Studios Blame Everyone But Themselves For Movies That Suck

tcsmit29 said:

The well isn't dry yet... One Day at a Time, Facts of Life, and Three's Company haven't had reboots yet. Personally, I'm holding out for WKRP in Cincinnati.

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There is in fact a One Day at a Time reboot on netflix right now

WKRP had a reboot about 10 years ago i think it was. Maybe longer. So another would be version 3 and would have to feature autotune music (and i use that term loosely).

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As for movies, i never watched Baywatch, but looking at the commercials, it looks like they turned it into a comedy bordering on slapstick when the original was a drama (so to speak anyhow). It just looked really stupid.

On the bigger picture, as noted by others. Do something original, take a risk, surprise us. You don't move forward or break ground giving people what you think they expect. Plus, you know, if you WANT to reboot something, there had to have been some appeal of the original - stick with THAT aspect. Stop turning them all in to stupid comedies.

I use the reviews as general a "guidline"

If I am interested in a movie, I will see it regardless of how good or bad the reviews are

Movies I know nothing about, I may do a quick glance at reviews, but even then, take most with a grain of salt anyway

cboath said:

As for movies, i never watched Baywatch, but looking at the commercials, it looks like they turned it into a comedy bordering on slapstick when the original was a drama (so to speak anyhow). It just looked really stupid.

On the bigger picture, as noted by others. Do something original, take a risk, surprise us. You don't move forward or break ground giving people what you think they expect. Plus, you know, if you WANT to reboot something, there had to have been some appeal of the original - stick with THAT aspect. Stop turning them all in to stupid comedies.

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Studios don't like taking risks because movies cost too much money to make these days to take big risks. Remember, outside of some indie studios, movie studios are in the business of making money, not making art, and certainly not losing money trying to make art. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing something more original but as long as movies cost tens (or more) of millions to make then we're not going to see the big studios taking many risks, not when crap like Transformers still makes money.

I also think that over the decades the studios have gotten a bit gun shy about making movies that are too off the beaten path because of past attempts that end up bombing. They see that they took a risk, it didn't work and cost them money, so they go back to what works. Of course, whenever they do take a risk and it works out and makes them money that then becomes the new norm as every other studio, along with the original studio, sees that movie X made tons of money they feel that they all have to make movies like that as well and they'll make huge money also.

Riceball said:

Studios don't like taking risks because movies cost too much money to make these days to take big risks. Remember, outside of some indie studios, movie studios are in the business of making money, not making art, and certainly not losing money trying to make art. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing something more original but as long as movies cost tens (or more) of millions to make then we're not going to see the big studios taking many risks, not when crap like Transformers still makes money.

I also think that over the decades the studios have gotten a bit gun shy about making movies that are too off the beaten path because of past attempts that end up bombing. They see that they took a risk, it didn't work and cost them money, so they go back to what works. Of course, whenever they do take a risk and it works out and makes them money that then becomes the new norm as every other studio, along with the original studio, sees that movie X made tons of money they feel that they all have to make movies like that as well and they'll make huge money also.

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Ever hear the phrase "no risk, no reward"? You shouldn't be rewarded for not taking risks.

As for costing too much, who's fault is that? People make damn good indy movie all the time for tiny fractions of what a big studio does. I haven't seen baywatch, but i can't imagine it's very effects heavy. It shouldn't have had a huge price tag to begin with. If you're going to throw 20M+ at the rock and 10+ at what's his name, you best make damn sure you put out something people want to see.

As for playing it safe, making a movie out of an old TV and trying to be safe would be largely following what made the show a success in the first place and not using the name and turning it to a fart comedy and then blaming everyone else when it bombs. It's all on you, you @#$%'ed it up, no one else. It wasn't piracy, it wasn't reviews, it was you plain and simple. You took what you thought was a safe concept, totally changed the concept, went against the grain of the concept, offended it's original fans, overpaid the cast - none of that is on anyone but the studio and the producer.

People have a ton more entertainment choices these days than 10, 20, or 30 years ago. if you want their money, you've got to EARN it. You can't vomit stuff on a screen and then bitch and moan that no one goes to see it.

If you want to make money, you have to take risks, or more make very cheap crap. You can't make expensive crap and then act dumbfounded as to why no one wants to see it.

Riceball said:

I also think that over the decades the studios have gotten a bit gun shy about making movies that are too off the beaten path because of past attempts that end up bombing. They see that they took a risk, it didn't work and cost them money, so they go back to what works. Of course, whenever they do take a risk and it works out and makes them money that then becomes the new norm as every other studio, along with the original studio, sees that movie X made tons of money they feel that they all have to make movies like that as well and they'll make huge money also.

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I'm sure some people will say they use recycled tropes and play it safe - but my counter to this part is Marvel.

Marvel did no like what others did with their stuff. the got what they could in house and I believe their first completely solo project was Iron Man. It was a risk, it may not have been off the beaten path, but there was risk there as they sank a lot of money into AND hired a star who no one would touch at the time and IIRC had to jump through hoops to get him insured to even get the project started. Massive success. They took risks here and there (lots of people doubted thor, most doubted ant-man, lots doubted anyone could put all those characters in a movie, keep it balanced, and make it good. Yet they succeeded all around. Dr Strange was doubted it would translate to the screen well, another hit. No one knows the Guardians, no one will see it cause they don't know the characters - mega hit x 2.

No, they're not doing off the wall avante garde never before seen life changing cinema- but they bucked the existing studio system to do things their way and people are still trying to (and failling) to copy them to this day (i'm looking at you DC )

They are caught in a vicious cycle that they created. To make the big money they have to have the big stars. To have the big stars you have to pay them millions. To pay them millions the movies have to make big money. If they were smart they would go back to putting actors under multi-movie contracts.

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cboath said:

I'm sure some people will say they use recycled tropes and play it safe - but my counter to this part is Marvel.

Marvel did no like what others did with their stuff. the got what they could in house and I believe their first completely solo project was Iron Man. It was a risk, it may not have been off the beaten path, but there was risk there as they sank a lot of money into AND hired a star who no one would touch at the time and IIRC had to jump through hoops to get him insured to even get the project started. Massive success. They took risks here and there (lots of people doubted thor, most doubted ant-man, lots doubted anyone could put all those characters in a movie, keep it balanced, and make it good. Yet they succeeded all around. Dr Strange was doubted it would translate to the screen well, another hit. No one knows the Guardians, no one will see it cause they don't know the characters - mega hit x 2.

No, they're not doing off the wall avante garde never before seen life changing cinema- but they bucked the existing studio system to do things their way and people are still trying to (and failling) to copy them to this day (i'm looking at you DC )

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Marvel does good movies, with fun adventures, and characters you like.

Can you imagine how that Dark Universe is gonna fare? They are doing nothing but hiring huge expensive names, Cruise, Crowe, Depp, and I hear they want Jolie. Marvel did not rise on star-power. It made stars.

The Mummy looks like the same MI/Bourne stuff we've been getting for years plus a Mummy. And no one has been asking for Universal Monsters, just like no one asked for a Ben-Hurt...I mean Ben-Hur movie and no one asked for a Baywatch movie.

Frankly, I would rather see "The Monster Squad 2" than a Universal "Avengers" movie starring all those actors.

Look what happened with the Ghostbusters reboot. As soon as it was announced the fans said "We don't want this!" and instead they just called them all misogynists. I don't think most fans would care one bit if the whole team was women, IF it was a new story.

Riceball said:

Studios don't like taking risks because movies cost too much money to make these days to take big risks. Remember, outside of some indie studios, movie studios are in the business of making money, not making art, and certainly not losing money trying to make art. Not that I wouldn't mind seeing something more original but as long as movies cost tens (or more) of millions to make then we're not going to see the big studios taking many risks, not when crap like Transformers still makes money.

I also think that over the decades the studios have gotten a bit gun shy about making movies that are too off the beaten path because of past attempts that end up bombing. They see that they took a risk, it didn't work and cost them money, so they go back to what works. Of course, whenever they do take a risk and it works out and makes them money that then becomes the new norm as every other studio, along with the original studio, sees that movie X made tons of money they feel that they all have to make movies like that as well and they'll make huge money also.

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The first thing I thought of when I read this was Deadpool

As someone who is a screenwriter and knows a tiny TINY fraction of what goes on behind the scenes from both covering scripts and working in TV I can sum it all up for you in one single sentence.

No matter what they tell you, no one has a clue what they are doing.

ForbiddenOnion said:

No matter what they tell you, no one has a clue what they are doing.

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I love that comment! Its exactly how I feel in my job and I'm an analytical chemist.

PS Love the P Troughton avatar! One of my favorite Doctors.

I still don't believe there is anything 100 percent original. Nothing you put out doesn't have elements in something before.

The way I see it, no story is original at this point. It's more about presenting developed and interesting characters and settings. The same story can be totally different when experienced by different characters. Here's an example, I'll describe the plot of a movie:

A man's most valuable possession, his bicycle, is stolen and he goes on a journey to find it.

That's essentially the story for either The Bicycle Thief or Pee Wee's Big Adventure. Essentially the same plot, but the setting and characters are what make it unique.

Sluis Van Shipyards said:

Look what happened with the Ghostbusters reboot. As soon as it was announced the fans said "We don't want this!" and instead they just called them all misogynists. I don't think most fans would care one bit if the whole team was women, IF it was a new story.

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andthey got real comedians. not fly by not stars....and the right director who knew what the hell they where doing..and...but we shant open this can of worms again ;o). people can't take facts.

Just to nitpick - the remake of GB had 3/4 stars from SNL. The original had 2/4 stars from SNL. The only one of the group who probably wasn't an existing star at the time of their releases was Ernie Hudson.

The big difference is, the original 'big 3' created it themselves and wrote it themselves. They weren't recycling a 25 year old hit and cult classic, they created something new.

I think a big part of the issue is not so much that it's a business, but that it's a business run by people who often only understand business itself, and don't really understand art.

There's this notion that art and business are somehow opposed to each other, and I just don't think that's really true. But the folks who are really good at business may simply not understand what makes good art, and so they go for the stuff they know: the things that they think will make money, or at least are the safest bets.

Starting with the first Pirates movie, you saw the explosion of "franchise" films and what I call "branded properties." In previous years, the "brands" were the actors themselves, which gave the actors IMMENSE power (well, gave some actors such power) to set their own prices. Remember in the 90s when if you stuck Tom Hanks in a movie, you were basically guaranteed an Oscar, amazing press, and critical acclaim? Well, there's only one Tom Hanks, and he's freakin' expensive, even when he's doing a weak romcom about a bookshop or whathaveyou.

But you can buy brands up left and right, and then YOU own them and YOU get to exploit them. Forever. Or at least until the license expires. Enter the "branded film." Take something that everyone's familiar with. I dunno...a board game, maybe, like, say, Battleship. Then you either adapt an existing script to fit the brand, or you cobble together something around the brand like, say, aliens attacking and this big earth battleship defends the planet. Whatever. Who cares. Stick a well known star or two in it (e.g., Liam Neeson), cut a big, action-packed trailer with a few comedic lines in it amidst the action, and bim bam boom, you've got yourself a franchise!!!

Well....not always. But I think that's the calculus behind a lot of these films. They know people prefer to go to films where there's some underlying sense of familiarity, rather than completely new source material (which is why films like Jupiter Ascending and Valerian and the City of 1000 Planets are so surprising and risky). So, they just...keep doing that. And they also know that the demographic most likely to go to films -- between about 12 and 25 -- tend to cycle every 5-10 years or so, to the point where you can just reboot properties somewhere in that schedule. Sooner, even, if it's a big enough property that people will just keep seeing it (e.g. Spider-Man).

Lost in the midst of all of that is consideration for the art of storytelling. I'm not saying that nobody in Hollywood understands or cares about that. Obviously, that's not true. But a LOT of the people holding the purse strings, I think, don't understand it, or just aren't thinking about it as a priority.

I was thinking about this over the weekend and it seems to me that Hollywood being risk averse is similar to most corporations in the US needing large numbers in profit and/or growth or they lay people off. "Office Christmas Party" mentions it twice in the first part of the movie.

Speaking of unoriginal and The Rock, I keep forgetting to stop following him on Facebook (He made a big deal about moving a show he is on from Miami to LA and how it is going to help employ a lot of people while totally ignoring all the people he is unemploying) and I see he is filming a movie version of "Rampage". The game where you are a monster destroying buildings.

gotta prop up LA as the center of the world ;o), cause we know there is no great talent outside of it!

meanwhile, if hollywood was nowhere near it, it'd be no better off than any other city in the country ;o)

There's this notion that art and business are somehow opposed to each other, and I just don't think that's really true. But the folks who are really good at business may simply not understand what makes good art, and so they go for the stuff they know: the things that they think will make money, or at least are the safest bets.

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IIRC it has been demonstrated by researchers that creativity goes down when you ask kids to make art that they think is popular, rather than make whatever they want.

I don't think art & business are diametrically opposed either. But predictable mass-market success and creativity do have a strained relationship at best.

Starting with the first Pirates movie, you saw the explosion of "franchise" films and what I call "branded properties." In previous years, the "brands" were the actors themselves, which gave the actors IMMENSE power (well, gave some actors such power) to set their own prices. Remember in the 90s when if you stuck Tom Hanks in a movie, you were basically guaranteed an Oscar, amazing press, and critical acclaim? Well, there's only one Tom Hanks, and he's freakin' expensive, even when he's doing a weak romcom about a bookshop or whathaveyou.

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I don't think the first POTC movie was where it started. IMO it seemed to creep up over time around the turn of the century.

In the late 1990s the sheer number of movies hitting theaters seemed to be ramping up year after year. I mean not only the little Tarantino ripoffs & horror flicks, but also the number of decent-sized movies with recognizable stars that would have been expected to last a while in theaters. The amount of net-total money that the studios were throwing at theaters (like counting total biomass rather than number of individual life forms) seemed to be on a steady increase.

For a while they were trying to sell stuff based on the star-power of actors but eventually that wasn't working well enough anymore. Putting Al Pacino or Brad Pitt or Harrison Ford on the headline wasn't guaranteeing butts in the seats like it used to. They switched to sequels/reboots/etc as their next attempt to find a predictable formula. There was a lot of bottled-up ideas for "big" movies that SFX limitations had kept out of production in previous eras. Going BIG was where it's at, and that has largely been true ever since.

Cable TV had also been showing a lot of older TV shows to younger audiences in the 1980s/90s. I think that primed the pump for a lot of theatrical remakes of old TV show that would not have happened in previous eras. That helped feed the idea that remaking existing stuff was a low-risk investment.

The LOTR trilogy was a remarkable incident of betting on three huge movies to succeed before seeing the box office take of the first one. That only seems like a safe risk in hindsight. They didn't even do The Hobbit first, they jumped right into the big three. That was the same era when studios thought blowing a hundred million bucks on Travolta's Battlefield Earth or Kevin Costner's post-apocalyptic messes were good ideas.

MrSouthpaw said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aomqbq5eIB0

These guys get it.

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ForbiddenOnion said:

RLM gets it on a level more people don't even know exist. They are sincerely some of the wittiest, funniest people out there. True artists.

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Don't forget Jeremy and Chris at Cinema Sins. Brilliant commentary on films, and for while Cinema Sins Jeremy side-channel was posting really good commentary on Hollywoods current downward spiral.

RLM's "**** you, it's January" video is one of their classic posts about what's wrong with your theater cinema choices.

It's incomprehensible that Hollywood seems to be making movies for 14-25 yo males, mostly, and they KNOW the guys in this demo have way way more choices for their entertainment dollars. So yeah, these young people use word of mouth, and sites like RT and IMDB to decide, "Um, see the singing dancing muppets in space movie, or the sad flick about the lawyer with AIDS, the rehash of the TV jiggle show (do we get to see Alexandra's boobs again? no? screw it, let's watch True Detective again),… or do we go play video games, or I dunno, go to the beach and try to pick up girls, or…" Hollywood execs and "talent" like Johnson are griping that it's the sites' fault ... those sites would be dead and buried except they're popular with the demo whose $s they're chasing.

I dunno, Hollywoodland, you're putting out re-boiled crap leftovers from the 80s, spending way way too much money on producing it, then crybabying that the demo you made it for couldn't care less, and blaming some web sites. Great job deflecting blame and not learning a dang thing in the process. Time to green light that Partridge Family reboot treatment, eh?


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