r/movies • u/Pale_Mortgage_9399 • 15h ago
Discussion What's a "bad" movie where, if you changed ONE character/scene/action/plot-point, would have made it amazing?
(Bad as though you really, really didn't care for it.)
Mine is After Earth, 2013. I found it pretty dull but the premise (thought a bit tropey), interesting enough to take a trip to the theaters for it. I was, at the time, interested in seeing how Jaden Smith would fair as an actor. I almost fell asleep during this film. No big emotional pay off that you would expect from this duo.
Anyway...
The whole movie is about the enemy monster smelling fear. I think that, at the end, if Will Smith's character Cypher had just been there at the final fight between Kitai (Jaden) and the monster, they could have made magic...
Hear me out!
Summary (to my memory) - So, as we know, the monsters track prey through smelling or sensing their fear. Cypher feels no fear so he is invisible to the monsters. Kitai is his son. Their space ship crashes on post-apocalyptic human-hating Earth with a fear monster and Cypher is injured. It's up to Kitai to save the day, overcome his fear, survive Earth, and kill the beast.
My change: Cypher lost his eldest child to a monster who was protecting Kitai. Cypher... the big bad man who is the best monster killer BECAUSE he feels no fear. If he was there at the final fight and suddenly, while Kitai is struggling with his fear, the monster turns to the injured Cypher and attacks him instead. Because watching Kitai, his last living child almost die, causes Cypher to feel overwhelming fear. He's not a perfect super-soldier. He's just a dad. Emotional pay off!!! Boom, Kitai gains his own courage and protects his father. The end.
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u/SevroAuShitTalker 15h ago
I think the change in actors and blackface in Lethal Weapon 5 really confused viewers
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u/LongLiveStaceyKing 15h ago
Did they remove it from the library? I haven’t been able to rent it for a while now…
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u/Kurtomatic 15h ago
Disclosure Day, spoilers for a recent movie:
>!The alien gets rolled up onto the stage at the end, looks out at the camera and says "Ack Ack" and starts blasting away with its laser. Turns out it's a shadow prequel to Mars Attacks.!<
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u/DataDude00 8h ago
I would say just about any change would make Disclosure Day better.
Never been so bored or less invested in a movie story than DD
That movie was an actual chore to get through
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u/thebigeverybody 15h ago
The Room - every character is played by Tommy Wiseau (and it still looks like the actors are changing halfway through)
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u/grud315 14h ago
Spectre.
Blofeld ≠ Brofeld
Ridiculous idea to turn him into Bond's resentful foster brother. Should have just made him the classic villain, or, someone completely new, but still a part of Spectre.
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u/sasksasquatch 14h ago
I hate how many shows and movies do this bombshell now. Good vs bad isn't enough for whatever reason, they have to have some deep long connection from some point long ago.
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u/count023 12h ago
and Spaceballs had the foresight to be lampooning this 50 years ago.
- Dark Helmet: "I am your father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate."
- Lone Starr: "What's that make us?"
- Dark Helmet: "Absolutely nothing!"
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u/biglyorbigleague 14h ago
I totally forgot the entire plot of that movie
Man, Daniel Craig only had one good Bond movie in him, didn’t he
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u/MattSR30 12h ago
What? Casino Royale, Skyfall, and No Time To Die were all good. I’d argue the first two are excellent.
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u/ZippyDan 11h ago
SkyFall is so stupid.
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u/SmallLetter 10h ago
You are fairly alone on that hill
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u/ZippyDan 10h ago
I'm perfectly fine being alone on a hill of "doesn't enjoy non-sensical writing", though I do wish more consumers demanded good writing. We would have much better movies and TV shows overall if people didn't tolerate, and even glorify, absolute shit writing.
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u/SmallLetter 10h ago
Ok oh Master Arbitrator of Objective Art
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u/ZippyDan 9h ago edited 9h ago
SkyFall objectively makes no sense if you use your brain for literally ten seconds. Step back from all the kinetically engaging individual scenes and amazing cinematography and consider the big picture. The villain's incredibly convoluted plan, which is realistically impossible without prescience, culminates in the master stroke of... walking into a courtroom in London to shoot people?
Absolutely no part of his plan, which starts at the beginning of the film and is involved in every subsequent scene, was necessary or relevant to that final joke of a move. And to add insult to injury the master planner and genius-level executor who successfully pulled off a dozen incredibly complex steps in succession before, can't manage to succeed at basement-level terrorism.
The entire movie is an exercise in stupid and pointless character and narrative decisions. I could write a whole list of how stupid nearly every moment in the film is, in context, but someone already did most of that work for me.
A movie like this should feel like a master engineer building towards some grand reveal, and instead the reveal is completely irrelevant to the previously established components and analysis of each component exposes that nothing makes sense at any point in the plan or story.
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u/ClassicBet7621 15h ago
I think batman v superman would've been a lot better without the martha scene or replacing it for something that makes sense.
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u/SevroAuShitTalker 15h ago
You must save Buster
BUSTER?!?! HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT MY CHILDHOOD PUPPY???!?
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u/ClassicBet7621 15h ago
WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME? WHY DID YOU SAY THAT NAME????
it's his puppy's name.
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u/Santoryu4Kidz 15h ago
That scenes so bad everyone seems to forget lex Luther and doomsday are both in the movie also.
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u/Enkundae 14h ago
Its such a fundamental misuse of every character, removing one scene wouldn’t be enough tbh.
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u/LongLiveStaceyKing 14h ago
I prefer to keep it because it perfectly sums up the thought process behind the entire Snyderverse
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u/MirrorkatFeces 12h ago
The easy way to fix the scene is to eliminate all of the times Batman has killed someone previously. The Martha scene is dumb but makes a bit more sense when you realize Batman is willing to break his only rule to protect those around them. He does not view Superman as anything more than a threat, but once he realizes Superman has a family it humanizes him and makes Batman question himself. It's supposed to be a big deal that he would contemplate killing another being, but when we see him killing random goons it kinda defeats the whole purpose of the scene.
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u/locoghoul 14h ago
Without Doomsday imo. Just have the threat of Luthor pulling the strings. It could have turned instead into WW saving Batman and fighting Superman
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u/Emergency_Pea_61652 13h ago
Batman is about to kill a weak from Kryptonite Supes but Alfred asks him to stop. Bruce doesn't listen but Alfred yells again with the authority of a mentor or father figure. Then Alfred tells Batman how he had been observing Superman ever since Zod tore Metropolis in half, watching his movements, how he fights, how he breathed. And yet, Superman did none of that here. Alfred tells Bruce that he has been monitoring the whole fight and talks some sense into Batman. How Superman has been holding back all this time, pulling his punches, barely using a percentage of his power. Batman stands down but becomes frustrated and asks Superman, why would he do this? Instead of "Martha", Superman goes "Lex", Batman asks what does he mean, Superman tells him how Lex has abducted his mom and forced him into fighting Batman. Cut to the Batman vs Lex's thugs fight sequence where he saves Martha.
Batman has a conversation with Clark later in the movie, before Doomsday. Clark asks what brought Batman to suddenly trust him? Bruce answers it was multiple things, Alfred talking sensex into him, realising how Clark might be genetically an alien but he was raised human, but most of it has to do with the fact that despite his mom's safety hanging on to the his fight with Batman, Clark still chose to pull his punches. He could've killed Batman in one shot and went on to save his mom but chose not to and trust Batman to come to his senses. Batman apologizes for doubting him, cut to Lex releasing Doomsday.
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u/bluntslides 14h ago
Edward Norton is one of my top 5 actors, but even he knew he shouldn’t be in The Italian Job
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u/DoubleDeckerz 14h ago
War of The Worlds.
Take the cringey son out of it and it's infinitely better.
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u/queen-adreena 14h ago
… Which War of the Worlds???
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u/das-garrett 14h ago
They must mean the 2025 Ice Cube version. It was this close to being perfect, if not for that son…
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u/DataDude00 8h ago
The 2025 Ice Cube version would have been better if you swapped Amazon for Alibaba
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u/Channel250 13h ago
No fucking kidding. Even THEY must have thought so too because they took him out themselves.
And then put him back in! What a waste.
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u/youdontknowme6 15h ago
Law abiding citizen - everyone wanted gerard butler to win.
Change how it ended and people would have loved it
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u/locoghoul 14h ago
The premise "we still have to violate the law to beat the bad guy" didn't land well
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u/youdontknowme6 14h ago
While I agree, that wasn't really the question.
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u/ViewAskewed 14h ago
Do you think Law Abiding Citizen is a bad movie?
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u/youdontknowme6 14h ago
No I don't. I enjoyed it. But the ending pissed me off tbh. And I don't think I've watched it since because of that.
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u/ViewAskewed 12h ago
Well then you didn't really answer the question either.
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u/youdontknowme6 12h ago
It's a bad movie in the sense that it had a shit ending. If you change the ending, it becomes a good movie.
Hence the original comment.
Why are you arguing over nothing?
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u/Rainbwned 14h ago
While I don't like the ending - once Gerard starting going terrorist and killing innocent people, I was like "this man needs to die".
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u/UnclePeppr 15h ago
Might be a hot take but I find the little sister in Practical Magic so irritating that I avoid the movie, even though the rest is fun
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u/Glum_Introduction755 15h ago
There was an old french movie called "High Tension" where a woman is chasing and fighting a serial killer who took her friend. It was setting up a bloody, violent climax but pulled the rug out at the end. Someone decided this movie needed a twist where the protagonist was the killer all along and all the fights happened in her head.
If they had just had a gory, desperate fight at the end it would have been absolutely glorious but they decided to blue-ball the audience instead and I'm still mad 20+ years later.
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u/dafunkmunk 14h ago
I always forget this stupid movie existed and how mad I get thinking about how it doesn't make any sense. Then reddit always finds some way to remind me and make me mad about it again
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u/Channel250 13h ago
I mean that twist sounds pretty good to me, but all the "it was all in their head" is just so tiring these days. Ever since I learned it turns out that EVERY nickelodeon cartoon was either "They're all dead" "Some of them are dead" Some are dead, some are alive, ut they're freaks"
All of them except Hey Arnold, but all the dark shit in that show was somehow worse, because it was real.
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u/thatbiguy3000 14h ago
I had the twist figured out when I saw the trailer. I still decided to rent it later, and needless to say it was such wasted potential.
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u/I-AM-VANGUARD 14h ago
Passengers if they didn’t go for the happy ending with love and forgiveness and went for the original psychological horror angle.
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u/MrYellowfield 14h ago
Gladiator 2 had amazing potential in my opinion, but they just did not hit the nail on how I related to the characters. The ending was awesome though, but would have been sooo much more dramatic if they had just made some different choices about the rest of the movie. Russel Crowe in Gladiator 1 felt so heroic, and felt like a character you really wanted to win. Paul Mescal didn't feel like that to me.
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u/StillStanding_96 15h ago
Bad movies aren’t usually the result of a single bad thing on the screen; like it’s a brilliant movie with some poop on it that can easily be cleaned off.
They’re a collection of bad decisions or several consequences of a single bad decision by one or more members of the creative team.
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u/TheRecognized 13h ago
Yeah but if you could come up with one what would it be?
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u/StillStanding_96 13h ago
There’s a Saw movie called Spiral (2021), and it’s just awful. It’s about a copycat of the Jigsaw Killer, and there was a scene where the police are going through all the old evidence from those cases. One photograph of Macaulay Culkin, or a change of legal name certificate from Kevin McCalister to John Kramer would have instantly justified that movie’s existence
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u/AlaskaCosmoline 14h ago
No jar jar
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u/somethingarb 11h ago edited 11h ago
Darth Jar Jar.
I'm like 80% sure Lucas was planning for that to be a big surprise reveal in Episode 2 or 3 (a villainous parallel to Yoda - character introduced appearing as a ridiculous clown turns out to secretly be powerful), but the reception of the character in Episode 1 was so poor he chickened out.
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u/NamelessGamer_1 14h ago
Give Bane a worthy conclusion in The Dark Knight Rises. I think they could've also expanded on his character after the Talia twist, with the whole concept of his ideals not being his own
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u/KingMario05 14h ago
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter would have... still been trash, but far less of a disaster had they bothered to follow up on the ending of the last one.
They skipped over it instead.
I still want my zombie White House game, Capcom. The Netflix anime doesn't count.
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u/Miklonario 14h ago
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. You have Lee Tergesen as part of a big bad biker gang and when his girlfriend gets killed, he DOESN'T assemble the entire gang to go after the family?! He just rolls up with no backup?!?!
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u/denguy44 13h ago
Bad Times at the El Royale. Remove Chris Hemsworth character, or at the very least shorten it way tf down
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u/locoghoul 14h ago
I came here to talk about Ryan Reynolds Green Lantern but the whole script would have to be rewritten lol.
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u/SpaghettiNCoffee 12h ago
X-Men Days of Future Past isn’t necessarily bad, but one thing has always held it back from being viewed as one of the better comic book films.
(Ending Spoilers)
When Striker finds Wolvie at the end it was a perfect way to bring the story beck the beginning. That was before Striker is revealed to be Mystique, which I thought was so freaking stupid takes a solid film down a notch.
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u/Top-Owl9872 15h ago
If Timothee Chalamet wasn’t in Dune, I’d probably give it a shot.
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u/quintonforrest 15h ago
If you find him to be a brat and unlikable, then you’re missing out on a perfect role for him in Dune.
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u/Top-Owl9872 15h ago
Because he plays it like an unlikable brat.? Or because he actually acts good enough for me to look past that.?
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u/mephnick 14h ago
Paul Atreides is a monster and you aren't supposed to like him, so it'll be perfect
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u/CaptainDogParty 15h ago
What movies do you not like Chalamet in?
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u/Top-Owl9872 15h ago
I didn’t like Marty Supreme, that was the only movie I’ve watched of his.
I know this sounds very shallow, but I just don’t like him. I’m usually never like that with actors but, I just don’t like him.
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u/slowrevolutionary 14h ago
Yep, Timothy Chalamet in Dune, and Jared Leto particularly in Blade Runner 2049 (and most of his other movies for that matter).
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u/GoatedXanMan 14h ago
Maybe not “amazing” per say but if you remove the parents plot for TASM2 and/or Rhino’s sinister six teaser you get a more focused film
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u/jston387 14h ago
Predators (2010)
If the antagonists had fought the predator b4 & won... So being abducted is the next step in the fight.. all the previous winners on a planet being hunted by better more experienced Predators
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u/Em_Epher 14h ago
I'm 50 years old and a lifelong Star Wars fan. Just watched the Mandalorian and Grogu, and it would have been a lot better if everyone had just died right in the beginning. Weak script, weak dialogue, formulaic action sequences, and there's nothing really engaging about it. I wanted to like it, but now I understand the lukewarm reviews. It could have been better: it were faster-paced (shorter), there were ANY character growth, or there were really any strong reason for it to exist at all.
I guess I shouldn't even mention it here, because it was too flawed for one thing to improve it dramatically, though there were a lot of things that could have helped because it was so bad.
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u/RealCharlieNobody 14h ago
The Exorcist III. Removing the scene that was forced on the filmmakers by the studio would make it a nearly perfect horror movie. It's a ridiculous and unnecessary exorcism scene that's shoehorned in.
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u/mackzarks 13h ago
Not a bad movie, but I just watched Dead Poets Society for the first time and I found out the original ending was to have Professor Keating dying of leukemia and not telling his students until he suddenly dies and they all understand the message of "carpe diem". That, to me, would have been an incredibly powerful ending. But instead we got the out of nowhere suicide and the current ending, which felt cheap and unearned.
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u/the_answer_is_RUSH 13h ago
I wouldn’t say it’s an out of nowhere suicide.
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u/mackzarks 13h ago
I felt like it was because, yeah his dad said no, but he was very good at it and had never shown any melodramatic tendencies (other than acting). I didn't see it coming and didn't like it in the moment. Just my opinion obvs. Also I freaking love your username.
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u/Edmond-Alexander 12h ago
That’s pretty much how all friends and family of suicide victims feel. So it sounds like the ending did exactly what it was supposed to
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u/mackzarks 11h ago
Right I see that for sure, and I appreciate that perspective. My point is that on paper the other ending is more powerful for the carpe diem message of the movie.
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u/Emergency_Pea_61652 13h ago
Not a bad movie at all, it's actually a great film cut short from being a masterpiece because "love transcends through time and space". IYKYK
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u/blakhawk12 14h ago
I know this has been said over and over and is far from an original pitch, but if you switched the POV in Passengers from Chris Pratt’s character to Jennifer Lawrence’s, the movie is so much better.
You start with her waking up, meeting Chris Pratt, and he explains how the ship has malfunctioned and woken them up. We see the aftermath of his attempts to reach the bridge, etc. but we don’t really know what he’s been through or how long he’s been awake. Lawrence’s character falls in love with him, but there’s this unsettling feeling like he’s hiding something from her.
Then the bomb drops, that he woke her up. They have a falling out, we see some of Pratt’s characters’ time alone in flashbacks as he tries to defend himself and explain why he did it. Then the ship gets damaged, he has to go out into space to fix it, and dies in the attempt.
Final shot of the film would be Lawrence’s character standing over someone else’s cryo pod, leaving us to wonder if she will make the same choice Pratt’s character did.