“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made — and it’s even starting to happen with the little ones, which is what’s really freaking me out — decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee,” she added. “Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to fucking want to see those.”

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176 points

I don’t know why studios keep meddling.

She said the script she signed up for was way better, and what got released is completely different

Like, I know some stuff will always change. But this comes up so often and it’s just producers fiddling with shit

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81 points

This is often over looked when people wonder why someone might sign up to something that is a trainwreck, and it usually comes down to the final film being far different than the original vision. Hell, a movie can be destroyed during script rewrites, bad scenes, and even during the editing process! Bladerunner has multiple versions based on editing the same filmed scenes. The theatrical version was ruined by insistence on a voiceover and the final cut is the best version due to what they cut out or left in.

This one sounds like the Bladerunner theatrical cut being ruined by execs, and that does suck.

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91 points

The best known opposite example is Star Wars (A New Hope). When George Lucas screened it for Spielberg, Spielberg didn’t know how to tell George how terrible it was without ruining their friendship. George gave his steaming pile of shit to his wife and she and her editing partner literally built the classic we know today from it. George learned his lesson and gave Empire to someone else to direct and his wife to edit.

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40 points

George is the most overrated director of all time.

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26 points

After seeing what Disney did to Star Wars, George Lucas at least produced something decent with the prequels.

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7 points

Hancock

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7 points

What’s the story with that one? I’m unfamiliar.

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33 points

I don’t know why studios keep meddling.

Movies get expensive. Studios are afraid of the risk and want to play it safe. They start meddling.

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42 points

And then they ruin it. They should understand their limits and realize they’re hurting the bottom line by not trusting the people who know this stuff better than them.

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24 points

Having spent way too long in corporate middle management, I can tell you that there are a lot of people in corporate offices who think they’re geniuses when they are, in fact, fucking morons.

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8 points

Conversely, how many times have we all heard people talk about the latest Star Wars movies with the, “how the fuck did they green light the trilogy with no structure” argument?

I’m not advocating for studio meddling, but this is the highest of profile projects where it arguably would have helped. JJ Abrams set that clock back to zero

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7 points

It’s either that or try to make cheaper movies instead, but even then they need to trust the people who actually make the movies.

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23 points

I attended a conference where a former 20th Century-Fox executive talked about the way she meddled in the trailer process with technology. It’s all about numbers and metrics – if enough people, in the right demographics, didn’t watch the whole trailer on YouTube, they’d cut the next trailer to cater to that group. Even if it wasn’t a great representation of the movie; her bonus depended on people watching the trailer.

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8 points

I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie trailer that made me more excited to see a movie than less, I generally try to avoid them at this point like most advertising and feel better for it.

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4 points
*

Yes and that too bad, I’m not sure if it was the novelty or just the naive rose-tinted glasses of youth but trailers seemed Awesome when I was a teenager.

Now? Eh.

I feel like I’ve seen too many trailers with shit exploding and the one and only funny scene of the movie, that they don’t really attract me anymore.

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4 points

“KPI Psychosis”

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3 points

Money people want to be artists.

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