Audience-Alienating Premise cleanup

Sigh

• Arrested development: Seems okay
• Community: Not sure
• Friday night lights : Confused
• last week: Nah not an example. His show is really popular
• monty python: And You Thought It Would Fail
• star trek : Uh don't think this is quite Th is since its still a classic even now. Maybe theirs some other censorship trope we can put it under.

Isn't Arrested Development too popular for this? If i remember correctly, its resumption on Netflix was triggered by massive fan demand

I think the entry states it was why the original run didnt work out which seems fine.

fair enough

BTW guys, the trope now has a TRS thread.

Bringing up the following example from The Playboy Club:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Much of the show's undoing came from its premise that portrayed being a Playboy Bunny as somehow being a liberating experience during the women's rights movement and change in gender attitudes in The '60s, which was seen as an epic case of Completely Missing The Point. As one reviewer for The AV Club stated in a review comparing the show with Pan Am:^note The quote is in the comments section in the linked article
  Meredith Blake: […] [D]o I have to point out how dressing up in a skimpy rabbit costume is slightly more degrading than wearing a powder blue suit? […] [Y]es, The Playboy Club is about 10 times worse because it's actually pretending that being a bunny was somehow a liberating experience.

This was recently added to Artemis Fowl:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: It's an adaptation of Artemis Fowl that changed a huge amount of things from the books, many of which were crucial to the plot and backstory, like Artemis being a villainous genius, Root being male and Butler never revealing his first name. The majority of the fanbase were incensed by the changes, and didn't want to see the movie as a result.

Unfaithful adaptations are pretty common, so no.

In Name Only is not the premise. The premise is "Irish Teen Genius kidnaps a fairy and holds her for ransom".

What does the commonness of something have to do with whether it alienates an audience?

At least one thing central to the premise — Artemis being a Villain Protagonist — was changed.

"Work doesn't have a Villain Protagonist" isn't exactly audience-alienating, though.

The YMMV page for the film is already pretty much nothing but pointing out how people didn't like the deviations from the source. Why shoehorn another trope just to make the same point again?

I think Audience-Alienating Premise should explain why a work's premise failed to attract a general audience. If it alienated fans of the source material, that aspect can be included in the entry, but something about the basic premise should put off the casual movie-going audience as well.

If it's just explaining why the premise put off fans of the work, that's more They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.

Edited by chasemaddigan on Sep 2nd 2020 at 9:19:34 AM

Bringing up this example from Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: A sequel to an extremely divisive show/film, with Meryl Streep's character being dead, and built around ABBA songs that either weren't popular enough to make it in the first time or, like "Fernando", could only be very awkwardly made to fit in. Alternatively to the second point, Here We Go Again having to rely on several ABBA songs that weren't used the first time around made some people (read: ABBA superfans) very, very happy...

Cut it.

Bringing up the following example from the film section of Catwoman:

• Audience-Alienating Premise:
  • A film about Batman's longtime nemesis Catwoman with no Batman in it was bound to be this, especially if said Catwoman was not even Selina Kyle to begin with. Not helping was the film's higher priority on cat-related puns, Halle Berry's sex appeal, and a scheme involving a very dangerous facial cream.
  • Even more alienating, a movie about female empowerment yet complete with a metric ton of Male Gaze Fanservice was just asking for trouble.

It seems people will look for any excuse to bash this movie.

So...cut?

Bringing up the following example from The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: "Ultron-5" seems to portray pacifism as a hopeless cause, especially when Hank gives it up about three episodes later.

And this example from The Baby-Sitters Club:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: In Stacey's Ex-Best Friend, the moral of the story seems to be: if your longtime best friend apparently Took a Level in Jerkass, you should immediately end the friendship after your first fight. It's not like she can eventually realize her mistakes and become a good friend again, it's better to write her a letter to be sure she will never call you again.

Ax them both. They're both simply complaining.

Bringing up the following example from The Morning Show

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Many reviews point out that the show is trying to walk a very dangerous tightrope in presenting a #MeToo target as sympathetic and undeserving of all he gets.

Not what I’d call a “premise.”

Bringing up the following example from Blade Runner 2049:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: A big-budget sequel to a moody, somewhat depressing R-rated Cult Classic from thirty years ago (which itself bombed financially), that's light on the action and heavy on the philosophical brooding, was always going to be fighting an uphill battle at the box office, no matter how good the reviews were. The nearly three-hour runtime didn't help matters. What's perhaps less surprising than the fact that it didn't make its money back was the fact that Villeneuve and crew were handed such a big budget in the first place, Villeneuve's Auteur License was solid enough that he was given the task to direct a new adaptation of Dune afterwards (after another high profile flop from The '80s).

Bringing up the following example from Cuties:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The Contemptible Cover combined with the film featuring the sexualisation of minors caused some to accuse the film of having a Broken Aesop and participating in the exploitation it decried. This gave the film a reputation of being clueless at best and borderline child porn at worst.

And this is how the same film is written about on AudienceAlienatingPremise.Film:

• Cuties focuses on an eleven year old dancing group performing sexualised dances to win a competition juxtaposed with the protagonist's restrictive Islamic background. Even without the Contemptible Cover Netflix had to apologise for, this film would still have had to fight an uphill battle to gain an audience.

Cut both of those. It's just a pitfall of how Netflix advertised the film.

Bringing up the following examples from AudienceAlienatingPremise.Film:

• Most live action adaptations of popular cartoons have a specific formula for success, so when one attempts to stand out from the rest of the pack, this trope will likely ensue.
  • With the 2015 film version of Jem and the Holograms, Universal Pictures managed to make a film that appealed to no one. Somebody thought it would be a good idea to take a cult '80s cartoon with a devoted fanbase and reboot it while injecting it with many drastic changes and clichés. The fanbase was alienated, and younger audiences had no interest seeing a film based on a 1980s property they knew nothing about. The result was one of the worst opening weekends for a movie playing in wide release (2,400+ theaters), and the worst ever for a film released by a major studio, even on a modest $5 million budget, and it was eventually pulled from theaters in just two weeks. Even The Nostalgia Critic, who openly admitted to having never watched the original cartoon, felt alienated by it:
    Critic: People, as someone who didn't watch Jem growing up and only kinda saw it once in a while in passing, even I can say this movie's an insult! It goes out of its way to piss you off in every conceivable fashion! It doesn't work as a standalone film, it doesn't work as an adaptation, the choices make no sense, and it does everything in its power to make sure the fans will hate it! Look, I'm not gonna act like I enjoyed the stupid cartoon. We all had our shows that only existed to sell toys, I had mine, you had yours, and that's fine, but there's a definite audience that grew up with this and while I know there has to be changes when adapting the show to film, there is absolutely no respect and no love for any of the people that grew up with it. Say what you want about Transformers, but it had Transformers! This has no Jem... and they're strangely proud of that!
  • On the opposite extreme, there's Josie and the Pussycats, which updates the classic '70s cartoon into an adult-oriented Self-Parody/Satire on the music industry. While other adult-oriented self parodies of Hanna-Barbera shows were successful, those were mostly [adult swim] shows based on their more obscure properties (Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021, Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law) where they could find cult audiences. This being a better-known name on a more mainstream venue, moviegoers were expecting something they could take their kids to, only to be disappointed when the ratings said otherwise. Thus, the movie bombed, the Home Video release was heavily edited down, and the then-upcoming Scooby-Doo movie (which was originally going to be a similarly more adult take on the source material) was reworked into a more Family Friendly flick.
  • And then of course there is Dragon Ball Evolution. Someone thought it was a good idea to take one of the most well known, famous, and beloved mangas and animes of all time, one that many would argue is the most well-known and beloved, and do a live-action version that contains a perfect storm of tired clichés that blew away literally everything fans of the source material enjoyed. Naturally, fans of Dragon Ball were utterly enraged by the movie's premise, while with everyone else it was such an unnecessarily clichéd and uninteresting plot with such lackluster special effects that it failed to attract the attention of casual moviegoers or fans of the fantasy/action genre. It was so bad, and Akira Toriyama hated it so much, that he reportedly returned to the franchise to undo the damage it did and redeem his creation: yes, it was so alienating the series' own creator feared it had alienated people from the entire franchise and had to set things right.
  • Speed Racer is an odd case. When people heard that the Wachowskis were behind the movie, they expected it to be a gritty and serious Matrix-style re-imagining of the classic anime. What they got was a fairly faithful and straightforward adaptation, full of Camp and retro aesthetics.
  • Along the same lines of the above two, there's The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, which was expected by many to be another tired rehash of the old-cartoon-to-live-action-film formula popularized by The Flintstones and fellow Jay Ward property George of the Jungle. It was naturally met with a polarizing response, though only a few fans see that the film is actually an almost campy self-parody that faithfully captures the original show's wry sense of humor, and it was clear that nearly everyone involved had much respect for the source material. It still ended up as a Box Office Bomb nonetheless. The fact that it came in the wake of the similar failure of Dudley Do-Right (which itself was adapted from one of the show's supporting segments) didn't help much.