“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made — and it’s even starting to happen with the little ones, which is what’s really freaking me out — decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee,” she added. “Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to fucking want to see those.”
I don’t know why studios keep meddling.
She said the script she signed up for was way better, and what got released is completely different
Like, I know some stuff will always change. But this comes up so often and it’s just producers fiddling with shit
This is often over looked when people wonder why someone might sign up to something that is a trainwreck, and it usually comes down to the final film being far different than the original vision. Hell, a movie can be destroyed during script rewrites, bad scenes, and even during the editing process! Bladerunner has multiple versions based on editing the same filmed scenes. The theatrical version was ruined by insistence on a voiceover and the final cut is the best version due to what they cut out or left in.
This one sounds like the Bladerunner theatrical cut being ruined by execs, and that does suck.
The best known opposite example is Star Wars (A New Hope). When George Lucas screened it for Spielberg, Spielberg didn’t know how to tell George how terrible it was without ruining their friendship. George gave his steaming pile of shit to his wife and she and her editing partner literally built the classic we know today from it. George learned his lesson and gave Empire to someone else to direct and his wife to edit.
George is the most overrated director of all time.
One hit wonder as a director. And that hit is American Graffiti, not Star Wars.
I don’t disagree but THX1138 is pretty alright too
He’s an ideas man, maybe one of the best ever. Ideas are important for a director, but execution is arguably more important, which requires the ability to listen to others
After seeing what Disney did to Star Wars, George Lucas at least produced something decent with the prequels.
Hancock
What’s the story with that one? I’m unfamiliar.
It was a Will Smith movie about a Superman-like superhero who became reviled and then became a bum. It was exciting because this was during the height of Will Smith’s action career and it would have been the first high-budget serious superhero movie starring a person of color.
The original script reads like pure art and adrenaline from what I remember. The actual movie turned into some shit-fest that made a white PR Rep the main character and then shoehorned some weird love triangle with ancient beings and super-amnesia.
You read that right. Somehow, the first big budget gritty superhero movie starring a black man got turned into a milquetoast semi-rom-com starring a white man as a media specialist with no superpowers.
Blade.
Ghost Dog, Shaft
I think Shaft might be closer to a superhero character than Ghost Dog, but Ghost Dog had a $2 million budget, which is pennies for a studio. Shaft is a blaxploitation film, which is a totally different discussion about representation in Hollywood.
Blade had a $45 million budget, Hancock was $150 million. Blade: Trinity had the highest budget of the blade series at $65 million, and each entry introduced more white heroes who reduced Wesley Snipes’s heroic screentime.
To be fair there was a lot of rumor that Snipe’s reduced screentime had a lot to do with his own antics.
Also to be fair, if I were on a meteoric rise that made a relatively unknown IP popular and then was told that for the third entry, they were gonna reduce my screentime and most of my time on screen would be next to the two sexiest white motherfuckers in Hollywood, I’d be scared that they were trying to transition my strong black character out to be replaced with white actors. After living through that kind of white washing throughout my entire professional career and even having white writers write jokes for black people to call me dark-skinned, I’d probably start calling everyone racist and try to sabotage the production too.
Also also to be fairer, if I found out that my financial adviser was a moron and I’d likely get convicted of tax evasion, is probably be a huge asshole to everyone around me, even if I didn’t want to be mean.
Lmao those CGI eyes will be remembered until the day I die
muhfuggin goalposts
I guess? Do you consider $45 million a big budget film? That’s a lot of money for a person, but for Hollywood it sounds like a pretty safe investment. To put it better into perspective and ensure that inflation isn’t the driving factor of Hancock costing so much more than Blade: Batman and Robin released a year before Blade and had an estimated budget just shy of $160 million.
At $48 million, 1989’s Batman was still budgeted $3 million more than Blade 6 years later.
$100 million is frequently thought of as the cutoff for a big-budget film, but obviously, subjective things have wide ranges. But case in point, Batman Returns had a budget of $80 million and Tim Burton still was mostly in creative control, but feeling some pressure from the studio. Batman Forever was budgeted $100 million and was when the studio suddenly shoved their grimy hands into the creative soup and fucked things up for everyone.
I’m not sure I agree that I moved my goalposts since I very specifically mentioned gritty, superhero, starring, and big budget. Yes, that’s a very narrow focus, but these types of movies are most analyzed by annoyingly specific people.
Movies get expensive. Studios are afraid of the risk and want to play it safe. They start meddling.
And then they ruin it. They should understand their limits and realize they’re hurting the bottom line by not trusting the people who know this stuff better than them.
Having spent way too long in corporate middle management, I can tell you that there are a lot of people in corporate offices who think they’re geniuses when they are, in fact, fucking morons.
Being right and being wrong often feel the exact same until something actually challenges that belief
Conversely, how many times have we all heard people talk about the latest Star Wars movies with the, “how the fuck did they green light the trilogy with no structure” argument?
I’m not advocating for studio meddling, but this is the highest of profile projects where it arguably would have helped. JJ Abrams set that clock back to zero
That story line was 100% the result of corporate board meddling
I think the biggest thing is they should be having artistically minded people consulting the artists. Not money minded people
It’s either that or try to make cheaper movies instead, but even then they need to trust the people who actually make the movies.
Cheaper movies are exactly what we need. There are 5 major studios (Disney, Paramount, Universal, Sony, and Warner Bros.) and between them they release about 20 movies a year with budgets over $100mil. They need to be releasing about 5. In 2023 14 movies were released with budgets above $200mil and only one (Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3) broke even on box office sales.
Throwing money at it doesn’t make a movie good. Some movies require big budgets to effectively tell their story but most don’t and the more money a studio throws at a movie the less control the actual film makers have. The story and a film maker with a coherent vision are the two most important elements.
To prove it here are some iconic movies made for less than a million dollars: Mad Max, Napoleon Dynamite, Clerks, Paranormal Activity, Friday the 13th, Halloween. Between 1 and 2 million we pick up movies like Rocky and Saw. My Big Fat Greek Wedding cost $5 million.
Studios need to focus on 1 big movie a year and then take lots of small budget risks. The box office profits from the $5 million Get Out would pay for 25 $10 million risks. Find a decent script with a passionate filmmaker behind it, give them just enough of a budget to get the film made and stay out of the way. The overall quality of cinema would be vastly improved.
There’s a great rant by Matt Damon about how we don’t do mid-budget films any more. We get cheap crap, we get AAA level blockbusters with 200 million marketing budgets, what we don’t get is 40 million movies.
The ones big enough to tell big stories but small enough not to attract attention from mid level execs wanting a producer credit.
To be fair, a lot of people are just going to wait for any mid tier movie to show on streaming rather than go to the theater for something that isn’t a high budget spectacle.
Cheap crap is low risk, so who cares if it flops
Yep, before the mid-tier movies came out on DVD, which gave them another boost of profit - in many cases bringing the movie from a loss to profitability.
In the streaming world this mechanism doesn’t exist.
I attended a conference where a former 20th Century-Fox executive talked about the way she meddled in the trailer process with technology. It’s all about numbers and metrics – if enough people, in the right demographics, didn’t watch the whole trailer on YouTube, they’d cut the next trailer to cater to that group. Even if it wasn’t a great representation of the movie; her bonus depended on people watching the trailer.
I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie trailer that made me more excited to see a movie than less, I generally try to avoid them at this point like most advertising and feel better for it.
Yes and that too bad, I’m not sure if it was the novelty or just the naive rose-tinted glasses of youth but trailers seemed Awesome when I was a teenager.
Now? Eh.
I feel like I’ve seen too many trailers with shit exploding and the one and only funny scene of the movie, that they don’t really attract me anymore.
They used to be better. My prime example is This teaser for Thor Ragnarok.
Watch from about 1:09.
They just kept revealing the scene! How much better would that scene have been when you watch the movie if we didnt know who was going to come out that door?
Would you show the hulk? I wouldnt. Thats an amazing scene everyone who left the theatre would have been gushing over if it was a surprise.
This never would have been the trailer in previous years but today seems to be all about showing the juiciest parts of a movie just to get people talking about going to see it. Then the movie be utterly disappointing because you have already seen the best scenes and all the bits between just arent as interesting. Its like telling all of the best jokes in a movie before you go see it. Sure it gets butts in seats. Im just surprised it STILL gets butts in seats
“KPI Psychosis”
Money people want to be artists.