Minor Mogul

Don’t make these movies!

By MAT
Posted February 27, 2025

Making any movie is hard work, and it’s possible to do all that work and still make a bad movie. It all starts with an idea — so make sure your idea is original and interesting to people other than you. Here are some movies that we have already seen eleventy-squillion times, so you don’t need to make them again:

1) Any movie about a group of recent film-school grads struggling to make a movie.

2) A dramedy about four twenty-something young men who throw a house party and connect or fail to connect with the women in their lives. Extra cliche points if one of them comes out as gay.

3) A drama about two estranged family members who reconnnect at the funeral of a third family member. Extra cliche points if the deceased committed suicide.

4) A noir drama about a jaded hitman who just wants to feel a human connection. Extra cliche points if he spends a lot of time sitting alone smoking a cigarette and staring into the middle distance.

Extra, extra cliche points if he wears a wife-beater undershirt and sits next to a formica table with a handgun on it. Bonus extra cliche points if it’s shot in black-and-white.

5) Fan films (especially Batman fan-films; creators behind these projects usually have a multi-movie slate planned that will finally “do Batman right”, as soon as someone answers their request for James Gunn’s cellphone number).

The major IP owners have usually been tolerant as long as you don’t charge money for your Amateur Hour, but you can’t legally show these films to anyone except your own friends whom you invite into into your own living room.

Always remember: you’re playing in someone else’s sandbox. At any time, some low-level lawyer at Warner Discovery can get your fan-film pulled from YouTube, and the law is completely (and rightly) on their side.

6) A semi-autobiographical drama about you heroically coming out as gay, or heroically overcoming abuse, or heroically dealing with mental illness.

Art is therapeutic, not therapy. I’m really sorry that you’ve had a hard life, and I will advocate and work for public policy that helps people who need it — but that is a far cry from saying that this will make an interesting movie.

No, you’re not going to “raise awareness” of your pet issue, because you have no audience and nothing new to say. You had better have a damned good point other than “This is what I went through,” if you want to make a movie people will watch out of something other than politeness.

Extra cliche points if you reply in anger, “This actually happened!” So what? It’s still a bad movie.