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Why are blockbuster movie scripts so... bad?
I've been going to the movies more in the last year than I have in the previous decade, because I have a coworker turned friend that likes to watch films in theaters and it is a cheap way to hang out with him (protip: bring your own snacks and drinks in a backpack instead of buying from the concession stand and watch the morning matinee instead of purchasing the more expensive evening tickets). And what I keep noticing is that, while they are very pretty, the writing in them is absolutely, uniformly awful.
I'm not even talking about politics here. I'm talking about how nobody in Mufasa ever stops to think about "wait a minute, how do I know that Milele even exists?!" the way a level 1 intelligent character would. I'm talking about how half the runtime of Jurassic World Rebirth is pointless action sequences that contribute nothing to the plot. I'm talking about how Brave decided to waste its amazing prologue by focusing the movie around the mom turning into a bear.
If you are already spending $200 million dollars producing a movie and a similar amount marketing it, why can't you just throw in an extra million to hire Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin (or, hell, Eliezer Yudkowsky) to write your script for you?
But... it doesn't seem to be a question of money? It is certainly possible to find much better writing in direct to video films than in theatrical films, despite their much lower budgets. Everybody agrees that the DCEU was a pile of crap, while there were have been some very solid entries in the DC Universe Animated Original Movies series. I recently watched Justice League: Gods & Monsters, and I was hooked from the first scene of General Zod cucking Superman's dad to the end credits; I wasn't looking at my watch wondering how much longer the movie is going to last, the way I do when watching a blockbuster.
Previous discussion.
There are two broad models for film production: the auteur model, where a genius director is granted full control; and the committee model, where a variety of people belonging negotiate for their own interests.
Well, that's a lie. There's a whole spectrum of production models, including genius-director-plus-meddling-executive-directors and committee-headed-by-strong-mayor and collaborators-work-to their strengths. But it's useful to think about every movie as falling (relative to some imaginary baseline) into either camp. Auteur films lie and die on whether their director is actually a genius-- and a genius not just at directing, but at every layer of personnel selection and delegation. That makes them risky, because a director's genius is often relative to the nature of the specific project they're working on. Pretty much every "great" film has been an auteur film, but a disproportionate number of terrible films are auteur films too. In the meantime, committee films pretty invariably fall into a "mediocre but enjoyable" middle zone. When entertainment companies fund a movie, they can afford to take risks on auteurs if the movies being funded are relatively cheap. If 9 of your 10 million dollar movies flop but the last one makes 200 million you're in the black. But blockbusters have to make a return. Netflix Originals can afford to vary in quality, but Marvel movies have to put butts in seats every single time.
Now, all of the above is probably just review-- I'm sure you've heard arguments to that effect before. And it might seem a bit misaimed with your criticism is with writing specifically. Why not just hire a known-genius director, and force them to work with a known-genius writer, and otherwise keep your hands off? The problem is is that the auteur-versus committee problem is fractal. We can say that a genius director should have all the power relative to their production committee, but what about relative to a genius actor, or a genius writer? Compared to novels, scripts are filtered through three extra layers of interpretation: first, the collaborative interpretation between the actor and their director. Then, the interpretation of the camera operator, then the interpetation of the editor. Each layer subtracts some of what the writer's initial intention was, and adds a little of what all the other collaborators are thinking of. That means every layer of production needs to be careful about not spoiling the soup. If they add too much of their own personal flavor, it'll clash with what everyone else is doing. If they add too little, they're create the movie equivalent of that one meme about the horse drawing. So you can't just add a top-tier writer to a project and let them have free reign, because that brings the whole thing out of whack. You can't just lock a bunch of geniuses together in a film studio with an unlimited supply of cocaine, you need genuine collaboration, the entire way up and down the chain. If movies routinely used the exact same crew working together they could be consistently good, but as-is there's no way a production committee can just hope for the best. Thus, executive meddling. Thus, poorly written blockbusters.
The studio system/golden age of Hollywood churned out fast crud, by committee, significantly better than what we have now.
Fast crud, not fast blockbusters. Even committees can take artistic risks when movies are cheap. The 1959 Ben Hur only cost about 150 million dollars in today's money. Back that, that was an absurd amount of money. Today, any given marvel movie will hit that figure.
Okay, so why don't studios make movies for less? We know full well it is possible; Super Mario Bros and Oppenheimer were both made on a budget of $100 million, and both did great at the box office ($1.361 billion and $975.8 million, respectively).
Why are the budgets so out of control? What possessed Disney to invest $250 million on Snow White, or Warner Bros to drop $200 million on Joker 2?
They do. But mostly those cheaper movies end up going straight to streaming, because nothing short of a blockbuster puts butts in theater seats.
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I can't conceive that any kind of ROI calculation happened with Joker 2. Profit was not the goal. You don't take a small-mid budget film that scored a billion at the box office and go 'for the sequel we'll take a completely different tone and genre and themes! Also to maximize our revenue, also spend 4-5x as much'. No sane person would do this. If it works, do the same thing again but better and follow up on the hit. Don't totally reinvent what you're doing.
But it was the same writers and directors... Only one of three producers was changed.
It really says a lot about our society.
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Did it, or did everybody just collectively forget about all of the forgettable trash?
That's what crud means. I'm not talking about the blockbusters. Now, 50s style b movies are different, but the studio system had everyone on top of their game because they were putting movies out so quickly, with teams having control over their specific domain. The end results would often be forgettable but rarely incoherent like today.
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