Troubled Production / Fictional Examples

Fictional examples of troubled productions.

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Advertising

• The classic Alka-Seltzer "That's a spicy meatball!" commercial where an actor needs to do dozens of takes for his single line on a commercial shoot because he keeps messing up. In the end, he says the line right...only for a door on the set behind him fall off, resulting in yet another take.
• A 2011 commercial for the Citi card is told from the perspective of a makeup artist working on a film. This trope seems to be in play if the lead's cell phone going off, rain delay, and demand for a bigger explosion are any indication. Funnily enough, the makeup artist in the commercial is played by Patricia Ja Lee, who has actually dealt with troubled productions in the past during her tenure on Power Rangers.
  "I thought we'd be on location for three days. It's been three weeks."

Anime & Manga

• Cardcaptor Sakura: An OVA reveals that the iconic first opening was actually filmed by Tomoyo with Sakura (reluctantly) participating. Unfortunately, poor Sakura flubs up a few things and even panics when she’s asked to sing the theme, but Tomoyo is able to pivot gracefully.
• Case Closed: In a filler case, the cast befriends the young leader of a drama troupe that seems to have serious problems. The script writer is a bitter Jerkass, said troupe leader is a sweetie but he's overwhelmed due to his lack of experience, the treasurer had embezzled quite a sum of money, two troupe members die... Oh dear.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Parodied when the cast tries to make a movie, and everyone's favorite Reality Warper starts causing...problems. Mikuru nearly kills Kyon with her spontaneously developed Eye Beams, a cat gains advanced intellect and the ability to speak, extinct birds appear out of nowhere, and so on. Also, Haruhi is even more of a jerk than usual.
• Jewelpet Sunshine: Masago's movie. Since he favors his lead actress Garnet excessively, it leads to complaints on part of the rest of the cast, which are rebuffed by Masago in true Prima Donna Director style. This causes both cast and crew to walk off until he realizes that making a movie is worthless if no one's having fun, apologizes to everyone and starts accepting suggestions. After this, another problem arises; lead actor Jasper can't get a pivotal scene right and collapses from exhaustion, so Masago takes it upon himself to replace him.
• The Kindaichi Case Files: Some case arcs have this trope as part of their premises, usually involving Reika.
  • In "Reika Hayami Kidnapping Murder Case", Reika is kidnapped shortly after the start of the case arc due to being unlucky enough to witness someone else in the film-making crew being abducted before the kidnapper notices and kidnaps her as well. As she is part of the cast, the filming is forced to be postponed while Kindaichi tries to help get her out safely.
  • The "Black Spirit Hotel Murder Case" starts out with the film production already getting rough as the result of three part-time workers quitting while the film-making is still ongoing, which causes Reika to send a plea for help to Kindaichi, prompting both Kindaichi and Miyuki to fill in the spots. And this is before the murder case even begins to unfold.
• Kirby: Right Back at Ya! has "Cartoon Buffoon", involving the characters struggling to make a cartoon. Hilarity Ensues
• Paranoia Agent: (Darkly) parodied in Episode 10. It's hard to produce an anime series when your production staff just can't seem to get along. It's even harder when the crew starts getting killed off one by one.
• Sailor Moon R: In "Steal a Kiss from Mamoru: An's Project Snow White", the Sailors learn that Mamoru is having troubles with a play — the class he was in all walked off the project over roles. Usagi, who is trying to break through what she thinks is Laser-Guided Amnesia since his death and resurrection, decides they should help him out. The girls end up fighting over who should be the lead of the play "Snow White" — Rei, because she chose the play; Usagi, because she's cute and adorable; Makoto, because of her "talent"; Minako, because she has grace and elegance; and Ami, because being Snow White would be easy for for such a studious girl with so few lines. Not even Naru and Umino can stop them! However, An shows up with the idea for them to draw straws — red gets the Evil Queen, white gets Snow White and blue gets the "fairies". However, An cheats, tearing off her straw piece so that she got white instead of blue, leaving Usagi as the queen and the rest as "fairies". When An offers Ali the role of the last "fairy", he rejects it and, out of jealousy as he wanted to be the prince to An's Snow White, summons a Cardian to disrupt it. When it attacks, the simple Snow White play turns into a fight between the Cardian and the Sailor Guardians, which the audience don't realize is not part of the play.
• Yes! Pretty Cure 5: One episode Urara's first show, an outdoor stage show, go completely off the rails. The actress playing the main character falls ill during rehearsals, leading Nozomi, who was kicked out of the Drama Club after just two days, to decide to take over. Then, there was trying to get Nozomi to get through the show without klutzing out. Then, during the show, Girinma shows up and summons the Monster of the Week, forcing the girls to figure out a way to transform and fight the thing. And it is a hit! However, when Urara's manager asks her if she could pull that off again, she's left speechless and the other four vocalize what she wants to say: "No way!"

Comic Books

• Watchmen: Sally Jupiter, the original Silk Spectre, became a superhero in part to aid the possibility of a film career for her. The film seems to have hit snags rather quickly after Sally Jupiter's career did. It spent a decade in production, went through four titles, changed genre multiple times from a documentary to a children's matinee to a borderline softcore-bondage skin flick, and swapped out the lead actress while still retaining a lot of old footage. By the time Silk Swingers of Suburbia came out as a B-movie, Sally had been retired for a year, and it received a thorough critical thrashing.

Comic Strips

• For Better or for Worse: After Rebecca becomes a pop star, she decides to hold a Halloween concert at her high school with her former band 4Evah as an opening act. While preparing for the concert, 4Evah's April Patterson recruits her uncle Phil after he tells her about the trumpet and how it works. 4Evah puts on a surprisingly good show as a result, then everything goes wrong for Rebecca. The sound system cuts out, one of her band members shows up drunk, and another is stoned. Rebecca ends up running offstage crying and April goes to comfort her.
• Heart of the City: Dean tries to do a Han Solo origin story using puppets. The cast doesn't help at times, as Heart bungles her lines and the other two question the script, the budget is finished with firecrackers for a climactic explosion that even set a puppet on fire, and Dean spends all-nighters editing, making his grades fail.

Films — Live-Action

• And God Spoke is a mockumentary about an attempt to create a biblical epic that goes downhill as the production goes on, resulting in a film that looks nothing like the filmmakers' vision, but does end up as a So Bad, It's Good cult classic.
• Babylon (2022), in a strong resonance to Singin' in the Rain shows a case of this restricted to a single scene of Nellie's first talkie: the recording demands make her struggle with her delivery, and at two points she also misses her mark (which can't be moved, because it's set right below the overhead microphone which would require a long and complicated process to be dragged just a few inches away), plus any unexpected noise ruins the take, to the annoyance and eventual anger of everyone on set. And once they do nail the take, the cameraman who is inside a hermetically sealed booth - after all, cameras were loud back in the day - has died from heat exhaustion.
• The Bad and the Beautiful is a bitter condemnation of the increasingly ruthless Hollywood system of the 1940s and '50s, personified in producer Jonathan Shields. The son of a producer so hated in the industry that his funeral was mostly attended by paid studio extras, Shields flounders in B-movie hell until he creates a surprise hit by utilizing the concept of Nothing Is Scarier rather than show ridiculous "cat men" costumes. But he continually finds himself in various binds that cause him to betray his collaborators, and his effort to direct a film himself after driving the studio director to quit is a self-admitted disaster. The film's framing device is that he's in yet more trouble and has to come crawling back to three of the people he screwed over, arguing that they were all able to channel the emotions he stirred up into far greater success than they likely would have otherwise.
• The stage adaptation of Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" at the center of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is in serious trouble. At the beginning of the movie, Ralph, a key supporting actor, is injured shortly before previews; Riggan, the writer, director and star of the play, who may even have arranged the accident, takes advantage of his injury to recast the part because he was dissatisfied with Ralph's performance. He is replaced by Mike Shiner, a talented method actor who is also a Jerkass on the verge of breaking up with his girlfriend... who plays his wife in the play. At previews, Mike breaks character to harshly criticize Riggan's adaptation of the story and complains that they aren't using real gin onstage; later, he gets caught with an erection visible through his underwear during the play's climax. We also learn that the play's finances are shaky; Riggan is considering taking out another mortgage on his beach house in Los Angeles to tide it over. An influential New York Times critic tells Riggan she's going to pan his play regardless of how it turns out because she resents Hollywood actors like him taking up valuable space on Broadway. Oh, and Ralph files a lawsuit against the production over his accident. The play's fortunes are reversed only when Riggan concludes opening night by attempting suicide on stage, which turns the play into a media sensation and earns it praise from the critic for its "super-realism".
• The Bubble (2022) follows a global pandemic derailing Cliff Beasts 6: Battle for Everest: Memories of a Requiem, the latest installment in a popular franchise featuring dinosaurs (clear reference to Jurassic World Dominion suffering with the COVID-19 Pandemic), leading to plenty of studio-imposed changes and the actors quitting, going insane from isolation or without their limbs.
• In François Truffaut's 1973 film Day for Night, the film-within-a-film Meet Pamela runs into all sorts of problems. A power failure at the processing lab ruins footage of a key scene, the lead actress is emotionally fragile after a nervous breakdown (and nearly has a second one during filming), the actor playing her husband is having serious relationship issues and nearly walks off the film, the actress playing his mother is so drunk she can't remember her lines, a cat involved in a cutaway scene keeps running away from its mark, and the middle-aged lead actor is killed in a car accident and the insurance agency won't cover the cost of reshooting his scenes with another actor.
• Found Footage 3D is one part Exactly What It Says on the Tin, and one part a mockumentary about the production of a 3D found footage horror film. It's clear from the start that production on the Film Within a Film Spectre of Death 3D was a disaster in the making: the makers of the film went with the 3D angle simply as a gimmick without considering all of the implications, the film's writers and stars Steve and Amy were in a crumbling relationship and outright hated each other by the time production began, Steve's ego leads to a bad case of Wag the Director, and the sound guy Carl is convinced that the cabin they're shooting in is haunted and walks out of the production halfway through. By the time Scott Weinberg of FEARnet shows up to interview the cast and crew, it's clear that things have gone horribly Off the Rails and that he'll be returning home to write an article about a film production Gone Horribly Wrong. All this comes before it turns out that Carl was right and that the house really is haunted...
• In the Spanish movie Hasta la lluvia (Even the Rain), a film crew decides to make a movie about Christopher Columbus in the land locked country of Bolivia. The American studio that was backing the production was willing to give them a large budget that would've allowed them to film in the Caribbean, if they filmed it English, but since they wanted to film it in Spanish, they had to look for somewhere cheap. Filming goes smoothly at first, but things start to go wrong as the Cochabumba Water War, a series of protests against the government selling the rights of Bolivia's water to a Multinational, escalate, especially when the actor portraying a tribal leader uses his down time between filming to lead the protests. Eventually the situation deteriorates to the point that the producers decide to film what they can, and finish the movie in an American sound stage, but after the cast and crew decides to flee Bolivia, the producers give up and shut down production.
• A fictional example can be found in Werner Herzog's Incident At Loch Ness. To give any details would be ruining it. As the Live Action Film page shows, it is inspired by Herzog's actual career.
• A subplot in Irreconcilable Differences is Ryan O'Neal's hilariously overblown Gone with the Wind musical ripoff spinning out of control.
• Living in Oblivion is a nineties independent flick in which Steve Buscemi plays the role of a director in a nineties independent flick where everything goes wrong. The movie itself is supposedly based on the director's experience while working on a Brad Pitt movie called Johnny Suede.
• Return to Cabin by the Lake is about a Ripped from the Headlines production based on the exploits of the horror writer serial killer from the first film. It first attracts protestors because of its exploitation of a real tragedy. Then the original killer, upset about the film's unfaithfulness, murders and impersonates one of the producers and starts to target the rest of the cast and crew.
• The film-within-a-film of Scream 3, based on the "real-life" Woodsboro murders, is quickly shut down when Ghostface starts targeting the cast.
• Shadow of the Vampire fictionalizes the production of Nosferatu highlighting the disagreements between stars and producers, director and crew, and an actual vampire.
• The film within the film for Singin' in the Rain (The Dueling Cavalier) experiences a severely troubled production due to the transition from silent to talkie pictures; the cast and crew's inexperience with sound recording (and the leading lady's paint-peeling voice) causes numerous difficulties, leading the film to be laughed off by audiences at its first screening. It's salvaged by a hasty Retool into a campy musical and the redubbing of all the film's dialogue via studio recording, complete with another actress dubbing the leading lady's lines.
• State and Main shows examples of a lot of the production troubles of location shooting, especially the interpersonal variety; in-fighting, ego-clashes, irresponsible talent and/or management, Executive Meddling, etc.
• This is Spın̈al Tap depicts a tour as snakebitten as the Victory Tour (see Music for details) would be that year in real life.
• Tropic Thunder parodies this phenomenon, with specific jabs at Apocalypse Now. Funnily enough, a minor example of this happened during production. During the opening scene, Ben Stiller's character is supposed to say "alright, can we cut now?" after a scene in the Film Within a Film goes wrong. Problem was, Stiller also directed the film, so when his character said "cut", the crew mistook that for their director ordering them to cut.
• At one point in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Dewey Cox (under the influence of a number of drugs) attempts to create his bizarre masterpiece "Black Sheep" (a clear parody of the Brian Wilson song "Smile"), which leads to the band and his wife to break up with him and his inevitable drug fueled rampage through the city in nothing but his underwear.
  "I need ten thousand didgeridoos!"
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit starts off with a film-within-a-film that has gone over schedule and budget due to Roger not seeing stars when the fridge is dropped on his head.

Literature

• Blown Away, the Discworld version of Gone with the Wind in Moving Pictures. The dwarfs object to being stereotyped as miners, the leading lady objects to the Romantic False Lead being a troll, the troll objects to that objection, and C.M.O.T. Dibbler is trying desperately to recoup his losses by sticking Product Placement wherever he can (he'd accidentally discovered Subliminal Advertising, and figured if one frame of an ad worked, a full minute in the middle of the climax would work even better). At one point someone asks why all Dibbler's moving pictures are set "in a world gone mad", and gets the reply "Because Mr Dibbler is a very observant person."
• "Coppola's Dracula" by Kim Newman, which is basically Hearts of Darkness ... In "Anno Dracula" Transylvania!
• The Charm Offensive: Season 37 of Ever After is already under scrutiny due to growing complaints from the fanbase, immediately a shitstorm due to Charles being extremely awkward and having no charisma or chemistry with almost any of the contestants (save for Angie, but Dev chalks it off to the fact that she is infinitely charismatic and could get chemistry with anyone). The following weeks have Charles's triggers being pressed one after the other and causing even further issues to the production, which feeds on Charles own insecurities and issues and makes him worse. And then Charles falls for someone who isn't a contestant as well. In the end, Maureen is also fired from her position after forcing a recently out Charlie to go through with dating a woman, which accounted as prejudice.
• Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (and its film adaptation) features a troubled production as part of its Horrible Hollywood setting. The Napoleonic costume drama on which protagonist Tod Hackett is working as a set designer is running behind schedule, and the crew therefore rush into shooting the climactic Battle of Waterloo action sequence on a soundstage that is still actively under construction. The structurally unsound "battlefield" soon collapses under the weight of hundreds of extras and crew members, causing numerous injuries (the extras thus injured are not too upset, though, as they know they can look forward to generous financial compensation).
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: In the first book, Greg’s school puts on a production of "The Wizard of OZ". It gets so bad that they don’t even make it to the end:
  • Greg is forced to audition by his mother and despite his efforts, he gets a part. In fact, every kid gets a part, regardless of effort. To make matters worse, Dorothy is played by Patty Farrell, a girl who Greg is angry with for preventing him from cheating on a test.
  • This naturally leads to several characters Playing a Tree, including Greg himself, who volunteers to be one of the Apple Trees, because they don’t get to sing and throw apples at Dorothy. During rehearsals, the kids don’t bother to learn their lines, because the teacher keeps whispering the lines to them rather than making them remember. In addition, a first grader who plays Toto is walking on his hind legs for the show because his mother refuses to let him crawl around because it would be "degrading." Greg also finds out that he has to sing after all, after the teacher created a Villain Song called "We Three Trees."
  • At opening night, the play is a half hour late because a kid playing a shrub got Stage Fright, Toto reads comic books on stage and everyone barely remembers their lines. Greg avoids embarrassing himself by pretending to forget the song and when he sees Patty Farrell glaring at him, Greg throws an apple at her. It ends with an apple fight, Patty’s glasses breaking and the play being shut down.
• Stephen King's Misery has Paul Sheldon, creator of the titular trashy pulp romance series that he can't stand, try to definitively end it by killing off the main character. Unfortunately, he then breaks his legs in a car accident and ends up in the care of Loony Fan Annie Wilkes, who goes off the deep end upon finishing the new book and uses various tortures to force him to write a new one that undoes Misery's death. Paul is quite surprised to find that the end result may just be the best thing he's ever written, and has it published after he escapes, where the story behind it naturally gets it even more attention.
• Patrick Quentin's Puzzle for players consists entirely of this. At one point, the desperate Broadway producer explicitly writes down a list of "13 reasons why Troubled Waters cannot possibly see the light of day".
• The titular movie Siren Queen becomes this after an unseasonably early wildfire interrupts a shoot, which leads to a cascade of further disasters. The leading lady becomes too addicted to benzos to work and the leading man and one of the head screenwriters mysteriously vanish, but the studio has spent too much money to cancel the movie outright, which forces the project into extensive rewrites and reshoots with a new director everybody hates. Oh, and the main character's ex-girlfriend gets cast as the new protagonist.
• The Technicolor Time Machine by Harry Harrison is about a struggling studio's attempt to shoot a historical epic about Vikings using a time machine.

Live-Action TV

• The two seasons of American Auto show the development of the Payne Pika 10K, the first car to be introduced under the leadership of new CEO Katherine Hastings. It does not go smoothly.
  • The car first comes up in "Earnings Call" during the eponymous earnings call. It's mentioned that the company is planning to build an entry-level car costing twelve-thousand dollars ^note  which would have been around the price of the actual cheapest car on the American market at the time, the Mitsubishi Mirage . Thinking customers prefer round numbers, Hastings cuts the selling price to ten thousand without anyone else's input. (This episode aired in 2022.)
  • "The $10K Car" shows the result of Hastings' price cut: to make the car profitable, various features had to be cut. This ends up making the Pika The Alleged Car due to its ungainly looks, rough ride, loud engine, poor fuel economy (despite being a compact), and brakes that take at least twenty seconds to work. Hastings considers cancelling the project until an article in Car And Driver emboldens her to bring it to market. Despite its various flaws, the car is greenlit.
  • "Millbank, IA" has Payne Motors preparing to open a factory in the town to build the Pika and bring them much needed jobs. Before they can do so, they receive a counter-offer from an Eastern European country with a history of human rights violations which they find too tempting to pass up. They eventually bail on the town, only for a coup to break out in the European country forcing them to come crawling back to the town. However, news of their decision reaches the townspeople, resulting in an icy reception.
  • In the middle of all this, an incident unrelated to the Pika causes severe damage to Payne's stock price and reputation. The fallout has Hastings ask for six months to return their stock price to what it was or she'll quit.
  • After that, the Pika goes unmentioned until "Dealer Event" when the car is officially unveiled. The unveiling has Hastings drive the car filled with rabbits into the room herself. However, she's afraid of rabbits which requires to her take meds for it. The meds leave her so loopy that she crashes the car on the way out. Additionally, many of the dealers tell the executives they won't be selling the Pika. In the aftermath of this, they get the idea to sell the car directly to the consumers.
  • The car officially goes on sale in "Judgement Day" which is also the deadline for returning the stock prices to their previous value. Their attempt to announce the car on a news program hits a snag when breaking news reports on a typhoon in China which cripples the stock market. However, they do manage to recover their stock price. It's then revealed that the Pika has drawn two hundred thousand pre-orders online and gotten much praise for its simplicity and low cost.
• A sketch from The Benny Hill Show has Benny as a French avant garde director who deflates the pretensions of an interviewer by revealing that all the supposed brilliant touches of his latest film were the result of problems during filming. Changing from color to black and white as the heroine's fantasy world is shattered? They just happened to run out of color film at that point and didn't have money for more. Using a documentary style with handheld cameras? Two crew members got in a fight and broke the tripod. Having the heroine lisp? She was played by the producer's girlfriend, who really had a lisp. A woman saying a profound statement to a waiter? She was supposed to just be ordering soup and blew her line. The dog running across in the final shot? A complete accident from a dog that had been pestering them throughout the entire shoot.
• The Community episode "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux" depicts the Dean trying to film a 30-second ad for the college. It starts innocently enough. The only issue is Jeff reluctantly playing the Dean in the commercial. He has his scenes shot around the statue of Luis Guzman with the hopes that Guzman's people will have the footage pulled for unauthorized use of his image. It backfires when Guzman asks to be in the commercial himself. His sudden desire to participate turns the Dean into a Prima Donna Director demanding absolute perfection and slowly driving himself and all the other characters to madness. (At one point, he goes through dozens of takes of Britta and Troy hugging because he doesn't find it believable.) The episode is shot as Abed's documentary, which explicitly described as the Hearts of Darkness to the Dean's Apocalypse Now.
• Pretty much any of Vincent Chase's movies on Entourage (Smokejumpers, Aquaman, Medellin... pretty much all except Gatsby) fall victim to this trope.
• The Frasier episode "Ham Radio" had the station put on a murder mystery radio show with Frasier directing. The whole thing goes Off the Rails. The cast includes Roz, Bulldog, Bulldog's girlfriend, Gil, and a veteran voice actor who's handling six different roles. The veteran gets into an argument with Frasier and quits, so Frasier replaces him with Niles. Niles, however, has to handle those same six roles without a chance to read the script beforehand. Roz has a root canal before the show (however, this helps her performance as her character is German and her garbled speech comes across as an accent). Bulldog comes down with a serious case of stage fright and his character ends up mute. His girlfriend only has one line ("Look out, he's got a gun!") which gets screwed up by her dyslexia ("Look out, he's got a nug!") And after his Final Speech is cut for time, Gil is determined to deliver it no matter how hard Frasier tries to stop him. Finally, Niles gets fed up with Frasier's direction, goes off script, and kills the entire cast of characters.
• GLOW (2017) is a heavily fictionalized retelling of the 1980s "Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling" promotion. The show is helmed by a notorious schlockmeister whose past work is barely above porn, and the women are hired for their looks first and foremost with hardly any having actual wrestling skills. Then their funding is abruptly cut off due to the producer's mother getting wind of the kind of money her son has been throwing around on it. Plus, the real life animosity between two of them after one slept with the other's husband gets them cast as the headlining face and heel, which the one who was cheated on naturally causes some issues over. By the time the pilot is actually made, the crew is outright comparing themselves to Andy Hardy characters and hoping they can also use sheer pluck to put on a good show against all odds.
• Impractical Jokers deliberately invoked this as a challenge turned punishment for Sal. What's supposed to be a challenge where a kid shoots a water gun at a stranger only for the Joker to take the bullet and completely embarrass himself by saying something completely stupid afterwards quickly devolves into the kid squirting before Sal gets the chance to even do anything, much to his constant frustration. After one "failed" attempt too many, he goes over to the other Jokers and crew to complain, only for the other Jokers to reveal the true nature of the filming while squirting him with water guns.
• The Late Late Show with James Corden invokes this in its occasional "Celebrity Noses" sketch, which they never seem to ever get right.
• Oliver Putnam from Only Murders in the Building is a theatre director whose musical adaptation of Splash had an incident where several cast members were injured. He finally is able to get a new play, Death Rattle, to the stage in the show's third season. Then that takes a bad turn:
  • As soon as the play opens, the lead actor Ben Glenroy walks out on stage and collapses in the middle of his opening monologue. He's pronounced dead, but is later discovered to be alive and surprises the attendees at his memorial service at the Arconia apartment building. Shortly afterward, he falls down an elevator shaft and dies for real. However, the fact that he dies in the Arconia gives Oliver, Charles, and Mabel the justification to investigate his death on their podcast. ^note  When they started it, Charles suggested they limit themselves to only murders committed in the Arconia.
  • Shortly after Ben's death, it's revealed that one of his co-stars, Loretta, fought seriously to join the play when Ben was cast. However, her acting skills are a little lacking with her playing the role in grating ways and missing a cue at one point. However, Oliver decides to cast her anyway due to some attraction for her.
  • Oliver runs into a theatre critic and asks her what she thought of the play. She gives it a thorough bashing, criticizing almost every aspect. Oliver takes the criticism so harshly, he suffers a mild heart attack. He then picks up on something she said which inspires him to rework Death Rattle into a musical titled Death Rattle Dazzle. This is bad news for Charles (who was also cast in the play) because he finds it difficult to perform the musical numbers, suffering blackouts twice. Oliver tries to replace him with Matthew Broderick but changes his mind when Mel Brooks tells him how demanding Broderick can be.
  • While visiting Loretta's apartment, Oliver finds a scrapbook which seems to cover much of Ben's career. But she was actually using it to chronicle Ben's adopted brother Dickey because she's his biological mother. A rehearsal gets interrupted by the police questioning the cast and crew. They decide to arrest Dickey which leads Loretta to falsely confess to Ben's murder. This causes Oliver to have a more serious heart attack.
  • After Oliver is released from the hospital, he, Charles, and Mabel try to piece together what happened before the show's original opening. They discover that Ben was having a really rough night. He got into arguments with several co-stars (the one with Loretta led to Charles punching him), a group of women he befriended were unable to attend, and he fired a documentarian he'd hired to follow him. Despite trying to fast for the show, he gave in and ate a cookie. He didn't realize that an advance review for the play called him the weak link, so Donna the producer laced the cookie with rat poison to buy time for a better show. ^note  However, she didn't push him down the elevator shaft. Her son Clifford accidentally did that when Ben confronted him about her poisoning him.
  • One last thing to go wrong was the new lead actor getting sick, necessitating a replacement. This ended up being Oliver himself. Despite all of this, the play is warmly received.
• The unauthorized theatrical production of The Phantom of the Opera in the Married... with Children episode "Something Larry This Way Comes" hits a snag before it even begins as the result of Al having to fill in for Larry at the last moment after Gary knocks him out out of sheer spite due to Gary having invested money in one of Larry's failed business schemes in the past. Since Al doesn't remember the lines, can't play a piano (or a synthesizer, in this case), and still has his werewolf costume he wears for his own failed shoe sales promotion event underneath his formal attire that's barely holding together, and both Al and Kelly are bad at acting, it turns out badly.
• Slings & Arrows has one of these every year. The first two turn out well; the third one ends with the lead actor dying and everyone else involved in the production being fired.
• The first two episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip detail this with the season premiere of the eponymous Show Within a Show. First, a controversial sketch is cut due to Executive Meddling prompting an on-air rant from the showrunner. This gets him fired and replaced by the main characters Matt and Danny. ^note  Ironically, Matt wrote the controversial sketch. Now, they have to put on the premiere with the events of the failed premiere hanging over their heads. Not helping is that cast member Harriet used to date Matt and their past does come up. Additionally, the writers struggle to come up with sketches and the musical guest (The White Stripes) pulls out for medical reasons. Finally, they have a "Eureka!" Moment from an offhand comment and open the show with the cast singing a promise to behave themselves. The rest of the series seems to avoid this.
• Supernatural has used this trope a few times. Most notably, the season 2 episode "Hollywood Babylon" has the Winchesters getting involved in a horror film production that's being progressively sabotaged by evil spirits that are being summoned by a spiteful screenwriter. The season 6 ep "The French Mistake" also qualifies: the brothers find themselves dropped in place of actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles on the set of a TV series called Supernatural, and rapidly escalating pandemonium ensues culminating in the bloody deaths of the cast, crew, and even departed creator Eric Kripke.
  "Robert Singer": At least they're talking.
• Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has the musical Spidermen Too: 2 Many Spidermen, parodying Spiderman Turn Off The Dark as well as The Clone Saga. Titus auditions for the role of Spiderman #12 after the entire cast has to quit due to injuries.
• Part one of Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies revolves around Indy engaging in a battle of wits with Real Life primadonna director Erich von Stroheim over Foolish Wives.

Music

• Gorillaz had quite a few of these. Particularly with their ill-fated movie, which involved unraveling plot-holes, Russel's weight gain, Murdoc's insubordination, a director completely out of his league and, to top it all off, the script-writing incident that almost killed Gorillaz (figuratively) and 2D (literally!).
• Ice-T 's "Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous" is about one of those for a concert - as soon as Ice arrives in the venue he finds out that the microphone and the speakers are broken and the soundman is not cooperating, when he goes to the hotel to get a little rest before the concert he winds up being ambushed by aspiring rappers that want him to listen to their demos, and when the show actually begins, his DJ loses his records and has to improvise, and besides having to freestyle on a smoky stage, Ice also has to deal with the local police looking for a excuse to arrest him.

Podcasts

• The film Widow's Weave, the passion project of a Prima Donna Director named Dexter Banks in an episode of The Magnus Archives is full of problems before the production even begins. The film is based on a Japanese horror movie that only Banks has ever seen (no one else is able to find any evidence that it exists), and he is obsessed with re-creating shots from it, which his cinematographer is unable to do as she has no way of seeing what he's trying to imitate. He also insists that the film be shot on non-digital equipment and spends so much time editing that he eventually just gives the cinematographer authority over scheduling so he can focus on editing. The film's centerpiece, a giant animatronic spider, is being made by a famous practical effects artist, but the director is the only one who is able to enter the workshop, and creation of the animatronic takes so long that every scene that doesn't require the spider is filmed before it's done. Of course, this being a horror podcast, the effects artist has been dead for years, and the workshop actually contains a giant spider which the entire cast gets fed to, but even without the horror elements, the production of this film was a nighmare.

Theatre

• The play being performed in Curtains! is one big screwed-up mess, thanks to a lot of back-stage drama, an entire number being badly-choreographed, the lead actress giving a terrible performance, and a whole lot of murders happening. Fortunately, the detective investigating said murders is a Promoted Fanboy who puts just as much time into improving the quality of the play.
• Good Luck, Studio revolves around the disastrous production of the children's TV show Wibble the Dragon. The show has gone way over its budget. The cast has to film 16 pages within a single hour. The audience of children is becoming increasingly irate. And then a rejected actor barges in and hijacks the show.
• The Play That Goes Wrong and its sequels Peter Pan Goes Wrong and A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong cover the travails of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society, an amateur theater troupe who are suddenly thrust into some major productions which are embarrassingly out of their league and dissolve into a slapstick chaos of prop failures, blown cues, and the personal issues between the actors.
• The Producers, when they weren't troubling their own production, were overjoyed with the 'bad luck' that struck it, until the worst disaster: audiences loved "Springtime for Hitler".

Theme Parks

• In the former Disaster! attraction at Universal Studios Florida, the fictitious Disaster Studios runs into trouble with the production of its latest movie, Mutha Nature, due to the filming falling behind schedule and all of its actors being sent to rehab. Director Frank Kincaid, the owner of Disaster Studios, has sunk "every last cent" into the film, which will likely be a Creator Killer if it fails. As a result, they had to cast people from a studio tour (i.e. the people visiting the attraction) in major supporting roles.

Video Games

• In Dead Rising 4, newspaper articles found throughout the Willamette Memorial Megaplex reveal that the process of rebuilding the town's mall after the events of the first game went like this. Four workers died in the space of four months during construction, leading to people claiming that the place was cursed and forcing the developers to create a scholarship fund for the dead workers' children as compensation. Plans to build a "Zombietopia" amusement park as a future expansion to the mall, which would've featured animatronics of actual victims of the first outbreak (including Homeland Security agents Brad Garrison and Jessica McCarney) as well as a "Frank West Experience" roller coaster (even though West was a wanted criminal at the time), were met with howls of protest. All of this is before a second zombie outbreak hits Willamette, Colorado on the mall's opening day (Black Friday, no less).
• Played for laughs in Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist, where the titular game is treated like a troubled movie/stage play wherein It's Up to You to provide all weather, effects, and events for the previous player upon being prompted by the one remaining staff member before you can experience the game for yourself.
• In Fallout 4, exploring the Hubris Comics building reveals that the staff there were trying to produce a TV adaptation of the popular radio serial The Silver Shroud. If The End of the World as We Know It hadn't stopped production, all the infighting, arguments over casting, and other drama detailed in the Apocalyptic Logs you find in the building probably would have.
• The Hex: Lionel Snill's third game, the fantasy RPG Secrets of Legendaria, was going to be his magnum opus, but he had to do a lot of work to fund such a massive project. Digging through the game reveals that he was a Mean Boss who overworked his employees, especially Carla Dosa, and did things like cut a fishing minigame she worked for months on while ignoring her advice on how to improve the game. It ended up a buggy mess that broke on stream, so Lionel took the severance packages and fled to the desert, abandoning his workers. His harsh living conditions in the desert inspired his next game, Waste World, but he only coded a few battles and maps before giving up on it and subsequently getting into legal battles with modders for adding stuff he disapproved of.
• In _iCEY._, if you go to the Marionette Theater, you'll come across emails of various employees frustrated with the various shortcomings of developing the game beneath a Pointy-Haired Boss (the narrator). Examples include being given unrealistic tasks like "Make this level more fun/more beautiful", completing 80% of the theater level only for it to be dropped (and thus wasting the coder's time) and plonking down more requirements for the testers above the ones they have to do, not to mention one of the devs accusing their boss of having an affair with an intern. Depending on how things go out, the entire scenario ends with either the narrator's wife finding out about the affair and killing him or the narrator managing to against all odds secure further funding for the game via a sponsorship.
• Just Cause 4 has Garland King's movie. Shooting in the middle of a war zone will do that. It says a lot that your first mission for her has you faking her death. Also, her final mission has the film getting confiscated by the Black Hand and you have to recover it in time for the premiere.
• The Magic Circle is a game about a 3D remake of a RPG from the 80s that ended up stuck in developmental hell for years, seriously messing up the world inside. Eventually, one of the NPCs gains sentience and sets out on his own quest to fix the broken world before the plug gets pulled on the game.
• Nekyia Corridor, a VR movie in the Mass Effect universe, was hit badly by this and is famous in-universe for how much trouble it caused for the cast and crew as well as a terrorist attack. It was so bad that it formed a Story Arc on Mass Effect's Cerberus Daily News spin-off but it was a financial and critical success nonetheless.
  • Lightning struck Nathan Gold, the leading man, while strapped to the surface of a spaceship in the upper atmosphere of a gas giant which fried his suit's electronics and required him to get more oxygen.
  • Kate First, the leading lady, walked off the set with phone footage of her having a tantrum hit the extranet. Her tantrums had caused some of the movie to be rewritten.
  • The day after principal photography finished on the movie, the turian city Vallum of the planet Taetrus was obliterated after a ship crashed into the capital at near-FTL speeds which later turned out to be a terrorist attack^note Ships come equipped with a system to prevent ships flying into planets at these speeds, only the system was turned off in this case. Unfortunately, there was a scene in which a lovelorn pilot crashed a ship into a city at FTL speeds. The scene is in the final production, only it cuts to black just before the disastrous impact.

Visual Novels

• In Shining Song Starnova, Mika stars in a TV adaptation of the popular manga series Black Opera during her route. It quickly becomes apparent that the production is beset by multiple problems: a shoestring budget, a rushed production schedule (they need to shoot and post-produce five episodes in two months), a disinterested director who can’t be bothered to keep the main heroine’s name straight, a distinct lack of the gory fight scenes the series was known for, and the forced inclusion of borderline pornographic fan service scenes which led the original lead actress (whom Mika is replacing) to quit in disgust and leave everyone else involved deeply uncomfortable. Mika and Mr. Producer try to rework the show into something more faithful to the source material, even rekindling the director’s passion and inspiring everyone to work round the clock to get it done on time, but their efforts only make things worse in the long run and the show ends up looking like crap.

Web Animation

• The sixteenth season of Red vs. Blue has Jax Jonez doing a film reenactment of the previous season that goes awry in all ways possible (helped by Jax himself growing too much of an ego and abusing its crew) — for starters, the very introduction in the show has Sarge killing an actor mistaking him for Season 15's villain. Still, Jax believes that due to tortured film productions resulting in great movies he's on the right path... though once he decides to use time machines to bring some past actors to the cast, the studio eventually gives up and cuts the funding.

Web Videos

• Adam Butcher's Catastrophe Crow charts the development of the Nintendo 64 mascot platformer of the same name, by German studio Opus Interactive. What began upon its reveal to the public as a boundary-pushing game that sought to realize auteur lead developer Manfred Lorenz' unique creative vision using advanced technology, gradually devolved into a work environment that left many designers and artists in the lurch as to what they were even working on. According to several anonymous team members, Lorenz insisted they craft increasingly surreal assets without foreknowledge for what they would be used for, isolating himself from the rest of the studio and causing the scope of the game to rapidly expand beyond any reasonable release date. Months turned into years as development hobbled along beyond the rise of a new generation of hardware that outstripped the N64, with millions of dollars still being spent and eventually reaching a fever pitch with most of the team being dismissed from the project besides Lorenz himself, who confined himself to the Opus offices slaving away at the game. Ultimately, once debt collectors came to said office to shut things down permanently, Lorenz had already departed along with the development hardware. Tragically, mere days later, he would be pronounced missing when his personal boat was discovered unmanned several miles from shore in the North Sea. With the game ultimately dying with him, there seemingly remains no trace of what was worked on all these years.
• The crappy student film Marble Hornets was called off due to "unworkable conditions," with the director getting increasingly hysterical and paranoid. Later analysis would reveal that in this case, "unworkable conditions" means "driven to near-insanity by the constant presence of a creepy guy with no face."
• Tween Fest by Funny or Die and the Upright Citizens Brigade is a web show about the titular social media festival, a parody of YouTube culture. The festival's creator, Todd Crawford, organized it for his daughter Maddisyn, a teenage internet celebrity famous for her pimple-popping videos. Things go awry almost immediately, and they only get worse from there.
• Scott The Woz: Fittingly for an episode titled 'Development Hell', the opening skit shows Scott's own troubled development cycle in action when he gets commissioned to make a game for a company. Apparently, this happens every two weeks and he's not really sure what's going wrong and in reality they actually wanted him to make a Snickers bar instead.
  Step 1: I do the work.
  Step 2: Disaster strikes! (cut to Scott working on his Macbook while in the shower and dropping it onto the floor)
  Step 3: Explaining myself. (Scott: [walking in with the still wet Macbook] "Hey boss, funny story, so uh, the hard drive corrupted..."
  And finally...
  Step 1: I do the work.

Western Animation

• The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius had the episode "Lights! Camera! Danger!" where Jimmy and his friends win a contest to make their own movie. However, the director changes up Jimmy's script and has them film in more risky locations, such as having them jump off a rooftop with wires or do a romance scene on a broken rollercoaster. It's revealed that the director is secretly Professor Calamitous, who is invoking all this danger to try and kill Jimmy and his friends, even replacing props with killer robots.
• The Animaniacs episode "Hearts of Twilight", yet another Apocalypse Now spoof, has the Warners sent to track down an overbearing director (played by Jerry Lewis impersonation Mr. Director) and convince him to wrap up his big movie.
• In Bojack Horseman:
  • The second season revolves around the production on the Secretariat biopic and how the film is set back both by Bojack's personal issues and studio interference:
    • The first day of shooting was a complete disaster. Bojack couldn't get into character and kept delivering his somber lines in an overly jovial manner. A tragic accident involving an assistant tripping over a cable leaves her face disfigured and destroys the entire set.
    • Production is delayed after co-star Corduroy Jackson-Jackson dies while performing autoerotic asphyxiation.
    • The studio cuts an emotionally crucial scene about Secretariat's decision to send his brother to Vietnam because test audiences thought it was too sad. This leads to Bojack convincing director Kelsey Jannings to assemble a skeleton crew and break into the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum to shoot the scene guerilla-style. Because of her insubordination, Kelsey is kicked off the project.
    • Abe D'Catfish is brought onboard to fill in the director's chair, and his leniency towards the studios demands turns the film into a shallow crowd-pleaser. This causes Bojack to lose his passion for the project and when he reveals to Abe that he thinks the film's becoming "a piece of shit", Abe loses it and forces Bojack to do repetitive takes just to get back at him.
    • With only a few months left in production, Bojack leaves Hollywoo to catch up with an old friend in New Mexico. With their lead completely off the grid, the studio is forced to reshoot the entire movie and put Bojack back in post using a CGI duplicate. By the time production has wrapped, none of Bojack's original scenes have made it in and he's been completely replaced by his digital double.
  • In Season 5, Bojack's would-be comeback vehicle Philbert takes it further than one might expect.
    • The show's creator Flip McVicker is a pretentious hack whose sole guiding principle is True Art Is Incomprehensible, and the show is only made because it happens to have the same name that Princess Carolyn was planning to give her child, which she takes as a sign she should do it. And she's only able to get it greenlit as a web original series for whattimeisitrightnow.com, which is literally just a clock up to this point.
    • The website owners start doing especially ridiculous Executive Meddling, as they naturally don't want the show to have any reminders that there are lots of other ways people can find out what time it is, taking out all references to clocks et al.
    • Vance Waggoner, essentially every major celebrity social offense scandal of the previous 20 years, is hired to play Bojack's cop partner, and doesn't take long to piss off enough people that they conspire to get him kicked off the show with yet another scandal. He's then replaced with the highly unsuitable Mr. Peanutbutter, bringing up Bojack's long-standing antipathy for him on the set.
    • Mr. Peanutbutter's insistence on doing his own stunts leads Bojack to demand the same, not realizing just how dangerous the next one is. This results in him driving a motorcycle off a five story building, badly injuring his back and delaying the production while also getting started on painkillers, despite his previous addictions.
    • Flip's writing gets increasingly out of control, with no one else on the crew being able to understand a thing. Ultimately, a halfway-typed logline for a scene in a subway results in an expensive submarine set being built since it makes just as much sense as anything else, and they then have to figure out a way to work it in.
    • Flip was also ripping off corny jokes from Popsicle sticks for his one-liners, and once the show goes public one of the joke writers comes calling and threatening a copyright lawsuit. Princess Carolyn has to take several bizarre meetings with both him and his former partner to defuse it.
    • Against all odds the show is a smash success and renewed for a second season. Unfortunately, Flip puts it into production right away, at the same time that Bojack has collapsed into a full-blown painkiller addiction which has serious effects on his mental health. Thanks to the main set being an exact copy of his real house, he becomes increasingly confused between the show and reality, and ends up genuinely strangling his co-star Gina and needing to be pulled off before he kills her.
    • It ends up all being for naught when the website is destroyed by a sexual harassment scandal and no one else will pick the show up. Princess Carolyn then unceremoniously dumps Flip as a client, leaving him unable to get work anywhere and having completely lost his mind.
  • As successful as Horsin' Around was, even it wasn't devoid of any behind the scenes drama.
    • When production started, the cast was as close as family, then as time went on, BoJack would get into spats with show creator, Herb, over the writing quality of the scripts.
    • Herb would later get caught in a scandal which publicly outed him as gay, and resulted in Herb being fired from the show with BoJack too afraid of damaging his own career to stick up for him.
    • After Danny Bananas took over as producer, the cast became more bitter towards each other, Joelle developed an eating disorder, resulting in her being written out of some episodes, and an entire episode having to be rewritten after Sarah Lynn had to go home due to getting drunk thanks to BoJack and his hairdresser, Sharona, smuggling water bottles filled with vodka onto the set, and leaving one unattended next to her. BoJack then helped cover it up by convincing Sharona to take all the blame, resulting in her getting fired.
• In the DuckTales episode "The Duck Knight Returns!", Scrooge is having his movie studio create a big-budget remake of the Show Within a Show version of Darkwing Duck. It seems to have been doing fine for the most part...up until the episode's events, where things quickly go to Hell.
  • The director, Alistair Boorswan, is very much in the mindset that True Art Is Angsty, and has turned the hero into an unrecognizable Darker and Edgier version of himself. Scrooge also notes that he's been going over-budget.
  • Executive Meddling does a number on the plot. Scrooge's demands are initially fairly simple, as he hasn't been to a movie in a long time (make it in color and give the villain a mustache to twirl); then, upon realizing that the movie won't appeal to the younger demographic, he gives his nephew Dewey free reign over the final scenes, which leads to stuff like chainsaw jugglers and elaborate dance numbers being brought in, ultimately clashing in tone with the rest of the movie.
  • No one bothered to tell the original Darkwing Duck, Jim Starling, that the movie was being made. As a result, Jim attempts to crash the production so he can take the new Darkwing's place in the final scenes...which ultimately ends with him destroying the set in a fit of insanity and (seemingly) dying in an explosion.
  • The last straw comes when Boorswan, hoping to use footage of the two Darkwing Ducks fighting in his movie, discovers that Dewey ended up taping over the entire thing with a video of him dancing. Scrooge promptly cancels the movie's production.
• The Home Movies episode "Bye Bye Greasy" centers around the absolutely hellish experience Brendon has directing the school play of the same name.
  • During casting, Brendon gives the role of the female lead to a girl named Linda, much to the chagrin of Melissa, and the role of the male lead goes to Shannon, who "earns" the role by breaking into the Brendon's room and physically threatening him. While Shannon does turn out to be legitimately talented, his behavior unsurprisingly causes a lot of problems during rehearsals, especially when it comes to his feuding with Fenton, the show's lighting controller. Also, Paula paints an outdoor background for the play with a winter theme, despite the play taking place during the summer.
  • Things rapidly spiral further out of control during the premiere, when Brendon finds out mere moments before the start of the show that Shannon was suspended, forcing him to take over the role at the last minute. During one of her scenes, Melissa ends up eating what she thinks is a kiwi pie and begins freaking out onstage due to her kiwi allergy (though she later learns that it was switched out for another pie). Linda ends being unable to speak during her scene and Jason is forced to improvise, while Paula fixes her background mid-show and McGuirk accidentally drives his car onstage early. Then, during McGuirk's scene, his car window get stuck, making all his dialogue/singing inaudible to the audience, and he's unable to back the car offstage, eventually driving it over the edge of the stage. The only saving grace comes when Shannon returns (his suspension having been caused by a false report from Fenton) and takes back his role, delivering a final performance that sends the audience cheering... even though the play still has five more scenes left.
• The three-part "Starbright" storyline in Jem. Rival band The Misfits take over the studio and cause so much trouble for Jem and the Holograms that everybody involved quits. When The Misfits retool the film for themselves, they go massively overbudget and receive a dozen lawsuits from various unions. Jem and the Holograms decide to make their own movie, with theirs being a massive success while The Misfits' movie flops hard.
• The Looney Tunes short (blooper) Bunny! showcases every last mistake and pratfall performed by Bugs, Daffy, Elmer and Yosemite Sam. For a 20-second short for Bugs' 51 ½th Birthday.
• Metalocalypse: Every single in-universe album during the show's run. The first is done underwater in an attempt to sound as "analog" as possible, deafening the producer. But the biggest example of this trope is the second album: the band procrastinated big time getting it out, causing mass panic. When they finally got to it, Nathan demanded to perform in a suit of armor that made recording difficult, Pickles was starved while everyone else ate, Toki and Murderface produced their own song which, due to how bizarre it was, failed to even make it on the album and to top it all off, Guitarist Skwisgaar Skwigelf was forced by feedback to do his guitar parts skydiving, and thanks to Toki deleting the parts, they did it twice. And then when they did release the album, an anti-Dethklok terrorist group attacked Mordhaus, leaving said Mordhaus burned to the ground and their manager believed dead.
  • The best part? They experimented by recording the music ON water (It Makes Sense in Context), and then they all used the water they recorded the music on for mundane purposes.
  "YOU'RE MAKING RAMEN NOODLES WITH SKWISGAAR'S SOLO!"
  • The album after that: well, recording itself seemed to have gone fine, but Dethklok then faced accusations of racism, and their attempts to rectify that misconception just made them look worse, then when the album was shipped, a freak storm sank the ships with all the copies of the album, and Nathan destroyed the master copy after believing that the sinking was a sign the album shouldn't exist. This caused the economy to plummet. Their first attempt to rebuilt the economy, the Dethfairs, didn't go so well. Then their usual producer, Dick Knubbler, is fired and replaced with Abigail Remeltindrinc, causing tension between Nathan and Pickles, who both want in her pants. When Nathan succeeds, Pickles, furious that Nathan destroyed the album and got the girl, quits the band. At what's supposed to be their final concert, it's attacked by Mr. Selatcia, the president of their company is murdered, and Ofdensen is forced to reveal the truth about the prophecy surrounding Dethklok to them. There is a Hope Spot when Nathan apologizes for causing Dethklok's breakup, but then the Revengencers attack, and both Toki and Abigail are injured and captured. The fourth season ends with Ofdensen saying that they need to save them if they're going to finish the album that will prevent the Metalocalypse.
  • It's not like their live concerts were walks in the park either. Death and mutilation are commonplace, to the point that attendees must sign pain waivers absolving Dethklok of any responsibility for their injuries. (That fans happily sign them says something about their devotion.) In the very first concert we see an errant rocket launched their chef into helicopter blades. There's the concert where they end up brawling on stage. There's also the concert they didn't even perform because they had the blues. And of course the only reason they ended up saving Toki in the end was because they got busted using a hologram of Toki and the fans nearly rioted. And then there's what happened when they allowed Get Thee Hence to be their opening band: the fans got offended that they weren't Dethklok and attacked them.
  • Special note to their Dethwater concert, which Nathan didn't even want to perform because it technically wasn't for human listeners. General Crozier decided to go over the Tribunal's head and attack Dethklok at the concert, sending an entire army and an assassin to kill them. While the band lived, they lost a significant portion of their Klokateers and the fact that they nearly died drove them into seclusion.
  • But if we bring up live concerts, then there's the two Snakes 'n' Barrels concerts seen. The first one ended abruptly when everyone except Pickles overdosed on Totally Awesome Sweet Alabama Liquid Snake. The second one had the light show trigger a lingering side effect, causing hallucinations and bioluminescent snakes to shoot out of their orifices (yes, all of them), Pickles beat up Rikki Kixx, who usurped the band from him, and Dr. Rockso fell off the wagon. The best part is this was supposed to be a Straight Edge concert, and all the disasters caused everyone to drink and do drugs.
  • Nathan had an entire monologue on how troubled a Zazz Blammymatazz reunion was. The first time Rockso took acid and sprayed a woman with a hose, the second time he od'ed on cocaine he was trying to smuggle in the country, and the third time he was shot trying to steal cocaine from a cartel. Toki tries to make this current attempt succeed, but it nearly fails too when a reporter uncovered that Rockso was an Ephebophile who had been busted having sex with a 14 year old. They finally got the reunion to happen, but then Toki got freaked out by a bicentenial quarter and burned the building down.
  • Their attempt to branch out into film, Blood Ocean, goes into this very quickly. The film's 500-million-dollar budget jumps it into the category of "most expensive movie ever made", and that's just the starting line. Dethklok proves impossible to direct (their contracts stipulate that they can't be directed), and the project passes through multiple directors, at least one of whom commits suicide due to Dethklok's constant abuse, and another being killed in a forklift accident. Not helping matters is that Dethklok cannot act, with Skwisgaar's accent being so thick that they're forced to dub over it, and the film's script is a plodding mess of a Random Events Plot. When Dethklok sees the final cut on opening night, they immediately realize that if it gets out, it could sink their careers. Thankfully for them, as is typical, an accident sets the theatre on fire and nearly kills the producer (who was determined to get the movie out just to get some return on his investment).
• The Miraculous Ladybug episode "Horrificator" has Marinette's class trying to film a horror movie at their school which suffers from such problems as the lead actress being too frightened by the monster costume used to even do one scene, constant in-fighting amongst the crew, and the aforementioned lead actress being turned into an actual monster and terrorizing the other students.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Made in Manehattan", Coco Pommel didn't have the time or budget for as big of a play as she imagined. Not helping is the fact that the Midsummer Theater Revival was abandoned for such a long time that the area was grown over. No one pony could restore the stage, and when the original stage collapsed, it seemed hopeless to Coco.
  • In the episode "Horse Play", Twilight's attempt to produce a play falls apart rapidly. The first sign of trouble is her decision to cast Princess Celestia as herself, only for it to be revealed that Celestia cannot act to save her life. After Celestia causes an on-set accident that destroys the prop sun that was supposed to be used, Pinkie Pie's attempts to replace it (with a balloon, a burning marshmallow, and a huge ball of fireworks she bought from Trixie in a back alley at midnight) end up destroying the sets. Fortunately, at the end of the episode, Celestia is able to quickly come up with a plan to fix the performance.
  • Played for drama in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Magical Movie Night in "Movie Magic", as a series of mysterious incidents threaten to ruin the production of the Daring Do movie. Actors threatening to walk out, sets on the studio falling apart, and important movie props going missing. The Rainbooms are suspicious and decide to conduct an investigation to find the saboteur: the director's niece Juniper Montage, who is sabotaging the production just so she could take over the starring role as Daring Do.
• Rugrats had an episode where Phil and Lil were hired as actors for a diaper commercial. The director was a massive prima donna, Phil refused to even do a simple action (possibly stage fright) and Lil ended up causing chaos chasing down a toy car. The director gets so fed up, he kicks the twins out, with Betty all too happy to take them out. However, when the commercial proves to be a hit, the director attempts to crawl back and win them back. Betty isn't having any of it and the twins, along with Tommy (who was told this story) just walk away.
• The Simpsons has had a few episodes involving this.
  • In "Radioactive Man". the naive producers of a movie adaptation of the popular comic book character decide to shoot their film in Springfield based solely on the town's misspelled Variety ad, and chaos ensues.
    • Local businesses promptly milk the cast and crew for all they're worth by jacking up prices at stores, restaurants, etc.
    • Not that the locals don't get some karmic payback; the Simpsons' own house was used for a location set and Homer is paid only a few thousand dollars for the resultant damage done to it to set up lights, etc.
    • Leading man Rainier Wolfcastle proves consistently unable to say Radioactive Man's catchphrase "Up and atom!" as anything but "Up and at them!"
    • Milhouse van Houten is picked from the local kids to play Sidekick Fallout Boy (because the best child that auditions, Bart Simpson, is not quite tall enough). The boy does not take well to the rigors of movie production and eventually flees the set, which results in the ruination of an expensive, one-take-only action setpiece. From there, an attempt is made to finish the movie with only previously shot footage of Milhouse, which gets the editor fired ("And with good cause!") Milhouse is tracked down to Bart's treehouse but even a pep talk from Mickey Rooney can't convince him to return to the set. The filmmakers try recasting the role with Rooney, but it's no more successful, and having run out of money thanks to the aforementioned gouging return to Hollywood, where they're warmly welcomed back by the locals to a town that will complete the film properly — and that just treats people right.
  • "Homer the Whopper" involves a film version of an independent superhero comic book made by Comic Book Guy that winds up becoming one. For the film version, Homer gets cast as the hero Everyman because he fits Comic Book Boy's vision of Everyman being a fat, middle-aged man (like a typical everyman character). However, studio executives convince Homer that audiences want a physically fit Everyman and hire a fitness trainer to get Homer to the ideal weight. Everything works smoothly until the trainer has to leave to help another client, causing Homer to revert back to his usual eating habits. In turn, the film goes over budget, and the final project shifts back and forth between scenes featuring thin Homer and scenes with regular-sized Homer.
• The South Park episode "Cartmanland" documents Cartman's turbulent experience with running an amusement park of his own — from beginning to end.
  • Cartman inherits one million dollars from his deceased grandmother ^note  because she assumed that the rest of family would just waste it all on crack . He selfishly refuses to give any of the money to his friends, and doesn't listen to advice from adults on what to do with it. Instead, Cartman uses his earned funds on fulfilling his lifelong dream: owning the local amusement park, North Park Funland. The previous owner, Frank Fun, is hesitant to sell the park because it was such a financial failure, but gives in when Cartman states he won't intend to run it as a business; the park would just be open for only him and him only.
  • The glee and excitement of having a theme park, rechristened Cartmanland, all to himself becomes short-lived for Cartman; he launches a TV ad campaign solely to gloat that nobody — "Especially [my friends] Stan and Kyle!" — can come to the park (except himself). This triggers Stan and Kyle to attempt sneaking inside the park. In response, Cartman sends them away and hires a security guard to keep out any further trespassers. However, upon realizing that Cartman had already spent every last penny inherited on opening the park, the guard refuses to work without a paid salary. Turning down Cartman's desperate and weak offer of paying him with free rides, the guard suggests that Cartman allow two people per day into the park, with the admission charges going toward his salary. Cartman reluctantly does so.
  • The rising costs for security, food, maintenance, and utilities cause Cartman to begrudgingly let more and more people into his park, and thus the attendance becomes well in the thousands, making the park a smash success. Business experts mistake Cartman's "You can't come" technique as an ingenious marketing ploy to turn around the once-struggling park. By this point, Cartman is utterly livid, since now he won't have the park to himself anymore and will subsequently have to deal with long lines (which he loathes, as established earlier in the episode). When Frank Fun visits the park and congratulates him on his success, Cartman angrily demands his money back, ultimately selling the park back to him for a profit...
  • ...but just when he thinks that he's out of the woods, Cartman is hit with one hell of a Humiliation Conga: his refunded money is quickly taken away to pay off the IRS and a lawsuit by his friend Kenny's parents (he had died on the rollercoaster), leaving him with all of his one million dollars down the toilet and $13,000 in debt owed to the IRS. And when Cartman frantically tries buying the park back — seeing that this would be his only chance to pay off his debt — the park owner refuses because of how successful it now is. To put a cherry on top of it: the episode ends with Cartman sulking off to throw rocks at the park, only to be pepper-sprayed by his former security guard!
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy VI: The Motion Picture, SpongeBob and Patrick set out to make a Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy movie with the superheroes themselves after finding out a big-budget studio version will be using...
  "...actors."
  • It goes as well as you'd expect: Mermaid Man needs 5,003 takes just for one line, Plankton keeps getting the boom mic in the shot, the set ends up destroyed when a scene with the "Invisible Boatmobile" (which is played by Pearl) goes wrong, and to top it all off, the footage is completely useless because Patrick, the cameraman, kept the lens cap on the camera because he didn't want to lose it, causing SpongeBob to completely lose it to the point of slurping up worms from the bottom of a rock. It is only thanks to a totally nonsensical "speech" from Mermaid Man that SpongeBob is convinced to finish the movie, albeit on a much lower budget. And it shows.
  • In fact, the only reason people showed up for the movie's premiere at the Krusty Krab at all was because the studio version sold out.
• An episode of What's New, Scooby-Doo? revolved around director Vincent Wong's attempt to make a re-make of a cheesy spy movie Spy Me A River. Besides the lead actor quitting halfway through, no one reading the script, Mystery Inc. being used as stunt doubles, and a Classically-Trained Extra with eyes on the lead role, the production was haunted by the Faceless Phantom who turned out to be the director who wanted to sabotage the film after realising how awful it was.

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