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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.
My maximum charitable take is that they're just giving audiences the thing they've shown they want.
I model most movies along three axes for what justifies said movie's existence and creates the appeal to the audience.
They can be plot driven; They can be action driven; They can be character driven.
Or often, some combination of all 3.
Character driven means we get engaged with a unique/interesting character, who is put into certain situations, has a certain arc, and comes out changed in some way. The plot doesn't have to make sense, we're mostly just focused on seeing the character's reaction to what's happening, how they interact with other characters, and the lessons they learn by the end. Writing needs to be good, but mostly in terms of dialogue, giving the character(s) a recognizable voice and appropriately comedic or dramatic lines.
Action driven, we're there to see a spectacle, the plot is mostly there to set up scenarios for the action, and if the action is sensational enough the audience doesn't notice or forgives plot holes or crappy writing. You write your character some pithy one-liners and give enough of a skeleton of a plot to move things along. Choreography matters a lot more here.
Plot driven, though... we're there for an interesting story. Entertaining events, surprising twists, revelations, and a satisfying conclusion are mandatory. If the twist doesn't land, if there's noticeable holes in the plot, if there's too many boring scenes, it fails. If your audience is watching because they're "invested in the plot" and REALLY want to see where it goes, you have to make it work the entire time, and pay off effectively. In this case, the writing pretty much HAS to be solid, minimal/no plot holes, AND you have to keep your characters acting consistently.
What Hollywood appears to have noticed is that general audiences mostly prefer character and action driven vehicles... and care very little about purely plot-driven ones, where the story, not the characters, is the central draw.
I'd blame it on Marvel, to some extent. People show up to watch Thor or Iron Man or Starlord get into crazy shenanigans, with a big, splashy action fight scene at the climax to justify the cost of the ticket.
If you give them their beloved characters, and give them a pulse-pounding action sequence or two, most audiences will give it a thumbs up. They won't analyze the plot threads or question the film's logic or pick apart character motivations too much. So why bother giving them a tight, logical, completely unique story?
And its much, much easier to write stories for such films, where you don't have to make the plots completely coherent, just make your audience 'have fun' and you're golden.
So I think plot just falls by the wayside, and Hollywood optimizes for putting well-liked characters on screen and making up crazy scenarios to put them in, motivation or logical sense be damned.
Which sucks as one of the admittedly minority people who loves a juicy, well written, or unpredictable plot. Why I love for example in the book world the Scarlet Letter, otherwise a bit pedestrian. It has some great dramatic timing. Also, good characters play make plot easier, but good characters are harder to write and act than most people realize.
Sadly plot also requires you to pay attention and the dirty secret is that many viewers regardless of age range don’t want to sit through a whole movie and pay attention the whole time. Also most plot devices take a little time to get the first payoff. So if the other aspects of the film fall flat in the first half hour, you lose the chance, even if the plot is actually great.
And finally rewrites can destroy plot very easily via death by a thousand cuts. Great plot takes discipline! You have to know when too much is too much, and when the subtle things matter, and need the power to keep a good script good. Honestly I think most original scripts if performed as written would do great! But more than 1 significant “filter” and it gets made bland or hollowed out quite easily.
The failure mode for plot-driven media is when the writer(s) are too in love with their own genius and spend so much time adding on baroque twirls (Christopher Nolan seems to be the exemplar of this, by what reviews I've read) that they disappear up their own spirals and leave the audience with an unsatisfactory experience. "The Usual Suspects" is a great movie, but once you know the twist at the end, there's not much more to it. Sure, you can rewatch it to pick up all the clues you missed the first time round, but that's more like doing a crossword puzzle ("aha, there is the cup!" type of watching out for clues).
Juggling all three elements successfully is very difficult, pulling off two of them is probably more achievable, and it probably is easier to get characters + action to work than a combination like characters + plot or plot + action. I think this is why Hitchcock was so well-regarded as a director, he didn't pull it off every time, but he could manage to pull off plot + characters + action.
I made the exact same comparison in my review of Memento, which is not a good movie. I think one of Nolan's major weaknesses is that he loves plots, but hates the fact that there have to be characters in them doing things.
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