Okay, so today I’m going to go over a few formulas I have for a good story, as well as a couple of character study aspects. Let’s start with the formulas shall we?

Dark/Sad ending =/= bad movie.
Okay I know a lot of us grew up on Disney stories and fairy tales and are used to the happy endings. So when we get a story that doesn’t give us ‘happily ever after,’ it messes with us. It makes us mad, shocks us, but then make us think.

A good example of this would be… and I hate making this reference, The Butterfly Effect. There are three endings to this movie the happy one, the dark (original) one, and the neutral (theatrical) ending. Now let me just say that keeping the dark ending wouldn’t have saved the movie, but it would have made it a little less un-watchable. In that ending, the main protagonist goes back in time to when he was in the womb and sacrifices himself to save his friends by making himself a still-born. This makes you think because the mother mentions how she has had other still-born babies, which we can now assume had similar stories. Again, this doesn’t make the movie good, just a little less completely awful. But if you can get past pedophilia, brutal animal abuse, murder, etc, give it a whirl.

Another good example is the ending to pretty much any horror story… Think about it, very rarely does it end well for the characters. They usually wind up alone, dead, severely damaged, or even damned.

Good Villain = Good movie.
This has been proven time and time again and it’s a point that I subscribe to. I don’t care what anyone says to the controversy, you can have a story that is absolutely horrendous, but it will still be decent if it has a decent villain. I don’t know what’s been going on with the generations lately, but we are far more interested in the development of the villain and their descent into darkness vs. the stale, albiet time-honor developement of the hero.
A perfect example of this would be The Masters of the Universe… This movie took a bashing at the box office, it was considered corny, and the gay overtones were practically in your face (if not sometimes literally in your face. Do we really need all those close-ups of Dolf??). That said, Frank Langella as Skeletor. Suddenly, a movie that was barely tolerable, became something of a guilty pleasure to me.

This, to me was a powerhouse performance and kept the movie from being a complete disaster. It really shows just how intense Frank Langella, a very underrated actor in my opinion, can be.

Another perfect example of this would be “The Dark Knight.” No, I’m actually not talking about the joker. I’m talking about Harvey Dent AKA Two-Face. While of course the Heath Ledger Joker surprised everyone and made the general public finally realize (albeit too late) that he was more than just another pretty boy that made the teenie boppers scream, Harvey, I felt was overlooked and his story was actually the more powerful one.
The Joker was there to be the bad guy, his mission was to wreak havoc… no rhym or reason for it, no back story or explanation of his madness, at least none that can be corroborated. Some argue that this makes him all the more scarey being shrouded in mystery, I think it’s a weak plot device.
Two-Face on the other hand has a very dynamic story in both the movie and the comics. Batman is batman and ends the movie as batman. The Joker is the Joker and end the movie as… you know I don’t think they ever really established what happened specifically.
Harvey by the end of the movie was Two-Face. You watch as a small quirk in his personality begins to manifest itself and the madness turns him into the villain he inevitably becomes. This is one of the few characters that you know is going to fall from grace, but he’s such a great character as a good guy that you don’t actually want to see it happen. I guess you could argue that he has a Darth Vader complex in this way (we’ll touch more on this later).

3. $$>Storytelling = Bad story.
Yes I know, no one works for free, I get that, we’re all out to make money, but there is a difference between doing something well and doing something with dollar signs in your eyes. Allow me to explain, George Lucas wanted to make money. There’s no real way of debating this, he maintained all the international copyrights on everything Star Wars. However he also spared no expense when he made his movies. He dumped everything he had into them, knowing full well that if they flopped, he’d be out on the streets begging for change. It’s a risk, but the payoff was well worth it.
Now let’s take a look at say… Dungeons and Dragons.
This was a rather blatant attempt to cash in on the ever popular Role Playing Game, Books, and culture. The production company skimped on everything in this movie. The actors, the costumes, the set, the CGI… I think the only place they didn’t skimp was on Jeremy Irons. In addition to this, they did something that royally pissed audiences off with this movie: They didn’t end the movie. No I’m serious, they didn’t end it. They pretty much said, the story isn’t over and there is more to come… but guess what? NO SEQUEL WAS MADE!

The production company was banking on a sequel and making money so much that they forgot that the movie has to actually work before they make any!

4. They lived happily ever after… MEANS NO SEQUEL!!!
Disney has been arguably the worst offenders in this case. However I can cite other examples as well if your tired of my Disney-bashing (Love Never Dies… looking at you!) Take any of their movies and look at the story. By the end, all the loose ends are tied up, all is as it should be, and the main characters can now focus on their lives together as their adventure is over… right? Yes?
Well the people who owned the rights didn’t think so. Instead, they rehashed several crap story lines, many of which were identical to the original, and either used the main character’s child, or introduced a new villain, a new plot point, or all of the above. This wreaked of the bossmen saying “We want a sequel to this movie, come up with a story in 3 weeks and get it into production or you’re fired.”
I mostly just pretend these don’t exist. But they’re not the only ones… Avatar is coming out with a new movie from what I understand, Jaw (most famous for flopping in sequels) did it and suffered, and a multitude of others joined these movies in infamy. For non-movies… The Last Unicorn is a perfect example. It really didn’t need a sequel.