You are going to be SHOCKED at the movie I endorse at the end of this post
A lot of people in Hollywood are asking the question: how did A Big Bold Beautiful Journey bomb? It’s the follow-up film for THE STAR OF BARBIE, one of the biggest hits in movie history, a movie that made $635 million at the domestic box office. Yet Big Bold couldn’t even squeak out $4 million. What is going on here? Make it make sense!
This is actually a multi-faceted answer, so I want you to pay close attention. Because I really wanted this movie to succeed. It’s unique. I like the genre. I think this director is a visionary. And when movies like A Big Bold Beautiful Journey do well, it opens the doors for Hollywood to take more risks.
This is a big reason Hollywood is so reluctant to give up the superhero genre despite its deteriorating quality and increasingly lackluster box office. It’s because on the other side of that is darkness, is uncertainty, and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey shows you what can happen with that risk. It can go south quickly.
But there’s a lot going on here, so let’s get into it. The first reason this didn’t do well is obvious. Margot Robbie has been gone for two years since Barbie took over the world. All that buzz she created got swallowed up into a black hole of stagnation. If this would’ve come out six months after Barbie, it would’ve made at least $20 million.
Big Bold’s failure is also a reminder that concept matters. It used to be that it didn’t matter what the concept was for movie stars. Arnold Schwarzenegger could literally appear in the dumbest movie idea ever – Kindergarten Cop – and people would still show up because it was Arnold Schwarzenegger. But these days, the concept’s gotta be good. Actually, before the concept can even be good, it’s gotta be clear. What is the actual movie? I’m not sure people knew what this movie was about.
That brings us to the screenplay, what we here at Scriptshadow are experts at assessing. And I read this one back in 2021. To me, it felt like, if not a writer’s first screenplay, their second or third screenplay. Let me explain.
Two of the things that a lot of beginner screenwriters write are quirky coming-of-age-ish romantic stories and magical realism. Both genres are like threading a needle in the dark – there’s this incredibly narrow target you have to hit to make them work. Magical realism, in particular, is tough because it’s never entirely clear what the rules are. How magical are things allowed to get? And when the writer starts deciding those rules on the fly, the reader/viewer starts losing trust in the story quickly.
That’s what I remember from reading this. The writer was playing fast and loose with the rules of his world. It’s 20 years ago and we’re in high school and the adult version of the character is in the play instead of the high school aged version of the character and everyone just goes with it while we’re sitting there thinking, WTF.
When you look at something like A Christmas Carol, that story did a great job setting up its rules. It laid everything out for us. Ghosts of the past, present, and future are coming. Once we were in these different times, we could only watch, not participate. That’s how you do magical realism. You can’t just roll with it or things start to feel very loosey-goosey. We don’t understand what’s happening.
And I would argue that when you watch the trailer for this movie, that’s what you see. You sort of understand what you’re looking at. But you don’t totally get it. And that’s a big deal when you’re trying to sell a movie. It needs to make immediate sense to the potential audience member what the movie’s about!
Finally, you’ve got the cast. And this is probably the reason that trumps all of these reasons. There was no chemistry here. You can see the actors doing their best to force the chemistry. But that’s exactly when you know there is no chemistry. Chemistry between actors either happens or it doesn’t. And you saw that here. And if the chemistry doesn’t work in a romantic movie, you’re done.
Which is too bad. Because I love Kogonada as a director and I know exactly why he picked this movie to make. His talent lies in his visual aesthetic. He read this script and realized how much he could do in that area. And there’s also this underlying sadness to the story, which I know he also loves. But if you’ve got a quirky script that feels try-hard and you’ve got two actors whose chemistry feels try-hard, you can’t salvage that.
The news wasn’t all bad for Black List scripts over the weekend. “Him,” with its odd pairing of sports and horror, made $13.5 million to finish in second place behind Demon Squabble: Zanzibar’s Revenge. But all is not touchdowns and playoff appearances for this film, which is getting murdered by critics and audiences alike. The word of mouth seems to be so bad that, after some nice Thursday preview numbers, they were thinking the movie could make $18 million. But word got out that it was worse than a Chicago Bears draft night and receipts plummeted quickly.
I reviewed the script when it was called Goat and I saw these issues in big shiny flashing letters back then. In some ways, the script is similar to A Big Bold Beautiful Journey in that it contains magical realism as well, just a more “horror” version of it.
But what I remember most about the script is that it was sloppy. And even though this director is the real deal – he added a ton of style to the finished product and made this movie look interesting – you can’t overcome a) lack of effort in writing, and b) sloppiness in writing. And “Goat” had both. And all of the complaints about the movie are in line with these issues. You can see it in the trailer as well. In the same breath as you say, “That looks cool,” you say, “But it also looks like a total mess.”
Which brings me to our final movie critique of the day. And folks, it doesn’t happen often. But once every 20 years or so, I’m wrong. I am here to admit that I was wrong about a film. I’ve been hard on this film ever since it was announced, ever since it came out with its first trailer, ever since the publicity tour leading up to the movie. I’ve been extremely hard on this writer-director. I’ve given one of his scripts a “what the hell did I just read.”
But look, we all get it wrong every once in a while. And I got this one wrong. How wrong? I can confidently say that this movie will end up in my Top 10 of the year.
The film?
Eddington.
That’s right. I said it. Ari Aster’s movie. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say it’s genius. But it has genius-ness within it.
I originally watched this movie last week but, because I had already read the script, I wasn’t giving it my full attention. As the week progressed, I noticed that I kept thinking about the film and, once the weekend rolled around, I decided to watch it again. And I’m very glad that I did because this is a movie that deserves a lot more attention than it’s gotten.
For starters, I thought Joaquin Phoenix was spectacular. He plays a very difficult character, this sort of simpleton spineless sheriff who decides to run for mayor despite being way in over his head. And he’s captivating to watch. Because, despite him being a total moron, he’s the only person in town who is being rational about Covid (which plays a big part in the story). Everyone else is yelling at him and recording him in the supermarket when he won’t wear a mask.
This is probably one of the reasons this movie didn’t get pushed more by the industry. It definitely puts a mirror up to the absurdity with which the industry was acting at the time. But I would argue that one of the great things about this movie is that it doesn’t take a side. It expertly maneuvers right down the middle politically, always choosing dramatic impact over message. For example (spoiler), a big plot point at the end is that Joaquin’s character is compromised because he catches Covid due to the fact that he walked around without a mask the whole movie.
The movie does a great job capturing the chaos of that time. And maybe people don’t want to revisit that. I get it. But from a screenwriting perspective, it’s good stuff. He keeps the drama taut throughout. And he DEFINITELY improved the draft that I reviewed on the site.
This is an incredibly complex story. There are lots of moving parts, both on the character end and the plot end. When you have that much complexity in a script, you have to rewrite the shit out of it. I would argue that scripts like that have no end point. You literally can ALWAYS improve them because you can always better set something up or better connect Plot Thread #13 with Plot Thread #6. Which I saw Aster do. The draft he shot was a lot cleaner and more cohesive than the earlier draft.
With that said, Aster made a critical screenwriting mistake that all of us make and it’s something that’s very hard to avoid as writers. But conquering it ALWAYS makes the script better. And I’ll explain by going back to another Joaquin Phoenix movie, this one his first official leading role, where he played the older brother in M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs.”
In that movie, which is about a family privately dealing with an alien visitation, M. Night got some feedback about his script from a producer friend. And the producer friend said, “You know, the script is great. And I thought the one scene with the family trying to get the alien radio signal from their transistor radio was interesting. Too bad it will never make the movie.”
And M. Night said, “What are you talking about?” “Oh,” the friend said, as if obvious. “You know. It’s one of those scenes that’s fun to write but never works in the movie. It’s the first scene the studio always has you cut.” If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s this scene where this rural family is trying to get a signal from the aliens and the baby monitor is giving too much noise so they have to reach the monitor up higher into the sky to get the signal but it’s still not getting it so they get on top of their car. But it’s still not getting it. So they all start climbing on top of each other and creating this small little human hill on top of the car in order to get the radio up as high as possible until they finally get the signal.
M. Night was miffed by this critique and because he had carte blanche with making movies at the time, he put the scene in his movie anyway. And it was… not good. It was exactly what the friend said. It was forced, it was try-hard. It didn’t make real-world sense. And the most important detail: It could’ve been axed and nothing would’ve been lost from the movie. In fact, the movie would’ve had a much faster pace without it.
As writers, we fall in love with certain scenes and plotlines, usually early on in the screenplay’s life. And then when the script evolves into something slightly different, we hold onto those initial scenes and plotlines, even though they don’t really make sense in the story anymore.
The Emma Stone Austin Butler weird wife cult leader plotline in Eddington is one of the worst plotlines I’ve ever encountered in a movie. It didn’t connect with anything at all. It didn’t make sense. Why is this nationally known young handsome charismatic cult leader who can literally have any woman in the world, falling in love with the weirdo half-comatose 40 year old crazy lady in the middle of nowhere town Eddington, New Mexico???? There’s literally nothing about that that makes sense.
It’s your job as a writer to kill those storylines when they’re not working. Because you know they’re not working. You know it! Every time you read your script, you feel the awkwardness and the clumsiness of those sections. But you keep convincing yourself that you’ll figure it out in the rewrites. Some things can’t be figured out! You gotta kill your babies sometimes.
Had Aster been honest with himself about this and cut this storyline, he could’ve cut 20 minutes out of this movie, which would’ve massively improved the pacing and the running time, which was too long. And now, every plotline we would’ve cut to, we would’ve been interested in, as opposed to before when, sometimes, we had to endure this boring plotline.
And the thing is, he still could’ve salvaged it if he’d ditched the whole cult stuff. If it were just about his wife potentially being sexually assaulted by the mayor when she was younger, that could’ve worked. But Aster reached too far and got lost in a plotline that didn’t work.
With that said, I’ve found that the best movies often have some messiness to them. They’re imperfect. So, maybe this is just the price you pay to get a movie that’s so inventive and thoughtful and different and unexpected. It’s not going to be for everyone. But I’m more than happy to admit that I was wrong about this and that Eddington may low-key be the best movie of the year.
I have another screenplay consultation deal available! $150 off full price. If you want it, e-mail me at carsonreeves1@gmail.com
