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Notes -
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.
(1) Our attention spans have been shot by media; we're accustomed to everything from video (old fashioned tape) to videos (e.g. Youtube) to streaming where we can fast-forward to The Good Bits and skip all the boring talky parts
(2) Because of that, modern scripts have to be full of The Good Bits to hold our goldfish-attention spans, that's why when you watch the trailers now you more or less have seen the movie because they put a lot of The Good Bits into the trailers to grab our attention and make us want to see the movie
(3) Also, modern script writers are just bad. I know I've banged on here about "The Rings of Power" before, but you can tell that Payne and McKay are movie writers not TV writers. They treat every episode like a mini-movie, so there's little development of plot and characters flowing on from one episode to the next (and that gives us things like 'in this episode Galadriel is threatening to commit war crimes in her pursuit of revenge, in the following episode she is preaching about revenge bad') and plenty of pointless activity (what did Isildur wandering around actually achieve? nothing, but hey we got a Cool Fight* with a bog monster)
I was going to answer OP’s question with a tinfoil-hat rant about screenwriters being hired out of crony/nepotism rather than talent, but your complaint about the audience rings true (too?).
Not me, of course, but yes, other people. Anecdote: I have a zoomer significant other. Last night, she suggested we watch an episode of The Bear, a show of which we have both watched and enjoyed the previous 3 seasons, and are now midway through season 4. The episodes are only 33 minutes long.
My idea of watching an episode of a TV show is: sit down and watch the show, giving it your full concentration. Her idea of watching an episode of a TV show is: be scrolling through Instagram constantly during all those 33 minutes, occasionally flicking her eyeballs to the TV during the 0.5 seconds in between reels.
And she’s the one who pays for the Disney+ subscription we’re watching it on. So… kind of a waste of money to make your show coherent when even your paying customers who proactively decide to watch the show don’t even actually process it into their brains.
Is this her?
Though I suppose it could always be worse...
Jokes on them, this is my fetish
/r/BorednIgnored (NSFW)
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