Audience-Alienating Premise cleanup

Bringing up the following example from Parting Shots:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The film tries to glorify murder provided it's directed at scumbags.

Uh okay. Did it bomb or anything. Theirs a lot of anti hero Pay Evil unto Evil works that are popular too so that isn't really an alienating premise either.

Reposting from the previous page, so it doesn't get lost:

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 added to Cuties:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The film proved highly controversial due to its depiction of preteen girls dancing in a hypersexualised fashion while wearing revealing outfits.

Cut it.

Reposting from the previous page, so it doesn't get lost:

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.

I think Cuties still applies to this trope, just the example given to justify it wasn't good. If not, thats fine, just offering my two cents.

How about something like this: The film is a commentary on France's Values Dissonance towards children in regards to sexual material and content, as well as light analyzing of the kind of lifestyle women experience in Islamic society. However, it chooses to do so by making the story about a group of young girls dressing in scantly clad attire dancing to sexually based music. As a result, no matter how effective the message is or is not, most viewers were uncomfortable with the films premise.

Thing is, Cuties was successful in its host country, and the controversy is largely America-based. So it might just be Values Dissonance or Americans Hate Tingle.

A lot of that sounds closer to They Changed It, Now It Sucks! or "fans expected it to be one thing but the movie turned out to be another" which doesn't sound like the premise itself was a problem.

Regardless of whether it fits, the NC quote under Jem needs to be cut down. I don't even think it's relevant because it's not the premise that's bad, it's the movie itself.

That would fit under Americans Hate Tingle more than Values Dissonance.

Is it me or do these examples from AudienceAlienatingPremise.Film violate Examples Are Not General?:

• Almost every movie set during the Iraq War has been a box office bomb, including The Kingdom, Green Zone, In the Valley of Elah, and most notably, the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker. The war itself is so politically charged (the most controversial case since The Vietnam War) that any depiction of it risks alienating large chunks of the audience based on its perceived politics and it's too current to work as escapism. An alternative explanation is that the problem is with films perceived as critical of the military, or as depicting typical soldiers as victims and/or war criminals. The one successful Iraq War movie, American Sniper, focused on a specific, real life soldier and thus was distant enough of those pitfalls. Act of Valor managed to make money, and that started life as a Navy SEAL recruitment film (and the jingoistic tone was hated by critics but certainly worked for the viewers). Zero Dark Thirty, by the same team of The Hurt Locker, also recouped its budget given it dealt with the hunt everyone wanted to be solved. (Zero Dark Thirty, along with Lone Survivor, also shows how Afghanistan is less contentious for audiences than Iraq and thus easier to sell)
• Nearly every film targeted at very young children, such as Follow That Bird or Barney's Great Adventure, has been a box office failure, mostly because parents questioned why they would pay $20 (or more) for something they could get for free on TV at home, and other teenage (or older) moviegoers considered themselves too old for the depicted property. That latter statement could also explain why The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, which pretended to be part of a franchise that did not actually exist^note sort of - it's very loosely based on an obscure PBS Kids show from the mid-2000s called My Bedbugs, and hence had absolutely no brand recognition, did worse than the other two previous films in the box office. On top of that, the marketing for Oogieloves encouraged the little tykes to play, dance, and sing in the theaters, which repelled both theater owners and parents alike from the film due to the trouble the kids would inevitably cause.

Not sure about the first entry, but the second one seems inaccurate because most movies targeted towards very young children do well with very young children, even if parents prefer to wait for home release. The Oogieloves entry may count on its own because it's the specific part of the premise (the interactivity) that alienated audiences.

On YMMV.Growing Around:

• Audience-Alienating Premise:
  • The premise is not one that holds up well to Fridge Horror. It takes place In a World… with Swapped Roles taken to the extreme: kids have all authority, and grown-ups must abide by their rules. Despite this, people age and develop as they do in Real Life. While the author is aware of this problem readers have, he makes it clear that he doesn't want to pen the Darker and Edgier Lord of the Flies-style Deconstruction that everyone's minds head towards, nor does he want to bog down the story to explain how such a world could work, and simply implores potential readers to take the story for what it is at face value.
  • In addition, this is a project by The Mysterious Mr. Enter, who is well known for being a very divisive reviewer, which itself is enough of a reason for some people to reject Growing Around. It should also be noted that Enter's writing does contain a lot of the same tropes and writing problems he criticizes other creators of making.

There's no proof that critical reception was affected by the premise, though I definitely think it's a factor. The second bullet point sounds like misuse as well; maybe it's more Overshadowed by Controversy due to Mr. Enter's frequently polarizing opinions, including the conflict with Robobuddies over a scene in the show?

This was recently added to Ferris Bueller's Day Off:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: Some viewers were disturbed by the moral, which implied that it's okay to lie, cheat, and steal in order to live life to the fullest.

The movie was widely popular and liked despite the premise, wasn't it? So it doesn't count. That may be an Accidental Aesop or something instead.

Yeah that film is beloved. Not an example. Who added that ?

HarleyQuinnIsGreat added it on the 3rd.

Let me take a wild guess: was that entry originally under Family-Unfriendly Aesop? Because that troper has a history of moving misuse of that (discredited) trope to other tropes even when it doesn't fit those tropes.

Family-Unfriendly Aesop was removed from the page shortly before the Audience-Alienating Premise example was added...

Bringing up the following examples from AudienceAlienatingPremise.Film:

• Sometimes sequels can fight an uphill battle to captivate the public at large.
  • Army of Darkness is the third film in a film series that few people had ever heard of, and the only installment to get a wide release. It follows directly after the second film, requiring the main character to give a plot summary of the first two films right at the very beginning to catch everyone up. Furthermore, the concept is very outlandish for new viewers to dive straight into: A modern man with a chainsaw for a hand falls into a time portal to the Middle Ages and fights demon-zombies. The film's tone is also an unusual blend of slapstick humor and horror. Not surprisingly, the film flopped, though it did achieve a Cult Classic status along with the rest of the series.
  • Alien: Covenant had the bad luck of being a follow-up to Prometheus, which split opinions for going into intellectual tangents. Covenant tried to make all sides of the fandom happy again by returning to the sci-fi horror roots of Alien down to featuring the franchise name again in the title... which instead made wary both those who liked Prometheus (as they saw Covenant was trying its best to keep its distance) and those who didn't (who knew that as a sequel, Covenant couldn't completely get rid of the storyline and baggage of Prometheus), making it practically impossible for the sequel to succeed in any direction.
  • Blade Runner 2049 was the sequel to a moody and downbeat R-rated sci-fi that bombed upon release (though it became a revered Cult Classic) 35 years ago, that's light on the action and heavy on the philosophical brooding, and a very long runtime nearing 3 hours. So in spite of highly positive reviews, it opened to lower than expected numbers (though still finishing at #1) and couldn't break $100 million in North America, with the $260 million worldwide not being enough to offset the huge budget.
  • Terminator: Dark Fate put off audiences with its focus on new characters the fanbase didn't care for, continuing the trend of being a Happy Ending Override for Terminator 2: Judgment Day that made prior sequels reviled, and fans correctly predicting that John Connor would be killed off before leaks and early release confirmed it. Thus in spite of the best reviews since the third movie, Dark Fate was a financial flop.
  • The X-Files: I Want to Believe would not continue the dangling plots of the Myth Arc, but instead tell a Monster of the Week story. Even worse, it involves a Pedophile Priest, something that usually falls straight into this trope. Hence, fans of the show had the potential to not be satisfied and casual viewers didn't see much reason to watch the movie.

I think only Terminator: Dark Fate qualifies, as it is a rather egregious change to the series. The others were just very tough acts to follow, and the X-Files one doesn't appear to have any context.

I had this entry on the Anime and Manga subpage that seemed to be a pretty clear explanation of a poor premise causing a manga to be canceled early, but it was removed with no explanation.

• Ashigei Shoujo Komura-san is a harem manga about a girl who is skilled with her feet and relies on using her and the other female characters' feet as fetish. Since the majority of manga readers do not have a foot fetish, it comes as no surprise that the manga appealed to too small an audience and was Cut Short.

If there was no reason for its cut and the entry seemed fine, add it back.

No, you'll get caught in an Edit War. Message the person who removed it first.

Oh, right. Forgot about that. Sorry.

Bringing up the following example from Idiocracy:

• Audience-Alienating Premise: The film blames poor people for their own lack of birth control and low levels of education, all while conflating class, wealth and intelligence. This is remarkably mean-spirited for a film which allegedly wants to aspire to a better world. Idiocracy's take away is that the poor are to blame for the state of society (despite having little to no control over the circumstances of their lives) and that success comes from "common sense" (rather than the chance circumstances of health and education a person is born into).