Which past mistakes would you prefer to see them not repeat?

Half decent actors.Saw is not going to get oscar winners but at least semi decent actors

Simple traps.
I dont mind a trap that is a little unrealistic but ones like the love triangle trap are laughable

Few flashbacks-They are unnessessary

5. No more yearly releases. I hope they take couple years off in between releases, so they can come up with something fresh.

Not shake the camera so much.

Not reading the message boards and making people correct 6 years later. It was so annoying to read "the guy doing surgery on Michael in Saw II is Dr. Gordon. He has a limp!" then seeing it actually on screen. Like the writers, Patrick and Marcus, literally wrote down what people wrote 6 years earlier. I paid to see a movie not a fan fiction.

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"But my job's fun too - I mean, tomorrow I don't have to wear a tie." - Chandler

I'm sure I could think of more, but here are three big ones for me...

1- Focusing on gore over story. This is a big issue that the films went through more and more with each entry, with IV and 3D being the biggest offenders in my opinion. By the time we got to the last one, it was kind of depressing since the producers kept pushing the "this one has the most traps!" angle, and it ended up being revealed when the film came out that this focus on gore came at the cost of crucial time that should have been spent with the characters. Yes, there needs to be traps, but they should either be fewer and more impactful, or slower and simpler story-based traps like the original film.

2- Either being too frenetic and overstuffed and or far too boring and drawn out. One of the big problems with the later films is that they couldn't quite nail the proper tone or pacing. So you had films like IV and 3D where they over-filled the scripts with constant and increasingly convoluted amounts of characters and traps and thus the films never had the time to properly develop or resolve storylines and characters. And then you had cases like V, where it was deliberate to the point of feeling pretty bland and boring. Just create compelling characters and a natural sense of pacing rather than focusing on getting the running time down to 90's minutes.

3- Writing out important characters and having to subsequently replace them with similar new characters or bring them back in unnatural ways. I know they want to keep the stakes high and make you feel like nobody's safe, but it became a problem. Particularly with the Police/FBI characters, who kept getting killed off and replaced over and over. So you'd have a good character like Detective Mathews... but they knew they were killing him off so they created a new officer character in Strahm to sort-of replace him... but then he got killed off after only two movies, so they then had to contrive a bigger focus on Erickson... and then he got killed off too, so they had to create Gibson. Or Agent Perez, who sat out an entire movie and was presumed dead, only to be brought back in a slightly contrived way because they needed another returning FBI character. They need to find actors who can commit to multi-film contracts (assuming there are more after this) and not kill any characters off until the filmmakers are sure they won't be missed or needing replacements. It started to get harder and harder to connect with anyone when you knew that they'd probably be killed off and replaced with flesh blood soon enough.

And FURTHERMORE, this is my signature! SERIOUSLY! Did you think I was still talking about my point?

1a) Be about the games, not the traps.

1b) Make traps significantly more realistic. Even the engineer couldn't whip up that many devices in that kind of time. You don't have to escalate, you know. At least in Saw III, even the "bigger" traps made sense in the place that they were in. After that, it got a little hokey.

2) Anything that DLB thought was a "staple" to the Saw franchise (quick cuts and such) should be ignored. New director, new take. Please find one that is best, because what Bousman influenced Hackl and Greutert to do thereafter was ridiculous.

3) No more "series of tests" kinds of games. Again, Saw III was original with it. Even Saw IV, which had an extremely ridiculous opposite approach to it, still had it plenty original... but after that, it was just too much. Saw VI was a great movie, but we had seen that kind of game before. Saw VII should practically be ignored, especially because, once again, we see that they can't come up with an original way of telling a story.

** Rest in peace, Timothy Volkert (1988 - 2003) **