What Bad Movies Teach Writers About Storytelling

What Do Bad Movies Teach Writers About Storytelling?

Good movies teach the same principles by getting them right, and I cover those in what good movies teach writers.

I love a bad movie. A great film hides its machinery so well you can’t see how it works, while a bad one leaves the gears lying on the floor where anybody can pick them up. The unforgivable part is the waste. Studios pour enormous budgets into effects, rush the script, and audiences pay for that decision with two hours they don’t get back.

Every craft problem I see in manuscripts shows up in bad movies too.

Character inconsistency, rushed arcs, dialogue that sounds written instead of spoken, plot logic that collapses under basic scrutiny. The principles are identical whether you’re writing a novel or a screenplay. Here are the most instructive failures and what they teach. For more, see foreshadowing and deus ex machina.

For films and books that get storytelling right, see the Greatest Movies and Books reference.

Watch: Why Live Action Remakes (Almost) Always Fail │ Video Essay, Mr. Films

Rushed Pacing Destroys Earned Endings

The example: Game of Thrones, Seasons 7-8. For six seasons, this series built a reputation on careful storytelling, deep character arcs, and consequences that felt earned. Then the final two seasons compressed years of narrative development into a handful of episodes. The writers took character arcs built across dozens of hours and resolved them in minutes. Major decisions felt unmotivated. The ending was unsatisfying because the writers rushed the audience through everything that led up to it.

HBO’s own audience put a number on how cheated it felt. In May 2019, with the final season still airing, a fan identified as Dylan D. started a Change.org petition titled “Remake Game of Thrones Season 8 with Competent Writers.” According to CBS News, it passed one million signatures by May 18, with one episode left to air.

The petition called showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss “woefully incompetent writers when they have no source material (i.e. the books) to fall back on.” HBO was never going to reshoot what CBS called the most expensive season of television ever produced. In an update, the organizer wrote, “I made it because I was immensely disappointed and needed to vent.”

I think that petition is the clearest picture of a broken pacing contract I’ve seen. Those viewers gave the show eight seasons, and the rushed finish told them their loyalty ranked below a production schedule. A novelist’s readers won’t organize a petition. They’ll skip the next book, and the author may never learn why.

The craft lesson: Pacing is a contract with your reader. If you spend 300 pages building a character’s internal conflict, you can’t resolve it in two paragraphs. The resolution needs to feel proportional to the setup. When writers rush their endings, usually because they’re tired of the project or excited to finish, readers feel cheated. The fix is simple in principle and difficult in practice: give your ending the same care and space you gave your beginning.

I’m tired of a rushed ending, in a series or a novel. The reader gave you hours of attention on the understanding that it would add up to something, and a rushed finish tells them the writer stopped caring before they did. That’s the writer’s fault, and no deadline excuses it.

Character Inconsistency Breaks Trust

The example: Dark Phoenix. Professor Xavier, established across multiple films as wise and measured, suddenly becomes arrogant and reckless. Mystique, previously torn between competing loyalties, abruptly becomes the moral center without any arc leading to that shift. What the audience gets are strangers wearing familiar faces, and calling that character development insults everybody who paid attention to the earlier films.

The craft lesson: Characters can change. They should change. But events the audience witnessed have to motivate the change. When a character behaves contrary to everything established about them, the audience doesn’t think “interesting development.” They think “the writer forgot who this person is.” In novels, this shows up when a careful, analytical character suddenly makes an impulsive decision because the plot needs them to. The fix is building the bridge: show the pressure, the breaking point, the moment the old pattern stops working. Then the new behavior makes sense.

Spectacle Without Story Is Forgettable

The example: Avatar. A visual masterpiece that pushed CGI and 3D technology further than anything before it. The world of Pandora is breathtaking. The story of Pandora is the outsider-joins-indigenous-group-and-becomes-their-savior plot that audiences have seen in a dozen other films. Despite being the highest-grossing movie of its time, most viewers struggle to name the main character. The visuals created the experience. The story didn’t.

The craft lesson: Beautiful prose is the novelist’s equivalent of CGI. Gorgeous sentence-level writing can dazzle readers, but if the story underneath is a familiar template with no fresh perspective, the book is forgettable the moment it’s finished. World-building without story is a setting document. Prose style without narrative substance is a writing exercise. The story has to carry its own weight independent of the surface.

Humor That Undermines Stakes

The example: Thor: Love and Thunder. The Thor franchise found enormous success by embracing comedy with Ragnarok. The sequel doubled down, adding jokes to nearly every scene, including moments that should have had emotional weight. The result is a film where nothing feels like it matters because a punchline immediately deflates every serious moment.

The craft lesson: Tone is a signal to your reader about how to feel. If you establish a comedic tone and then ask the reader to take a death scene seriously, the tonal shift creates whiplash. Humor works in serious stories (Vonnegut proved that), but it works because the humor serves the theme instead of undercutting it. If your manuscript has a pattern of deflecting emotional moments with jokes, the reader learns not to invest emotionally. That’s the opposite of what fiction is supposed to do.

The fault sits with the studio habit of copying whatever worked last time. By early 2024 I’d decided Marvel has only one plot. It’s three acts every time, and you could swap the heroes and villains between films. In my opinion that’s one of the reasons they’ve gotten so crappy, and The Marvels (2023) became the lowest-grossing film in the series and was widely reported as a loss.

Ragnarok was funny, so the next one had to be funnier, and nobody stopped to ask what the jokes were costing. Writers do the same thing when a wisecracking narrator gets praise in a critique group and every chapter after that gets smothered in quips. The people who get hurt are readers who wanted to care and weren’t allowed to.

Internal Logic Must Hold

The example: Signs. A convincing family drama wrapped in an alien invasion premise that falls apart on one question: why would water-phobic aliens invade a planet that’s 70% water? The film works on a thematic level (the restoration of faith), but the literal plot crumbles under basic scrutiny. Once the audience starts asking “wait, why would they…” the immersion is broken.

The craft lesson: Every story creates its own rules. Readers accept magic, faster-than-light travel, talking animals, and unreliable narrators. What they don’t accept is the story breaking its own established logic. If your fantasy world establishes that magic requires physical exhaustion, your protagonist can’t cast spells for twelve hours without consequence. If your thriller establishes that the villain is careful, they can’t make a careless mistake just because you need them to get caught. Internal consistency is the foundation of reader trust in any genre.

The AI-Enhanced World Builder’s Handbook covers how to build and maintain consistent internal logic across complex fictional worlds.

Adaptation Requires Essence, Not Just Events

The example: The Last Airbender. A beloved animated series condensed into a single film. The plot events are technically present, but the characters lose their depth, the humor disappears, and the emotional pull that made the source material beloved is completely absent. The film adapted the events of the story without adapting its soul.

The craft lesson: This applies to any writer working from source material, including memoir writers working from their own experiences. The events of a story aren’t the story. The story is what the events mean, how they affect the characters, and why the audience should care. When you’re adapting real events (whether from history, personal experience, or another medium), identify the emotional core first. Build the narrative around that core. If you have to cut events for space, cut the ones that don’t serve the emotional truth.

This one matters to me more than most, because I see memoir writers fall into it. They get every date right and every event in order and still give the reader a book with no heartbeat, because they never decided what the events meant. The people in those books deserve better than a timeline.

Keep the ones that do, even if they’re smaller moments. See the full Entertainment Hub for related guides.

Clashing Creative Visions Produce Incoherent Work

The example: Justice League (2017). Started by one director with a dark, subtle approach and finished by another with a lighter, quippier style. The result is a film at war with itself. Characters behave differently from scene to scene. The tone lurches between gravitas and comedy without transition. Established character arcs from previous films are contradicted.

The craft lesson: This is the novel-writing equivalent of changing your approach mid-draft. If you start a manuscript as literary fiction and switch to commercial thriller at the midpoint, the reader will feel the seam. If you write the first half in close third person and the second half in omniscient, the voice will fracture. Consistency of vision holds a manuscript together. This doesn’t mean you can’t revise your approach, but if you do, the revision needs to go all the way back to the beginning so the whole work feels unified.

Complexity Is Not the Same as Depth

The example: Ocean’s 12. The first film was sleek, clever, and fun. The sequel tried to be more complex, adding sub-plots, backstories, and twists. But the complexity didn’t add depth. It added confusion. The ensemble cast that made the first film charming was buried under plot mechanics. Viewers left the theater unable to explain what they’d just watched.

The craft lesson: More plot isn’t better plot. More sub-plots, more twists, more characters, and more threads make a story busier without making it richer. The writers I coach who struggle with this are usually the ones with the most imagination.

They have so many ideas that every draft adds another layer. The fix is asking one question about every element: does this serve the story’s central question? If it doesn’t, it’s clutter, no matter how interesting it is on its own.

The AI-Enhanced Novel Handbook covers plot structure and the discipline of cutting what doesn’t serve the core narrative.

What do bad movies have in common?

Every example on this list fails for the same underlying reason: the storytelling broke a promise to the audience. The promise of consistent characters. The promise of earned resolutions. The promise of internal logic. The promise of tonal coherence. The promise that the writer (or filmmaker) is in control of the narrative and knows where it’s going.

These are the same promises every novel makes, and manuscripts fail for the same reasons.

I look at movies from that angle all the time. Why did this one bomb at the theater even though it’s a good movie? Sucker Punch (2011) isn’t a bad movie, but it lost money, taking about $89 million worldwide on an $82 million budget. The answer jumped out at me. At the end, the heroine, Baby Doll, is lobotomized. You take the hero of the movie and more or less kill her off at the end. What the hell did you do that for? It violates the hero’s journey.

Working out why a movie didn’t work is one of the fastest ways to diagnose why a chapter isn’t working. The filmmakers on this list had every resource imaginable and broke those promises anyway, and it’s inexcusable. A novelist has no studio to blame when the promise breaks, and no excuse for breaking it to readers who trusted the book.

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