User blog comment:Creeper50/Can a bad idea be done greatly?/@comment-28266772-20161022181450

I think because 'bad' is a subjective term it's going to be a problem to argue this out properly. Similarly, it's hard to define success. Do I consider Adam Sandler's latest cinematic efforts to be good? No I consider them to be fucking terrible but they make enough money to keep everyone happy and someone is clearly watching them. So a bad idea can be executed badly but it still 'succeeds' as a movie because people watch it and the people who make it get enough money to do more. Is this the only way to measure success? Nope, but it's hard to argue that it's one of many different ways to measure success that shouldn't be dismissed. Afterall I doubt Adam Sandler feels like a failure while he plays the latest Battlefield on a screen the size of Manhattan.

So I guess what I'm saying is there's no real way to know because everyone will have different ways of defining 'bad' and different ways of defining 'success'. Similarly how do you define an idea? If some producer leans across to his minion and whispers "I wanna make a movie with giant robots" is that the original idea? Or is the original idea what ends up brewing in the head of someone like Guillermo Del Toro? I'm not saying things don't start with singular original ideas that grow like seeds; I'm just saying that if you ask a producer, a director and a writer who came up with the movie's core idea all three will probably say "me".

On a more definitive note I'd like to nominate The Lego Movie. The basic idea is an absolute abomination created for the sole purpose of being a marketing ploy. And yet from that we wound up with a funny children's movie that was critically and commercially successful which riffs on the very underlying philosophy of corporate greed that led to its creation in the first place in a way that isn't insincere or annoying. Another example for me is X-Men First Class. It was made solely because someone wanted to keep onto the rights and it was chucked together quickly based on the stupid idea of "an X-Men prequel". A big studio made a  product. That was it's origin; not an artistic effort just pure number mashing and corporate dick waving. And yet it wound up awesome and is easily my favourite of them all because it was put in the hands of people who love the source material and saw it as an opportunity rather than a burden.

I think it shows that flowers can bloom in even the smelliest piles of dogshit. So yeah I think there is an element of truth to what you're saying. Some ideas are fucking terrible but still end up being great because somewhere along the lines they end up in the hands of the right people. I don't believe an idea can be terrible in the way you describe it; rather I think an idea is terrible when the reasoning behind it is terrible instead of thinking that specific ideas can be fundamentally broken.