10 Rules for Making Quality Work

By Trevor Pacelli
Good movies are important to distinguish from bad ones, as I posted before on this blog, yet when it comes to making bank, product quality isn’t enough. A filmmaker also must be in touch with the industry’s history. Any good producer knows a movie doesn’t have to be “good” to be a box office hit. Wicked, for instance, has problems with its casting, singing, and visual effects, but everything came together when meeting the desires of its target audience. Whereas other remarkable movies like Poor Things don’t get terribly prominent marketing campaigns, since producers are too afraid to give such niche films a chance.

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Finding a movie that’s both well-made and has an excellent marketing team is rarer than a functional ice cream machine at McDonald’s, and the problem’s getting worse. So based on my observations, I found ten easy rules to make sure any movie falls into the one percent of being both well-made and reaching the highest possible number of customers. These rules don’t just apply to movies, you can apply these to your line of work, whether it’s education, finances, medicine, or virtually anything:

1. Build Up the Hype First

In the months before Barbie came out, Mattel collaborated with hundreds of brands, spreading the film’s distinct pink flair all over. Wicked did the same thing, except with green and pink, which helped make both movies monstrously successful. Other clever advertisement strategies were Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool videos that promoted the Deadpool movies, while fake police reports promoted The Blair Witch Project. In contrast, some of the recent Disney/Pixar movies failed mostly due to an insignificant public presence before their release: Lightyear, Strange World, Elemental, and most recently, Elio. The best movies require just as much investment in their marketing as their production!

2. Set a Deadline with Set Dates

Plenty of movies that pushed back their release dates, sometimes more than once, as The New Mutants did, for reshoots and more editing, ended up flopping with scathing reviews. Yet sometimes a delay can pay off, as in Sonic the Hedgehog. After the first trailer for the first movie triggered such a negative reaction over the Sonic design, the studio delayed the movie for two months so the VFX artists could change Sonic. It ultimately paid off. A situation like this, or, well, a global pandemic, should be among the only exceptions for a competent studio to delay the release date of their approaching movie.

3. Follow the Experts

This point is self-explanatory: just look toward the professionals in the field you’re passionate about, maybe your college professors, your boss, social media influencers, any public figure you admire, or even movies that inspire you. The great Hollywood names took inspiration from previous films. George Lucas based Star Wars on the space operas he grew up watching, while also borrowing from Hollywood westerns and other iconic movies he admired. Also, Quentin Tarantino famously spent hours watching old movies that inspired many of his cinematic tricks. All the legends got to where they ended up because they followed in the footsteps of other successful names.

4. Know Your Medium So Well That Improvisation Doesn’t Scare You

Yes, complications on set always happen, just like life. Among the most famous behind-the-scenes-disaster stories include Viggo Mortensen breaking his toe while kicking a helmet in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, or the mechanical shark from Jaws that hardly ever worked. Steven Spielberg got around the shark problems by simply implying the shark’s presence throughout the first three-quarters of the movie, which ultimately worked because the sense of the unknown made the shark much scarier. Other movies with disastrous productions also became classics, like The African Queen and Apocalypse Now, since their directors knew that plan-A is seldom the only option for meeting their ultimate vision.

5. Know What You’re Doing

This point reminds me of high school drama club. The plays we put on were so pathetic, even compared to those by other high schools, since hardly any of us knew jack about the theatrical arts. Most of us were only in the club to hang out with our friends. Over in Hollywood, producers may greenlight a movie to catch onto a lost trend (like John Carter) or to give a sequel to a movie that audiences have already stopped caring about (like Alice Through the Looking Glass). Rather, a familiarity not just with your medium but also with your audience will reap the ultimate rewards.

6. Recognize What Inspires You

Someone may want to recapture childhood nostalgia or may feel motivated by a traumatic event to ensure nobody else goes through the same pain, but either way, every artist gets their purpose from somewhere. So many movies exist that lack any heart or are motivated to exist solely because of money, even a movie that claims to be about an important social issue, like Black Panther, may only be using those topics as bait to lure in audiences. On the other hand, a movie like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse exists because the directors and writers had something valuable to say about the webslinger’s legacy and weren’t afraid to delve deep.

7. Coworkers Should Share Your Vision

We all know how chaotic it gets when members of a school group project have different visions. The group’s collaboration often involves more fighting than working, with the presentation in the end being an incoherent mess. Right now, I’m working with a children’s book author as her illustrator, which helped me see first-hand the importance of sharing a collective vision. This author and I do come across different expectations for her book, but we communicate our concerns while bouncing ideas off each other, ultimately meeting a satisfactory compromise. It helps to know the three Cs of Coworking: Communication, Collaboration, Compromise.

8. Avoid Appealing to Modern Trends

Throughout the 2000s, Hollywood made kids’ fantasy novel adaptations left and right to capitalize on the popularity of both the Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings series. Now, those movies are mostly forgotten (anyone remember the Narnia movies or The Golden Compass?) Then in the 2010s, Marvel began a cinematic universe, which led to DC attempting the same thing. Nowadays the whole concept of the cinematic universe is pretty much left behind, to the extent even Marvel is struggling to remain relevant. Whereas the movies that became timeless never initially tried to join a movie trend, they were made because the director/writers decided to just be themselves.

9. Work For the Audience, Not the Elites

One of the many toxic Hollywood trends is Oscar bait. In 2024, the Oscar bait movies included The Apprentice, The Brutalist, A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Maria, Nosferatu, The Six Triple Eight, and the biggest offender of them all: Emilia Pérez. Such movies often adapt a true story that takes place after the 1930s (preferably during WWII), discuss a dumbed down version of a socially important subject matter, and maybe even give the lead a disability. Not only are these movies easy to forget, but they also misrepresent real people and real problems. Instead of trying to follow a checklist for wealthy out-of-touch people, remember that your movie exists for the public.

10. Have Fun

Now, it’s possible to have fun making a movie with a professionally handled marketing team only for it to turn out bad. The Super Mario Bros. Movie and A Minecraft Movie were both made by clear fans of the respective video games, but actively didn’t care about telling a good story. However, it’s also possible to make a good quality movie without any fun. Due to Schindler’s List’s delicate subject matter, there were intentionally no smiles on set, which helped capture the gravity of the Holocaust. Everyone behind Barbie displayed lots of love for the history of Barbie dolls while saying something important about the brand’s legacy. It’s essential to know what’s needed for the production you’re working on or the service you’re providing, and to do it all with a positive attitude and expresses passion for the material. Passion truly is the key to ensuring the other 9 points listed here create a movie, product, or service that will start meaningful conversations.

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Trevor Pacelli is a young adult on the autism spectrum as well as the author of What Movies Can Teach Us About Disabilities, What Movies Can Teach Us About Bullying, Summer of the Fruit Virus and the illustrator of The Kindergarten Adventures of Amazing Grace: What in the World is Autism?, and the author/illustrator of Amazing Grace Goes to the Zoo.