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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.
They used to rewrite movies until the execs thought they were good. Maybe they didn't have to do that to make money and that's why they stopped or maybe the execs that did that were replaced and the newer execs don't because they don't care or it's become harder to do something like rewriting a movie four or five times until you get something that you think is right like Gladiator. But it used to be a pretty common thing, Tom Stoppard would punch up all the dialogue in The Last Crusade or Aaron Sorkin for the Rock/Enemy of the State but I don't here about script doctors anymore and not really about things like Gladiator where they just couldn't stop rewriting it. I don't hear about studio meddling anymore, do you?
I look at things like Smile today (many days ago, I guess) and I can see that the execs knew they had a hit there with the idea alone. They got a really fancy production team on board, they got Cristobal Tapia De Veer for the music, They got decent to good actors, they marketed the shit out of it but they didn't try to fix the CW-level plot that existed in the middle for some reason. Maybe the execs that were artists themselves and could see what made something good or not are gone and now we're left with people who can only see what makes money because the two things are so far apart now. There's nobody like Roger Corman looking at your movie and telling you its shit because it doesn't have enough explosions and then shrugging and giving you carte blanche to go out and shoot the movie again with more explosions. But everyone's an auteur. There's some kind of allegory or symbolism. Can you imagine someone trying to fix the extra hour that exists in the Substance for some reason nowadays? They'd get quiet cancelled or something like that like that for "being a piece of shit."
But I suspect the main reason is that it makes no difference. Maybe it did at one point but there's no reason to try to fix Love and Thunder when it will probably piss Taika off and all the people who have to come for reshoots and you won't make any more money. Who'd want to take charge of something like that anyway? Joss Whedon was basically cancelled for dealing with the people on the Justice League reshoot and trying to get a black person to say lines in the script.
Though it's also clear that there are many major executive decisions at studios to not make things good. You can look at Amazon or Netflix, they didn't try to get good writers or even lovers of the material they were making for The Witcher or Wheel of Time. Why would Disney continue to employ Russel T. Davies to take a massive shit on Doctor Who again? Maybe its cheaper but Russel T. Davies is probably more expensive than the CW also-rans that seem to be able to get their hands on best-selling book franchises, so I expect there's a lot of cronyism or simply just lack of any understanding or care about the things they're making because known IPs don't have to be good they just have to exist so give The Witcher to that girl that wrote a few episodes of Riverdale or let's reboot Buffy with someone that wrote an episode of Poker Face. If it fails who cares we made some money and we can just reboot it again later.
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