying friend. But don’t worry, we’ll fix all that in the sequel.

We start with a long text crawl Star Wars-style that explains in excruciating detail what the monster is. Then we jump to the monster climbing out of the rubble that was once Manhattan and he roars at the camera because that didn’t stop getting scary nine hundred years ago. Then we introduce a totally bad-ass and unrelatable hero who is doing something heroic and awesome, like fighting terrorists or fighting those little things the creature spawns, or maybe just doing something pointlessly dangerous like climbing a mountain without gear. Then a scientist finds him and explains in detail using pseudo-scientific nonsense how the big monster can support his weight with his small legs and when our hero buys the explanation, so does the audience. And then when the scientist dies, the hero is the only one who knows the secret of how to kill it. In the end, he defeats the monster but then we find out at the last second that it’s not quite dead, thus setting us up for a hundred and fifty-seven more sequels. It’s bulletproof, I tell you!

Unnecessary Sequel Years Later

So what do you do with a movie where all the loose ends are tied up and the ultimate evil is not only vanquished forever, but erased from the entire time-line? Easy. Just pull an explanation out of your ass about how everything that was accomplished in the last movie was totally pointless, and have a character pass this information on to the heroes who don’t seem all that upset about it.

Back to the Future 4

So Doc shows up with his new time-travelling locomotive that he somehow put together with 19th-Century technology (and he didn’t have to back-stab Libyan terrorists to do it!) and tells Marty that they have a problem. It’s Doc’s grandkids! They’re in trouble, in the future! So Marty goes all the way to 2035 and finds out that Doc’s grandkids are being bullied by another Biff (I think that’s four Biffs we’re up to now). Even though they’re way out of their league in a future where everyone is flying around in Starships and can buy stocks by thinking about it, Marty gets the upper-hand on new future Biff but then he finds out that in trying to solve a minor conflict, they created yet another paradox that… ugh, I can’t even finish this. I feel too disgusted with myself.

Barely-A-Sequel Sequel

Here’s where you make a sequel to the mere concept of the movie and include none of the original actors. See Evan Almighty, Son of the Mask, or every Final Destination sequel.

Escape from Detroit

This time, Snake Plissken has disappeared (also Kurt Russell didn’t want anything to do with this mess). So they send in his adopted brother Jake (played by Terry Crews). Turns out New York and Los Angeles weren’t enough to house all the worst criminals in America, and they decided to add Detroit to the list. (What else are we going to do? Revisit New York or L.A.?)

This time, Jake has to save a kidnapped girl and also find out what happened to Snake. At the end, he finds Snake, but Snake isn’t actually seen and speaks to him off-screen so you can’t tell it’s not Kurt Russell. Pretty clever trick, huh?

Prequel

Prequels are the greatest invention in the world. Say you have a series of movies and each time you make a new one you have to raise the stakes just a little bit until it becomes totally absurd how the average guy who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time is now making a career out of being in wrong states of being. Why kill yourself coming up with an even more dangerous situation? If you just go back in time before any of it started, you can throw anything in there. This is admittedly tricky because you have to be cautious about messing with the timeline and contradicting the entire nature of the series, or completely destroying the motivations of the character in the first original movie. But if you don’t care about any of that, then you’re all set to make a whole series of prequels!

Friday the 13th: The Beginning

This is about 10-year old Jason Vorhees staying at Camp Crystal Lake before he drowned. Nobody actually gets murdered and it ends with something we all know is coming, but it’ll be a good opportunity to try something new with the franchise. As long as it has the name attached and the trailer shows the ending where he drowns, people will ignore the bad reviews and still go watch an hour and a half of a mentally disabled boy getting ignored by camp councillors and then falling in a lake.

Adaptation

Now, when you adapt a book, comic, video game, or TV show, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. First, you have to change stuff. Lots of stuff. Partially by necessity, and partially because we like to think we’re smarter than the writers who made the original work popular in the first place. But there are just differences you have to take into account.

Books can be very long and have a lot more internalization. Movies can’t really do that without some kind of invasive narrator, so you might have to totally change the character’s entire motivation. Maybe make him seem less of a conflicted and realistic character and more into a cardboard hero that people like to see on their hundred-foot idiot box.

Video games have really simple stories told to us bit by bit in-between killing a million monsters, so when you make the movie, you need to make the action tighter and also make the storyline a convoluted mess.

A comic book is a great source since it’s pretty much a storyboard outlining exactly how you need to do it, so make sure you stray as far from the source material as you possibly can, because comic fans aren’t really that obsessive or nitpicky.

A TV show is almost the same thing as a movie but with more time for character development, so just take that out and you’re done!

Matlock

This adaptation of the TV lawyer show will not have Andy Griffith reprising his role. That dude is old. We’ll get a younger star. Vin Diesel sounds good. He still has a mild demeanour in the courtroom and likes to eat hot dogs, but he also drives a flashy BMW. Oh, and a man (who only Matlock knows killed his wife) is on trial for a totally different crime for which he’s innocent and Matlock has to defend him. It ends with vigilante justice and a gun in Matlock’s hand and the bad guy confessing. But even though he confesses, he still pulls a gun, thus forcing our hero to shoot him in self-defence, because plots always have to end with the bad guy getting killed to provide dramatic resolution. Matlock doesn’t get arrested because he’s the good guy.

Remake

Originally this was done when you had an old movie that had technical limitations and someone thought it would be a good idea to remake the whole thing but with modern special effects, bright colours, and the best actors in Hollywood. This was a great idea at first, but then over time people realized it’s a cheap and easy way to inherit a fanbase and started remaking movies that had no reason to be remade. Sometimes it’s understandable to remake a foreign movie because we rich Westerners really hate reading subtitles, so we better redo the entire thing from scratch! Hollywood even recently remade a movie that was only three years old because the original had an English cast. We can’t let Americans see that! How will they understand their totally understandable accent and very slightly different culture? Fine, if you want to play it like that, I’ll play it like that.

Saw

They’re still making Saw sequels so interest is fresh, but the original Saw came out all the way back in 2003. That’s seven years ago! They didn’t have the special effects we have nowadays. We can make things 3-D now!

Anyway, this will be more or less the same as the original. We can even get the same actors, unless they died, retired, or had some kind of hate-speech scandal that destroyed their career. But let’s ramp up the special effects as far as we can go. In this movie, our villain doesn’t send videos to his victims, but holograms! We’ll do some bullet-time 360-degree shots of the hologram just to show that we really did make a life-like three-dimensional image of a dying cancer patient who likes to put people in life-or-death situations for kicks. One of these traps will be an iron maiden with turning blades tipped with a poison that causes people to inflate and explode in amazing high-definition quality. Never before will you have seen a more realistic portrayal of a human’s rib cage sliding out of their chest cavity! I know originally, Saw had some kind of moral about appreciating the time you are given, but after so many sequels people don’t care anymore and so I think the audience is ready for a body-count guaranteed to clinch a new Guinness World Record. Especially if we include the show-stopping shot with the 100-man guillotine.

Spin-off

You know that cool minor character in that movie? Let’s give him his own movie.

Mini-Me: The Movie

You can write the synopsis. I refuse.

Crossover

Franchise A plus Franchise B equals profit! Add even more franchises to the equation for the ultimate money maker! That does mean you have to split the profits more ways, but splitting a billion dollars six ways doesn’t sound bad to me!

Superman Vs. Goku Meet Dr. Manhattan Vs. Godzilla in Little China

Lo Pan returns to Little China in search of that elusive immortality in the form of one of the dragonballs, and the destruction he wreaks on the city brings the curiosity of Superman. Goku similarly follows in search of the dragonball. He and Superman find each other and for whatever reason they think each other is the bad guy and fight each other. When Lo Pan realizes they’re on to him, he summons Godzilla, so the government sends in Dr. Manhattan to deal with the creature. All bets are off in this summer blockbuster. By which I mean, even I have no idea how you would even end such a thing.

Re-imagining

This is what happens when someone thinks to themselves, “Hey, how about if Battlestar Galactica wasn’t so goofy and was a little more gritty and realistic with a lot of spiritual undertones? Or how about if Star Trek wasn’t about peaceful exploration and was just a bunch of lens flares and explosions?”

Results vary, but as long as the target audience remembers something that stopped being interesting a long time ago they’re usually willing to hear you out about how you plan to revamp it. Unless you make Catwoman into a super-powered graphic artist played by Halle Berry. But there’s still plenty of possibilities. So how about…

Bat-Man

We take Batman, but we add a hyphen to let people know that this time, it’s different! In this iteration of the classic comic-turned TV show-turned movie-turned better TV show-turned awful movie-turned way better movie-turned Internet obsession, our hero is no longer billionaire Bruce Wayne, but instead is a struggling journalist named Patricia Jones, just another black woman trying to make a name for herself, when suddenly she comes across a secret cave full of gadgets, karate and a butler. She dresses up in all black like a ninja and goes out fighting crime for some reason. Oh, and the Joker is not a clown, but a psychotic woman genetically-spliced with a hyena. They also might both be lesbians. That tends to get ratings.

Now, it might seem kind of risky taking both the Bat and Man out of the premise, but did you see “The Karate Kid”? He didn’t even learn Karate. Clearly audiences are ready for grossly inaccurate titles.

Besides, lesbians.

Gritty Reboot

Okay, so the last movie in a series was catastrophically stupid. How do we pick up the pieces and move on? We don’t! We just start over from the ground up and pretend the whole series didn’t exist. Or we just erase two of the four movies from the equation and start again half-way through even though the entire series was cheese incarnate. Okay, I guess Superman Returns doesn’t count as a “gritty” reboot. Just a “We’ll be fine if we make a cheesy movie but not AS cheesy as the last two ones which were a colossal mess” reboot. But if you want gritty, I’ll give you gritty:

Pink Panther Begins

Okay, so we re-introduce Inspector Clouseau as a gruff irritable detective whose wife died to plane cancer. He’s after the stolen jewel, the Pink Panther, and tracking it down is tough as many of his fellow officers of the law are being paid off and even those on the straight-and-narrow are forcing him through bureaucratic nonsense that only slows him down. He gets put on suspension for beating a 16-year old kid who turns out to not even know anything about the crime.

While on suspension, he’s put in the hospital by his martial arts instructor Cato, whose brutal tactics have thus far taught Clouseau to survive on the street. Afraid he’s losing his edge, Clouseau breaks out of the hospital, putting a nurse in a chokehold until she passes out, then runs amok in the criminal underground until he finds the crooked cops and kills them, making it look like a drug deal gone bad. Also, he pees on a hobo and steals the Pink Panther for himself. This movie should be rated NC-17, but might be okay with an R rating if you take out the scene with the naked prostitute having her spinal fluid being harvested by the president.

“Parody” Cash-in

At first these were disguised as parodies of one specific movie or a specific genre, ending with “Movie”, but it honestly doesn’t matter what you title them anymore, or what you base it on. The trick is to just fill it so full of references that you don’t have time for actual jokes. So here’s:

Clash of the Inception

Okay, so Perseus gets told by Zeus that he has to stop the most evil force in the universe, and he’s like “What, Hades?” and Zeus is like “No, Justin Bieber” and everyone laughs because Justin Bieber is popular. Then Lady Gaga walks in wearing a dress made of meat and Christian Bale yells at her and says they’re done, professionally. Then they go into each other’s dreams and find out that they’re all dreaming about David Caruso taking off his sunglasses and making cool one-liners. Also, the Joker is there dressed like a nurse and blows up a bunch of stuff. People are like “That was in Dark Knight! That’s so funny!” Oh, but don’t forget to include Ke$ha singing a song, but then Kanye West comes in and says “I’ma let you finish but” and then gets crushed by a fat David Hasselhoff who stops to eat a cheeseburger off the floor. Ha ha ha. Don’t you get it!?

Assholes.

Straight-To-Video Addition to a Never-Ending Series

Reader discretion is strongly advised: The following “fun facts” may cause disgust, loss of faith in humanity, internal hemorrhaging, Brain Cancer, Brain Cancer 2: Return of the Attack, or Brain Cancer 3: The Miracle of Friendship.

• There are thirteen Land Before Time movies. Only the first was made by Don Bluth.
• There are eleven The Adventures of Mary Kate & Ashley movies. And yes, apparently, just sticking two twins in a movie together eleven times in a row counts as a series.
• There are thirteen Bratz movies. I thought the idea of making one Bratz movie was stupid, yet predictable and probably harmless. Knowing that they made thirteen gave my soul a heart attack.
• There are twenty-one Barbie movies. That’s pretty awful. But honestly, I can sooner live in a universe with 60 Barbie movies than one with more than three Bratz movies. Isn’t there some parallel universe where we can trade?

Okay, how about…

Santo Vs. The Universe of Explosions

El Santo was a masked Mexican wrestler who in addition to the noble profession of luchadore, was also an actor. An actor who played himself, fighting monsters all around the world in a sweet-ass mask. Check out these titles:

• Santo contra los zombies (Santo vs. The Zombies)
• Santo contra las mujeres vampiro (Santo vs. The Vampire Women)
• El espectro del estrangulador (Santo vs. The Ghost of the Strangler)
• Santo contra la invasión de los marcianos (Santo vs. The Martian Invasion)
• Santo en la furia de los karatekas (Santo in Fury of the Karate Experts)

Okay, so El Santo is no longer with us, except as a patron saint of wrestling, but we can resurrect him with CGI! They did it for Orville Redenbacher. Also, I don’t know anything about the movie series, as I just heard of it now while looking at movie series on Wikipedia, but consider two things.

1. There are 52 of these movies. You can’t expect anyone to be able to stay on top of these and keep it consistent.
2. Looking at these titles, El Santo fights vampire women, zombies, aliens, Dr. Frankenstein, and anonymous death threats. Nothing can be too absurd. But I’m sure as hell going to try.

Okay, so El Santo gets a call. It’s from the President. Of the Universe. Only Santo can save us all. So he travels through a portal and arrives on an alternate universe where everything explodes. He uses wrestling techniques and whatever else happens to be nearby (chairs, a flamethrower, particle dismemberment cannons, etc) to defeat exploding ninjas, exploding witches, a living ice cream truck (which explodes), and finally a giant rhinoceros made of hand-grenades. By the end, he wins the love of a beautiful senorita who he makes passionate love to and then leaves behind for his own dimension as she explodes.

So, thanks for hearing me out, Hollywood. If I don’t hear from you in two weeks, I’ll assume you’re not quite convinced and send you some more of my great ideas. Also, can you lend me some bus fare? I had to post this on the computer at the library because I don’t have Internet at home.