Here’s the piece of the puzzle you appear to be missing.
The history of the movie industry is the history of tension between the money people and the creative people. Movies are expensive to produce, so money is required. But movies are also an art form, so creative artists are required.
The money people are gatekeepers as to what gets produced. They would love nothing more than for movies to be made cheaply and predictably so they can count their profits. But movies are an unpredictable business, and the money people are baffled by the creative process and are unable to generate movie product on their own. They try to reduce risk and increase predictability as much as they can, but it never works in the long run. There’s always something like a Big Fat Greek Wedding that comes out of nowhere to dominate the box office, and on the flip side there’s always something like Universal’s abortive Dark Universe “franchise” where they tried to translate the Marvel formula into a different genre and it fails spectacularly. As William Goldman famously said, “Nobody knows anything.”
So, the finance-minded people grit their teeth and try to figure out how to work with the creatives, in order to enjoy the profits of their art. And the creatives grit their teeth and try to sell their artistic impulses as potentially profitable, in order to get the money people to finance their visions. Occasionally you get an executive who understands creatives and can work productively with them, like a Zanuck or a Horn, but they’re not common. And conversely, you sometimes have a creative who intuitively knows how to slot his or her visions into a studio balance sheet; right now Nolan is the king of this. More frequently, though, the money people see the creatives as fanciful lunatics, and the creatives see the money people as unimaginative morons.
This tension is not new. It goes back to early Hollywood: the founding of United Artists comes directly out of this conflict. It’s also the motivation for Jimmy Stewart blowing up the studio-contract model, using his growing clout in the late 40s to establish himself as an authority in his own career instead of just letting the execs tell him what movies he’d be doing. Other stars rapidly followed suit.
The executives didn’t want the inmates running the asylum, of course, and actively tried to push the pendulum back. Two key inflection points are particularly relevant for the current moment: Gulf & Western buying into Desilu and Paramount at the end of the 60s, and Sony buying Columbia in 1989. Both of these were essentially manufacturing companies who looked at the profitability of the movie business and saw it as just another product to add to the portfolio, but then were frustrated when they tried to apply the same managerial principles to the production pipeline. They didn’t understand that you can’t predict input and output for each film; you have to manage a seasonal slate where everything is a gamble to at least some extent, and hope that the occasional hits will pay for the inevitable losers. This drove the manufacturing execs nuts, and they spent years wrestling with the talent and their agencies. In Sony’s case, they resorted to hiring two flamboyant movie producers to run their studio division, who wound up costing the parent company millions of dollars of losses as they went bananas on pet projects. Ultimately, both deals led to the transformation of both companies, as the manufactured product culture of the parent gave way to the realities of the entertainment industry.
The new WB CEO David Zaslav is just the latest incarnation of what industry people sometimes call “businessbots.” He thinks he knows better. He looks at spreadsheets of the past and believes it provides a map to the future. He finds the contribution of the creatives mystifying and frustrating, so he wants to compress it to a line item and stop thinking about it.
For an illustration of his idiotic mindset: Shortly after taking his position, he attacked WB’s longstanding relationship with director Clint Eastwood. Why are we still dealing with this guy, he asked, when his last couple of movies turned only a modest profit? The experienced people at the studio answered, We have a good relationship with Clint. The scoffing response from Zaslav: it’s not show friendship, it’s show business. If he doesn’t make us money, he’s out. What he fails to understand is that show business is a relationship business. Eastwood makes movies professionally and predictably, on time and on budget. They always break even, and most do at least a little better. This kind of reliability is rare in the movie business, and is valuable all by itself. And you cultivate it, because occasionally you get a breakthrough like Eastwood’s American Sniper, which was a huge hit, and made the whole relationship worthwhile from a business standpoint. Zaslav doesn’t get this.
For an even clearer view into his mindset, consider how he’s approaching the DC slate. He has signaled his interest in the Snyderverse, and wants Affleck back in the batsuit. These movies underperformed, but somehow he thinks of them as a better bet than the upcoming Aquaman 2, even though the first one was their biggest hit, and the second is highly anticipated in audience polls, and both Snyder and Affleck have said they’re not interested in revisiting their take on the franchise. I suppose it’s a coincidence that the director and star of Aquaman are both ethnic. Right?
The point of this very long post is that there is lots of opportunity for stupidity in Hollywood, because there is a specific peculiarity in the industry that creates cycles of a particular and predictable form of stupidity. It occurs and recurs with depressing regularity, as new generations of executives roll into town and think they’ve solved the algorithm of entertainment that will finally bring those creative weirdos to heel. He’s wrong, and he will damage the studio’s relationships with their artistic collaborators, exactly as previous generations of businessbot dummies have been wrong and done damage.
But the finance people will close ranks, as always, and instead of admitting that their businessbot ways are wrong, they’ll ease the guy out in five or seven years with an absurd go-away exit settlement, set him up as an independent executive like an Amy Pascal, and quietly try to pick up the pieces.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
