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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.
I think writing in general, including novels has declined and in part I think it’s down to how we create writers. These are not people who had traveled widely and read, they go to college to learn to write (or make films) they are taught structures and methods, but because everyone is going to the same programs and learning the same methods and having the same experiences, there’s not much to draw on. So you get a lot of people writing without very much understanding of how people react in a given situation, and the dialogue sounds a bit off because the person that’s on the screen is someone’s blind guess at what a person like that is like.
I think there's some truth to this argument, and I've seen people point out examples like how Tolkien was a World War 1 veteran which helped to shape his writing, versus modern TV shows which show military officers in some scifi or medieval setting bantering with each other like they're coworkers at a Starbucks. But I also am left thinking that this just moves the question back a step.
Everyone knows that life experiences can aid in enriching one's fictional writing. Everyone knows that sheltered people exist. Everyone knows that echo chambers exist. People educated in colleges are often even more aware of these things than the typical layman. Therefore, if I'm a sheltered college graduate wanting to write the next great American novel or the script to some TV show or film I'm pitching, I'm going to try to do as much research as I can to get out of the limitations brought on by my sheltered upbringing and limited experiences. I'm going to dive into research - at a bare minimum do a search on Wikipedia, which it's quite evidence that many of these writers didn't even care to do - to present the characters and settings in as believable and compelling ways as possible, reflecting what someone with true life experiences of those things would have written, even if I myself never had those true life experiences to draw from.
It seems evident to me that very little of that kind of research in order to break out of one's own limitations is occurring in professional TV and film writing. Perhaps in all fiction writing. This speaks to a general lack of passion or pride in the work they're putting out, a lack of desire to actually put together something good. Perhaps it reflects the education that writing is primarily about expressing your true self or whatever, not about serving the audience. Which would also, at least partially, explain why so much criticism is directed at the audience often when these projects fail because the (potential) audience refuses to hand over their money to them for the privilege of viewing them.
Even many people who are aware, in principle, that echo chambers exist seem to have a remarkably poor time recognising when they've found themselves inside one. Echo chambers, like "biases", are things that happen to other people. I'm actually not persuaded that the average person with an undergraduate degree would be better equipped to recognise that they're in an echo chamber than the average person without an undergraduate degree. Kind of reminds me of the cowpox of doubt: if you've been told that uneducated people get sucked down the rabbit hole of far-right echo chambers, you might think to yourself "phew, good thing I have a degree, that'll never happen to me!" Which might make you even more susceptible to ending up in an echo chamber - perhaps not a far-right one, but an echo chamber of some description.
Empirically, I can't disagree. What I find confusing is that, everything you wrote here is also basically common knowledge. Everyone who knows anything about bias knows that the bias of considering oneself above the biases that other people fall for is very common. As such, if you observe other people's biases and think yourself above them, the obvious conclusion would be that you're falling prey to such a bias and should break out of it by challenging yourself with objective research that challenges you.
At least, if you're motivated to write a good work of fiction that can appeal to people outside of your echo chamber. I have to conclude that a high proportion of major fiction writers have no such motivation. The hunger for status within one's echo chamber is often greater than the hunger for money, I suppose.
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