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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.
One thing to consider is that the movie industry as a whole is... not all that profitable.
It peaked at $11 billion total domestic gross in 2018: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/ and has gone down since then. Granted that's just domestic gross, so there's also international, subscription fees, merchandise, hollywood accounting, etc... but that also doesn't take into account the cost of actually making the movies. Anyway it's a ballpark figure to show the size. Not chump change, but not a gigantic industry either.
Meanwhile you could compare that to any large corporation. let's say, Citigroup: https://companiesmarketcap.com/citigroup/revenue/ averaging around 80 billion a year. That's one corporation, not even the largest, vs all of Hollywood. In other words, there's a lot of money floating around out there that can finance flops and not care too much about maximizing revenue.
The other point I'd like to make is that, well, we've all seen movies before. Lots of them. Half the audience is barely paying attention to the movie anyway, they're watching it while distracted with their phone or something. So you don't actually need to explain all the detailed plot points of a movie. Especially when it's a typical Hero's Journey type thing, the audience will get the emotional beats regardless of plot holes. It would just be boring to stop the action and explain to the camera like "as you know, there's a special magical place that we discovered by doing long detailed research in the library..." or whatever.
You picked the 99th biggest company in the world, that's not just "any large" corporation, that's a mega-bank behemoth.
Insane how small Hollywood is though, I had no idea
Well yeah I wasn't trying to just pick one at random. But I didn't pick the very largest either.
We could also look at wall street as a whole: 198 income against 856 billion last year.
But of course Hollywood has huge propaganda/marketing value that might be hard to measure.
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