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Author Topic: Original Story/Movie ideas  (Read 5408 times)

Bohandas

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Original Story/Movie ideas
« on: September 20, 2015, 10:52:56 pm »

Like the game ideas thread, but with ideas for novels and movies and television shows and whatnot.


Here's a few to start:


*A story about characters who had superhero origins but realistic outcomes, such as the guy who got cancer from the rays of Earth;s yellow sun, or the guy who was bitten by a radioactive spider with no appreciable effects at all.

*A cyberpunk retelling of the Christian gospels in which Saint Paul is a spambot which has somehow gained sentience

*A comic book about a superhero with all the superpowers of Rasputin (invulnerability, prescience, the ability to instantaneously heal people, etc)

*A disgruntled movie critic sends a robot back in time to stop The Terminator from being filmed, but accidentally ends up inspiring it.

*Dawn of the Dead in reverse. There's no more room on Earth because of overpopulation so people have to go down to Hell to seek housing and employment.

*A Christmas special about the nativity that is deliberately rife with scriptural and historical errors. The Roman centurions carry rifles. There are 5 wise men and one of them is Santa Claus. The narrator frequently confuses the Judeo-Christian god with Odin. King Herod sends Krampus to kidnap Jesus. The angels look like grey aliens and arrive in a flyig saucer that the narrator describes as a "magic chariot". The whole thing is played comp.etely straight.

*A deconstruction of Beyblade/Pokemon/Yu-Gi-Oh style animes in the form of an anime about a culture centered entirely on an all-consuming obsession with Tic-Tac-Toe

*A story or film noir about private investigator who is also a serial killer. He gets hired to find out what has become of people but the people were, in fact, killed by him. He simply waits a week or two, then announces to the client that he has solved the case; he gets paid, says "it was me who did it", then shoots the client and waits for someone to hire him to find out what happened to the previous client, thus ensuring a steady business.

*God sends a series of plagues to punish the sins of humanity, so in response the devil creates a team of superheroes to protect mankind.
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Starver

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #1 on: September 22, 2015, 01:22:57 pm »

*A story or film noir about private investigator who is also a serial killer. He gets hired to find out what has become of people but the people were, in fact, killed by him. He simply waits a week or two, then announces to the client that he has solved the case; he gets paid, says "it was me who did it", then shoots the client and waits for someone to hire him to find out what happened to the previous client, thus ensuring a steady business.
Dexter without the (main character's) redeeming features and sense of actual justice?  (However, we can already assume that our 'hero'/'heroine' might need a good dose of Mentalist-level thought processes, to choose just the right victim to only get the right client, rather than annoy the local police/press as well, enough to foil his/her plans.  That client already being 'just the right victim' to only get the attention of the right client.  Which indicates a form of outside-the-law clique, or at least a logical chain of connectivity, perhaps deeper into the heart of some outside-the-law parallel society to any that the normal forces of law and order tend to operate in and amongst and over.

With good (better than me) writers, that could be a long-runner.  With a gripping story-arc.  That (hopefully) makes more sense than something like Lost eventually didn't.


Ummm... constructive addition needed, not just PTW-fodder...  How about..? we need more Discworld put to the screen.  Done well.

I still hope CSI: Ankh-Morpork 'The Watch' gets off the ground.  It's been more than three years since I saw the series-preview-trailer-thingummy, and very little word from Narrativia or elsewhere since.


Except that's not Original.  So let's try something else...  A good plot needs an 'edge', a core set of of individuals tied to a situation, whether physical, geographic, social or whatever.  Something that's not been done before, though, which rules out robots-that-look-like-humans, mountain rescue teams, the inhabitants of apartment complexes, lighthouse keepers, deep-space explorers, hospital emergency rooms, paranormal investigations, ... etc.

Has there been anything centred around the hijinks/trials-and-tribulations of a printing company?  As a comedy, there's plenty of scope for the obvious mixing up of product (e.g. posters with slogans and pictures hilariously misaligned and switched between two totally different contracts, perhaps as a recurring theme/running joke) and, if serious, there's the tensions of the contract manager necessarily bringing in paying work that does not sit well with themselves/the floorstaff (highlighting intolerance and issues both within and without the workforce, perhaps both at the same time) and the increasingly losing battle against that modern competitor, the web and the many and various electronic self-publication possibilities.

In either comic or serious versions, the series could start with the introduction of the new Web Outreach Manager/whatever, brought in to bolster the failing family concern by offering Vanity Publishing/Print-On-Demand opportunities.  He/she is introduced (as, incidentally are we, the viewer) the team of close-knit-yet-internally-divided individuals that have worked with (and against) each other for many, many years, and may find the newcomer a threat to their position in the company or an ally in the battle in the internal conflict between various sub-groups of the operation (e.g. the maintenance men against the machine operators, or the whole floor-staff against the management), perhaps in surprising (and occasionally inverted) ways, as the fresh thinking comes in and turns established practices upside-down, even whilst the newbug learns that not all the ideas that they brought in with them from their previous position/educational establishment actually work as well as they could in the real-world experience of the industry.

We could probably use some inversion, too (humorous or not).  There's a posh lad, fourth son of a successful magnate/stately-home lord (the latter only really working here in Blighty) who is beyond the "heir and a spare, and a spare-spare" stage in inheritance and so actually likes the basic job of keeping the inking rollers well-inked, and so is rebelling against both his successful parents/heir-apparent who like the big business and perhaps his other 'playboy attitude' elder siblings who just rely upon their extensive trust-funds/allowances.  It would of course be assumed that the lord/magnate dislikes the whole idea of this printing firm and wants to bulldoze it off of his land and/or buy it out as (insignificant, not that it matters) competition to his own interests in the industry.

Meanwhile, the firm is actually owned by a low-class individual, perhaps a local farmer who happened to make it big in some unexpected way and bought into/created the business.  They don't dress well, and stays in his back-room executive office, much of the time conducting business by proxy; there's a partner in management who scrubs up well who does all the actual client-facing business and of course word to the floor goes through intermediaries.  In the comedic version (if not the other, but even then quite possibly), he can probably be mistaken for the janitor or even a local tramp when he actually wanders through the shop floor (anyone who ever knew, at the low end of the pay-scale, only ever managed to convey "him, oh, he's harmless, don't worry about him" to the others, who assume just someone a little eccentric) with either deliberate intent or laughable (dis-)synchronicity conspiring to prevent the mid-level people from trying to boss around/evict the 'vagrant' or else suck up to their boss, whilst transitioning through 'their' areas of the works.

(If the guy is the founder, or long-standing enough to have been around during boom-time building works, he's probably got(/knows of) a back stairway out of the office that he doesn't want to hang around in down to the main press areas, and (deliberately or otherwise) keeps out of the way when the board who know him go down to the shop floor.  This his remotely tannoyed pronouncements (or memos, with supremely bad handwriting for the opportunity of extra laughs/drama due to misinterpretations) thus never get linked to the cloudcuckoolander that everyone sees.)

There'll be some link between these two characters, the upper-class and lower-class switcheroonies.  I suspect that the boss would find the fourth-son's family ties to the person opposed to the business (for whatever reason) to be quite useful.  But whether the FS knows that he's passing secrets/misinformation back and forth is an open question.  (As is whether the FS has even told his dad!  The sudden revealing of this fact could be a plot-point in one episode of the series (threatened disinheritance?), so long as it's a logical part of a longer plot arc for the series/end-of-the-series climax.  Unless it can be written away as an "everything back to normal at the end of the episode"... perhaps specifically a dream episode, thus everything resetting again.)



But that's just an idea off the top of my head.  It might need extensive retooling due to the fact that I've not got a clue how the printing business works (or could work, with enough contrivances and plot-twisting involved), but it was the first idea I had that didn't seem to have already been done (road-sweepers - check; one household on a street vs. their neighbours - check; public transport drivers - check;...).  Although, saying that, it probably has been.  But, if not, feel free to run with it.  And perhaps then tell me how I can eventually watch it to see if it actually works out. ;)
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Jopax

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #2 on: September 22, 2015, 06:12:36 pm »

I've had one that's been bumping around in my head for a while now, tho I haven't revisited it in quite some time so it might be spotty at places, then again it probably wasn't as great to begin with, but anyways.
Movie/story thing. Starts off as we follow an alien ship of some sort, obviously damaged, crash landing somewhere in the world, staying mostly intact tho. We see a single occupant emerge, humanoid in shape, clad in a suit of some sort, maybe damaged, doesn't matter, looks like a fighting bloke in any case.
Some time later we see said bloke performing some feats of rescue and heroism in the area, acting generally like a superhero of sorts with the world both baffled at his appearance and thankful for his prevention of certain unexpected disasters. During his heroisms he comes into contact with a random girl, she'll be our human point of view. Obviously because of some circumstances he ends up saving her a couple of times, she begins falling for him, he starts showing interest in her, etc. etc. the classic damsel in distress falls for the knight in shining armour, even though it's not clear who or what he is yet (the craft itself isn't discovered and his origins are unknown to the world at large).
At one point we'll cut to a large spacecraft approaching earth, scanning and looking for something, some foreshadowing or somesuch.
Act two I guess would be mostly what you'd see from the slew of fantastical teen romance flicks we've had in the recent years, our two charachters spending time together, he's doing cool shit for her, all the while reluctantly telling her about himself and his past. A tragic one at that, his homeworld wiped out by a warmongering race, he's the last survivor of a noble species, still at the run, yadda yadda yadda. Of course the issue of him being hunted and found on Earth is brought up to which he replies that it's the reason he's been acting heroically, he needs humans on his side and with his tech and knowledge and the power base that the resources and the population of Earth present he might have a chance of standing up to the invaders.
Cue the warship in orbit contacting the world, but not really getting anything across other than that they exist and are seemingly very angry since they don't appear to have translators of any kind. Our hero then scrambles to get humans on his side, building up some sort of defense force for that final stand and everything. The invaders start doing strikes against key positions on the globe, taking out military bases and pretty much anything linked to them. In one of these strikes they take the girl, which, as we learn was put there by the hero to be kept safe or something, she was taken because the invaders apparently detected that she had interacted with the hero for a prolonged amount of time, meaning that she's somebody important to him in some way.
Our hero learns of this and is apparently infuriated, hailing the invading ship and calling for a duel, something the apparently honorable aliens can't refuse or something. So he's picked up, the world looks on silently, still preparing their weapons and whatnot, waiting to see what will happen.
Then we have the big showdown at the alien ship, our hero against the commander of the ship, the girl held hostage. Big talking is going on, threats are exchanged and all and then our hero simply shoots the girl. Announces that he snuck a nuke or something with him onto the ship and the talk was just to buy time, he then beams down to earth as the ship explodes. He then has his big speech about this being the first of many, how terrible it will be unless earth unites against these invaders and whatnot and then cue credits.
Now, this might seem nonsensical and it kinda is but here's the kicker, the twist thing at the end will telegraphed for the most part, because while the humans are fed exposition only from the point of our hero, everything the other race and him say will be translated for the audince only. From that we learn that our poor last survivor is actually a supervillian of sorts, hailing from a mostly wiped out race of masterminds and manipulators who destroyed empires from the inside, mostly using their advanced translator tech, something which appears to be a rarity in this universe. His last victims were actually his pursuers, he destroyed most of their homesystem after lifting them up from a relatively low tech state. Of course the aliens aren't honorable and didn't actually agree to a duel, they wanted to know what he did with the girl because she had incredible readings in certain areas and were worried she was an attempt to revive some superweapon of some sort. He agreed to come because he was apparently worried it ran out of control and wanted to save his skin just as much as theirs, he would come unarmed and they would not kill him on sight. As it appears, the girl was turned into some sort of weapon, a human nuke if you will, and it was triggered by her dying from a gunshot, because apparently the aliens only checked the hero for high tech stuff.
Moral of the story, don't shack up with monsters because they're called monsters for a reason. Getting eaten is the expected result, not the outlier.
Not that great again, I know but I think if it was worked over by someone who knows what they're doing it might be a decent jab at the recent trends of superhero/teen romance flick/special snowflake movies.
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Bohandas

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #3 on: September 22, 2015, 07:49:54 pm »

It starts out as a conspiracy thriller like The DaVinci Code (bordering on conspiracy-adventure like National Treasure or Hudson Hawk or conspiracy-horror like They Live). But that's just the start. After the mystery is solved and the conspiracy exposed is where things begin to get interesting. It then turns out that all conspiracy theories are true, but all are - or at this point were - in perfect balance; that is to say that the Illuminati, the Liberal Media, the Templars, the Freemasons, the Military-Industrial Complex, International Communism, Big Data, the Mafia, and so forth are all pulling the strings but in different directions, canceling each other out and allowing the world to operate with a semblance of normalcy. Now that one has been removed fnord the picture, society is beginning to unravel.
« Last Edit: September 22, 2015, 07:57:51 pm by Bohandas »
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Orange Wizard

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #4 on: September 22, 2015, 08:00:01 pm »

PTW, etc.

...

*God sends a series of plagues to punish the sins of humanity, so in response the devil creates a team of superheroes to protect mankind.
10/10
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Flying Dice

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #5 on: September 22, 2015, 08:01:52 pm »

PTW, etc.

...

*God sends a series of plagues to punish the sins of humanity, so in response the devil creates a team of superheroes to protect mankind.
10/10
It already exists.
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Baffler

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #6 on: September 22, 2015, 08:14:20 pm »

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Bohandas

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #7 on: September 24, 2015, 08:54:23 am »

Here's a couple more:

*In the future, humans have made contact with a friendly race space aliens. Both races are only just barely capable of interstellar travel, so although said contact was peaceful not much travel or trade occurs between them as . One of the few human travelers to the alien world experiences a mishap and crash lands in an out of the way region of the alien planet far from any space ports, airports, major city centers, etc. He now has just a few hours to find his way to a chemistry laboratory before he runs out of oxygen, which is neither abundant in the planet's atmosphere or necessary to the natives' metabolism (if he had landed near a spaceport or a diplomatic center they would likely have had a supply for just such an emergency, but there are not any of either close by).

*A series of educational films that use Lovecraftian horror as a vehicle to teach people about monetary policy. In the first film a student of economics at Miskatonic University runs afoul of a deranged cult dedicated to resurrecting the "Great Gold Ones" [sic] representing the gold standard. The next film deals with the evil "Reganomicon", representing supply-side economics.
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Flying Dice

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #8 on: September 25, 2015, 01:25:59 am »

Okay, how about this? It'd probably work best as a short story or film.

*Court wizards in some generic fantasy world acting and being treated like IT staff in modern companies.

That's it, that one line is all you need to picture it, I think.
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IcyTea31

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #9 on: September 25, 2015, 03:22:28 am »

In a far future where automation has taken over everything, there is a sudden blackout of electricity. The protagonist struggles to learn how to use these things called 'hands' to manipulate the world and bring the power stations back online.

Edit: In the sequel, the protagonist, now having mastered his handiwork, takes over the world by being the only one who can actually do anything without relying on machines.
« Last Edit: September 25, 2015, 03:28:35 am by IcyTea31 »
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Jopax

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #10 on: September 25, 2015, 04:31:54 am »

Okay, how about this? It'd probably work best as a short story or film.

*Court wizards in some generic fantasy world acting and being treated like IT staff in modern companies.

That's it, that one line is all you need to picture it, I think.

It'd be called Dungeon Space and it would be glorious :D
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Bohandas

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #11 on: October 03, 2015, 01:15:23 am »

Here's one. A man develops superpowers as a result of some freak occurence and resolves to use his newfound abilities to become a superhero. His efforts are thwarted however by his passive-aggressive friends and family members who waste his time taking advantage of his powers to get menial errands done; having him do stuff like carry a broken down car to the mechanic for repairs, or fly up to the roof to put up the xmas lights pr retrieve a frisbee, or use his heat vision to cook chicken.
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Bumber

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #12 on: October 03, 2015, 03:30:39 am »

Cyborg Dragons from Outer Space:
Main character's squad is delivering top secret experimental wormhole technology to a secure location. Attacked by space pirates and crash on an uncolonized planet. Squad attacked by dragons, redshirts die, squad drives off dragons. Space pirates arrive, engage in combat with squad and dragons. Most of squad and several dragons wiped out by space pirates, commander mortally wounded. Only main character and his sniper squadmate survive evac.

Cut to a year later. Colony outposts are being attacked by cyborg dragons appearing through wormholes. The main character and his sniper buddy, now mercenaries, team up with a cyborg ninja lady, expendable extras, and a female scientist (rescued when the original research base comes under attack.) They sneak about a space pirate ship in orbit that was raiding the base for tech after the attack. Scientist finds evidence on a console that space pirates are behind cyborg dragon attacks. Filler stuff happens (space battles, more cyborg dragons. Sniper announces intention to retire after this. Whoops.) Heroes sneak aboard pirate flagship, containing wormhole device and a large number of cyborg dragons. Scientist manages to disable the control over the dragons as a diversion.

Confrontation with pirate leader (in an area overlooking the active wormhole generator,) who turns out to be none other than the commander, now a cyborg (currently in a mech suit, having just killed a number of amok cyborg dragons.) He reveals he had been saved from death by the pirates for the purpose of interrogation on military intel. He managed to kill their leader during an interrogation session weeks after his capture, and declared himself the new leader (to not be killed by the other pirates.) The torture had taken a toll on his loyalties, and he set out to claim the original plans for the wormhole tech for his new fleet. He converted the dragons into cyborgs under the pirate's control for this purpose.

Gunfight ensues, wormhole tech is damaged by mech's minigun, begins to collapse ship into a singularity. Well-placed rocket knocks mech off edge into singularity. You can see some dragons and pirates on a lower level being pulled into the singularity. Heroes begin to evacuate, but pirate commander (having ditched the mech and grabbed onto a ledge or loose pipe/cable) jumps the main character (probably killing the sniper first if we haven't offed him already.) They engage in melee combat, commander is stabbed with a combat knife (or debris,) witty remark is issued, and commander is kicked over the edge into the singularity. Heroes escape on their ship, flagship collapses into singularity. Heroes head off for some R&R.

(You're welcome, SyFy.)
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IcyTea31

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #13 on: October 03, 2015, 03:48:08 am »

A man finds a bottomless bottle of beer. He spends the evening getting drunk until he passes out in a gutter, accidentally leaving the beer to pour on the ground. A passerby finds him and helps him home, ignoring the discarded bottle. In the morning, the city is flooded ankle-high with beer, and the badly hungover protagonist struggles to follow the trail of his stupor and find the bottle before all is lost to the ever-rising tide of lager.
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Neonivek

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Re: Original Story/Movie ideas
« Reply #14 on: October 03, 2015, 04:34:01 am »

A man finds a bottomless bottle of beer. He spends the evening getting drunk until he passes out in a gutter, accidentally leaving the beer to pour on the ground. A passerby finds him and helps him home, ignoring the discarded bottle. In the morning, the city is flooded ankle-high with beer, and the badly hungover protagonist struggles to follow the trail of his stupor and find the bottle before all is lost to the ever-rising tide of lager.

Honestly from my understanding the bottle would take never FOREVER to do it even if it was put in the best possible position to do so.

About 4 seconds for a litre...

13500 in a pool

So nearly three days it would take to fill it EXCLUDING Evaporation...

And even then the pool would only fill so long as the bottle of beer isn't submerged...

But the amount of water that would flood say... New York city would take 25,323 years to flood in this method if beer never evaporated or anything.

Yeah this method isn't gonna work...

Mind you broken science is great for comedies :P

Yeah I don't think the endless bottle of beer is going to be all that deadly.
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