Friendship Games: Too Many Villains, Too Little Time

[The MegaBrony 218]

Quick, name a good movie with at least three fully-fleshed-out villains who made an impact on the audience. Said villains have to only be in one film, which means Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lord of The Rings don't count due to giving their characters multiple films to flesh them out.

 

It takes a lot of elbow room to make someone like Hector Barbossa, Darth Vader, or Loki so memorable. Thus with a standalone movie (the EG films are only 70 minutes long), the more baddies there are, the less time you have to make each one memorable in any way. Friendship Games is a 70-minute movie with no less than seven villains. Seven. One of which needs the others to be able to make any impact, while the most remembered one (Midnight Sparkle) only shows up near the end and isn't even onscreen for more than three minutes. With only 70 minutes to flesh them out, it's no wonder many people forgot about the ones not called Midnight Sparkle.

 

Most good movies introduce the Big Bad in their first act. In the first 30 minutes of A New Hope, all the Kung Fu Pandas, Ant-Man, Stardust (an awesome movie), Over The Hedge, and The LEGO Movie, we know who the Big Bad is and what problem he/she is causing. Now that's how action and adventure movies are supposed to work.

 

Meanwhile, both Pixels and Pacific Rim (which I both liked) had a handful of minibosses that came and went. Terminator Genisys has four killer robots, two of which are killed halfway through the film, while the other two only appear in the final act. And X-Men: Days of Future Past juggles four major antagonists: Mystique, Magneto, Bolivar Trask, and the Sentinels. At least the former two have multiple films.

 

Remember, the best standalone films spend time establishing one villain. If Legends of Everfree one-ups FG just by doubling the number of villains...

[Evil_Emperor 176]

I don't consider all of the Shadowbolts villains, they were just the opposing team. The ones who were clearly mean spirited got what time they needed to demonstrate what a deleterious effect Crystal Preps style of teaching had on their young minds. I'm not refuting or challenging your analysis, I somewhat agree with it, but these are just my thoughts. Poor Lemon Zest only had one line in the entire movie, and from what we saw, we can only conclude she, unlike the others, was actually kind of nice. Maybe that's why, against all odds, she is somehow my favorite Shadowbolt,

[Megas 27,069]

The problem with the Shadowbolts was that they were heavily advertised before the movie came out while Cinch was hardly anywhere to be seen in the promotions, but the exact opposite happened with Cinch being the main villain while the Shadowbolts weren't given much to do as expected. Everyone expected Sci-Twi to play a big role, but people were going into the movie expecting more evil/cute schoolgirls instead of a crabby old principal.

 

They've been used in supplemental material like books and such, Josh Haber said on Twitter that they aren't done with them, and they might have originally done more with them with the original ending having Twilight staying at CP instead, so maybe they'll get their proper due in the future

[cmarston1 5,952]

I was a bit disappointed that we didn't get to see too much of the shadowbolts in Friendship Games.

I am really hoping we get to see more of them and see their characters fleshed out a bit more, even if it comes through some the EQG shorts or something.

[Unlikeable Pony 2,698]

 

Remember, the best standalone films spend time establishing one villain. If Legends of Everfree one-ups FG just by doubling the number of villains...

 

 

I don't think you have much to worry about there; Friendship games REEKS of plot tumors and indecision in the movie making process; they were cutting and changing plots in the movie WELL past the point when you would ever want to do that kind of stuff (like how they realized how poorly Sunset's subplot would mesh with the other parts of the movie).

They had multiple plot ideas (the shadowbolts as foils to the mane six, which was how their bios on the website advertised them and how the movie tried to play them up. Then they had Sunset wanting to go home. Then they had Sci twilight) none of which harmonized well with each other and in fact conflicted. As such, the multiple antagonists angle was due to all the conflicting ideas for the movie, and were unable to just start cutting things out due to toys (I feel pretty sure that the shadowbolts were most probably heavily backed by hasbro due to all the toy ideas they could do with them as recolors, so they had to stay)

 

So I don't think you have much to worry about For legend of everfree: They only have ONE new character in gloriosa, and this seems to imply they most likely are planning on doing a tighter movie plot with less characters.