There are often tens to hundreds of millions of dollars at stake in major motion pictures these days. When I see a truly terrible film like the one in the OP title I really have to wonder how the hell it got made. My sensibilities are not terribly refined, so if I’m smelling a huge pile of horse shit with a script that sounds like it was cobbled together by someone who could not write their way out of a paper bag you really have to wonder.
I mean there are creative professionals that craft wonderful stories for a living. How does some massive elephant dump of a movie get green lighted without someone with serious skills being able to pass muster on it?
How do terrible movies happen with so much money at stake?
Generally, said remake features a big name star who’ll bring in the masses and it being a remake brings in fans of the original out of curiosity. Even if it’s rubbish, that combination should send the film into profit. I have to say that as soon as I saw that Keanu was featuring I decided to avoid it like the plague unless he was playing Gort.
Movie production is a business. Like all businesses, the question that producers ask themselves is not “Is this going to be a good movie?”. The question they ask themselves is “How much profit is this movie going to make?” The way that they make a big profit is by considering what the moviegoers are going to ask themselves when they decide what film they are going to see. The questions are things like this:
Do I like the stars of this movie?
Does the trailer of the movie have some clever action scenes?
Does the trailer of the movie have some clever dialogue?
Is there a clever one-phrase description of the plot of the movie?
Is this a sequel to a movie I liked?
Is this a genre I like?
Is this a remake of a movie I liked?
Did my friends like this movie?
Is this film getting good reviews?
Is this film directed by someone whose previous films I liked?
Is this film written by someone whose previous films I liked?
The earlier questions on this list tend to be more important in influencing the moviegoers’ choices than the later ones. Another thing the producers have to consider is how much the movie will cost to make. If the movie is cheap to make, the producers will sometimes allow a movie to be made which scores higher on the questions at the bottom of the list but not very well on those on the top of the list.
Filmmakers have every intention to make the best films they can.
But they’re constantly thwarted by limits in budget, time, or interfering talent-free Executives who change things from under their feet at every turn.
I’ve heard that with comedies in particular, it’s nearly impossible to tell if a movie is going to be funny – and therefore good – until it’s nearly completed.
Even better example: Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel also had a budget of $80 million but grossed $443 million worldwide. Of course a sequel is under way. Also note that some of the same production companies released Fantastic Mr. Fox the same year, which wasn’t nearly as successful but received much better reviews. So the dreck subsidizes the art films.
Because people go out to see the latest movie because…that’s what’s out there, good or bad. I wager most of them don’t do any research or read reviews, they just go - because that’s what playing.
I don’t know if people flocked to see the original Day The Earth Stood Still, but it’s considered, today, a good movie and the current remake is thought to be terrible. But people still went to see the remake and it made money… If 20 years from now there’s yet another remake starring Alvin and the Chipmunks, people will probably go see THAT one and IT will be a big success. Because put a big new movie out there and the crowds will (usually) go see it.
The real question is “Why do they keep remaking old movies instead of trying to come up with new ideas, or adapting never-adapted stories into films?” Why do we have so many versions of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Planet of the Apes movies? Why do we have threads like Movies with the Same Plot?
Because Movies are an expensive, risky business, and any production is a gamble. And, even though they know that audiences want new and original stories, they also know that people usually want to see something similar to what they’ve seen before (they’d rather, as a group, want to see a James Bond movie, rather than Oedipus Rex), so they’re very conservative about what they come up with. So you get a lot of sequels, series, and remakes. Them’s the facts of life, even when you’re gambling with other people’s money.
This kind of thinking also makes producers look at the huge video-game market and think Lots of people like video games AND* movies. A video game movie would* Clean Up!
Which is how you got Mario Brothers and Doom and tons of other video game movies,most of which didn’t do all that well (Prince of Persia), although some have done respectably enough. And which is why they’ll keep churning them out in hopes of a jackpot.
During one of the movies I went to this summer, I noticed that almost all of the trailers were for sequels or films based on graphic novels or comic books. I think only one movie trailer was an original idea. But that’s been true for decades, except in the past the movies were based on novels instead of comic books.
Here’s your answer. Not everybody thought it stunk. No matter how bad the movie, you can usually find enough people with different enough tastes somewhere in the world to turn a profit, or at least make most of your money back.
To my tastes, Michael Bay should be washing windows at intersections, not making movies. Yet…
I actually just bought it yesterday. Granted, it was bargain priced at Target, but it was also bundled with Will Smith’s I, Robot. Take THAT, movie snobs!