So I’ve been watching a lot of cinema nerd youtubes of late (e.g. this one about Suicide Squad ) and one thing that strikes me about the analysis of famously bad recent movies is how rookie the mistakes seem to be.
I realize its possible to follow all the “rules” of film-making and script-writing and still end up with a bad movie (and sometimes to break them and end up with a good one). But its seems the real big budget stinkers of late seem to break some very obvious film-making 101 rules, e.g. in Suicide Squad, no obvious three-act structure, no protagonists to speak of, certainly no protagonists you can root for. But Suicide Squad was a $175M picture, I’m pretty sure the writers all got a lot further than film-making 101 at Film School, and have more experience in script writing than random YouTube cinema nerd. These rules and the fact that breaking them will usually result in a bad movie have been accepted in Hollywood for generations.
What explains this plethora of rookie mistakes in this kind of film? I know these sort of “troubled” films often go through a lot of writers, and there is studio interference, but that doesn’t explain the really obvious stuff IMO
I think it probably does. The writers all know how to write a movie, but the writers are not in charge of what gets made.
When someone who is at heart a filmmaker is in charge of production, you’ll almost always get a competently made film (or something crazy that they did on purpose to be different). But when someone who is at heart a business exec is in charge of production, you’re going to get something that might not even pass the competent film test.
“Too many cooks spoil the broth” works for a lot of things. Everyone has different incentives and without someone to align them to “make a good movie” that part can get left out.
Suicide Squad did double its production/marketing budget in worldwide gross, so it’s not clear that they made the wrong choice there. Whatever suit turned $325 million in costs into $768 million in gross did a good job! Their job just wasn’t making a good film.
Yeah totally but these kind of generic Hollywood blockbusters we never going to be particularly innovative. I don’t buy they were trying to be avante garde and experimental, and that why the character arcs all suck and/or are not existent.
I posit that most of your typical big budget films are meant to put asses in seats with hype and marketing rather than by actually being a well written movie.
But it helps if it is. They aren’t trying to be the next Citizen Kane (or whatever the golden standard for the “perfect” film buff’s movie is nowadays), but not completely sucking helps put bums on seats. I mean the Avengers films made a lot more than Suicide Squad. They are not a perfect auteurs movies by any means, they just got the basics right IMO.
And these are not some secret code known only to a few impresarios, its a pretty well understood that if you break the basic rules of filmmaking and scriptwriting your film will most likely suck.
A perfect example of this is the Terry Gilliam film Brazil, because it provides an explicit difference between the filmmaker’s vision and the studio executive’s idea of what makes for a salable film. Brazil is a complex, challenging film to be sure; it has exaggerated performances, outlandish sets, frenetic action, interspaced with elaborate dream sequences, but is fundamentally about a society where corporate doublespeak and arse-covering bureaucratic ineptitude threatens to vanquish individuality, responsibility, and compassion, not through some deliberate authoritarian policy like Orwell’s 1984 but just because it would be too embarrassing for the Ministry of Information to admit to making a mistake. (I know there is disagreement about this but it seems fairly likely that the supposed ‘terrorist campaign’ is actually just a propaganda cover for the fact that the infrastructure is so patched together and maintenance so incompetent that things just spontaneously fail in catastrophic fashion.)
Gilliam delivered his ‘final’ print which at 142 minutes was over twenty minutes beyond the limit that Universal, as the distributing ‘studio’ in the US, had contracted, although the bigger issue seemed to be that the film concluded with a “downer” ending with the main character (Sam Lowry) being lobotomized. Gilliam refused to cut the film down to length so Universal Chairman Sid Sheinberg had the film “re-edited” per his explicit notes, cutting out large swaths of Gilliam’s narrative and replacing much of it with alternate scenes not in the original cut, changing the narrative from a satire to a straightforward action-adventure romance and ending literally in what was supposed to be Sam’s lobotomy hallucination. Gilliam secretly screened his version for the Los Angeles Film Critics Association which was eventually distributed (with very minor edits) as the European theatrical release, while Sheinberg’s cut only saw the light of day in one airing on American network television. Both versions (as well as the American cinematic cut, which is a slightly shorter version of the European release but has essentially the same narrative) are available on the Criterion Collection box set of the film, and even someone who is not versed in filmmaking or screenwriting can see how absolutely terribly the Sheinberg cut ruined what is almost universally regarded as being a groundbreaking and innovative film.
Any screenwriter who has come out of film school or an MFA program can diagram and write a perfectly competent screenplay (I could teach someone to diagram it out any decent story in a couple of hours), and a brilliant artist like Gilliam can write and direct a film that is remembered decades after, but it only takes one talentless hack executive to screw up a film terribly, and if he or she has total contractual control over what gets distributed, the ‘good’ version of that film may never be distributed or even filmed. A film like Suicide Squad or those JJ Abrams Star Trek movies aren’t a mess because they’re telling a particularly complex story or because you can’t find talent to plot out a good script; they’re terrible because whoever was directing or producing the movie valued a few flashy images or scenes over any semblance of narrative coherence. When Galaxy Quest is not only a better Star Trek film than any of the Abrams-produced films but also managed to satirize the very tropes that the recent films actually depended on in what passed for their story, it isn’t that writers don’t understand what makes a story work; it is that executives don’t see any value in good writing or coherent narrative because it isn’t something that can be sold in the span of a trailer or on a billboard.
This is certainly the corporate studio view of things; they don’t really care whether a film is good or bad; they just care that it brings in a huge profit, and their view of how to do that is to hire actors who are popular to headline the movie and promote the hell out of it. That is a business model that has worked very well for a long time and frankly continues to work (see: Fast & Furious franchise or those Transformers films that are essentially Michael Bay filming himself throwing Matchbox cars into a Blendtec) despite critical complaints, while making small budget critical darlings offers prestige for a studio but not profits.
There are, of course, counterexamples to this: Marvel Studios–after a fitful start (anybody remember Ang Lee’s Hulk) and a little bit of narrative wobbling–has managed to consistently put out films that are both extremely profitable and narratively well constructed, despite taking what most studios would view as ‘risks’ like making a film with a mostly black cast set in a fictional African country, or where they take the arrogant god-hero of Thor and turn him into a comically oafish do-gooder, or make a film that essentially blows up the heroes’ entire organization as being a cover for a secretive Nazi death cult in order to reframe the characters world views and set up a complex narrative arc that drives the next several films to an apocalyptic, uh…endgame. The complaints that these films are formulaic have merit, of course, because they are following a formula that they’ve created of mixing humor, trauma, absurdity, and ‘realism’ but they’ve even managed to use that well by subtly parodying that formula while offering callbacks and hooks that rewards the audience for paying attention across films and makes them feel smart.
In short, Marvel treats their audience as if they are not only smart enough to follow along, but that at least some are savvy enough to catch ‘Easter eggs’ and appreciate the nuances of character development in between big action set pieces, and they’ve done it by putting narrative front and center of their development process instead of just coming up with a few scenes that would look good in a trailer and stringing a movie around them. But then, Marvel Studios is a highly unusual film studio that is essentially built around one franchise run by an avowed comics nerd and is willing to accord considerable freedom to individual filmmakers to make the film they want as long as it has the appropriate hooks into their shared universe. Whether somebody else could come along and to the same thing with a new franchise is probably highly dependent upon the right mix of creative talent and executive latitude that is rarely seen in the film industry.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if somebody could have pulled that off in Disney’s other giant franchise universe?
It frankly boggles my mind that the same company that owns Marvel (and has for most of the MCU run - I think they took over when Thor and Captain America were still in production - IM2 was in post) and also owns Pixar (Cars was the last independent Pixar films), made such a mess of the Star Wars cinematic universe*. Hopefully, they’ve learned their lesson with The Mandalorian and can recover, but as long as the current exec is in charge, I have my doubts.
* Yes, technically they made money, but they wasted a huge amount of good will with the fan base and the fact that the 2nd and 3rd films in the main trilogy each made successively less than the first (And Solo was barely, if at all, profitable) is a travesty and not a good sign - which is why we haven’t heard anything about any new SW movies since TROS.
But the director in this case is also not some 16 year old who’s only ever made instagram videos. David Ayer is fairly experienced director and screen writer whose made some pretty good movies, and clearly shown he understands the basic premises involved in making a movie.
If the problem was ‘suits’ intervening why would they intervene in a way that goes against the basic principles of filmmaking. This isnt the 1960s when this was the preserve of a film school clique.
Right, but it’s not like this is a role playing game character sheet, and if you put more points into “hype” you have fewer points to put into the writing. They’re paying $200m for a bunch of salaries and special effects, why not put a little effort into the script, too? It doesn’t have to be “hyped up, lots of action, but really dumb”, it could be hyped, action, and well written, too.
I object to Suicide Squad “having no protagonists” nor “protagonists you can root for”, Colonel Rick Flag was clearly suppose to be the “good” guy and audience identification character, since he was a relatively straight-laced American soldier whose job was to lead the “bad guys”. Why else would they clearly have the most patriotic guy ever in the squad?
Nitpick: Ang Lee’s Hulk is not a Marvel Studios production. You may have your wires crossed with The Incredible Hulk (2008), starring Ed Norton and directed by Louis Leterrier. This was the second official production from Marvel Studios, and for a lot of reasons it has been effectively swept under the rug. Ang Lee’s Hulk was produced by Universal Pictures under a deal in which they had acquired the rights to the character from Marvel (the publication house).
(Also, on a tangent, there are some really fascinating complications about the extent to which Marvel Studios owns and can use the Hulk character, based on the way the rights were parceled out before Marvel Studios was formed, but I’ll save the hijack unless someone is genuinely interested.)
Flag notwithstanding, Robbie’s Harley Quinn was clearly the standout in that film - an anti-hero, but still a protagonist you could root for. A pity they f**ked up her sequel (I mean, how do you screw up a film’s title that badly?), but at least they had enough sense to get rid of Leto’s Joker.
That is a bit unclear. Thunderbolt Ross is played by William Hurt in the Ed Norton Hulk, he also appears in Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: EndGame, and there’s also a possibility that the Abomination, played by Tim Roth, will appear in one of the MCU TV shows. I think you can count it as canon, and Mark Ruffalo as a simple recast.
Well, I didn’t say it was de-canonized, I said it was swept under the rug, by which I meant they were effectively ignoring it. Other than Hurt’s character, that’s been largely true. Though the possible return of Roth will complicate the picture considerably.
At the very least we can agree that it’s functionally inessential, in a way that few if any of the other MCU movies are.
The director is not in charge of what gets made either.
$325million → $768 million.
I mean, there are a lot of reasons, but at least one of them is that the suits don’t care about the basic principles of filmmaking. They care about the basic principles of making money, and while you are correct that making a good movie helps with making money, it’s far from the only thing that does so.
The more people who are involved, and the more money, the more different incentives there are which become difficult to align with “make a great (or even competent) piece of art”.
I’d say “swept under the rug” is a fair assessment. It’s noticeably missing from the MCU movies available on Disney+, for one thing. Although perhaps that’s due to the licensing issues with the Hulk that you mentioned?
Technically, this is true; the film production occurred under the aegis of Universal Studios which still retains distribution rights over the film and control over the Hulk as a standalone character, while Marvel Studios retained the rights to use the character as a member of a team-up movie (which is the in-joke in Thor:Ragnarok about Thor, Loki, Banner, and Valkyrie referring to their group as “The Revengers”). However, both Kevin Feige and Avi Arad were producers on the film (Feige is listed as an executive producer so it is unclear how much creative input he had) and the film was made at a point at which Marvel Studios was trying to exercise more creative control over the characters that it had licensed out. The 2008 The Incredible Hulk film was a sly reboot, essentially taking over the story from Ang Lee’s film left off while recasting everyone and leaving the origin story sufficiently ambiguous that it might or might not be connected, although given subsequent inconsistencies it is pretty clear that the Ang Lee film is not even implicit canon aside from it not actually being a Marvel Studios-produced film.
The 2008 Incredible Hulk film is definitely canon (in addition to retaining the casting of William Hurt as Thaddeus Ross, there have been a handful of ‘Easter Egg’ references to The Abomination and other events in that film) but because Universal owns the distribution rights as noted above it is not available on the Disney+ streaming service (same with the recent Spider-Man films despite the fact that they actually feature Robert Downey, Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson as Tony Stark and Nick Fury), and since the fortunate recasting of Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner they obviously can’t use any ‘archival footage’ of that film.
Anyway, the Marvel Cinematic Universe aside, movie (and television) studios general focus on marketability as the primary indicator of profitability above any narrative consistency or creative vision because that is an aspect that non-creative executives can understand and control, and to that end, will often inject demands into the script approval and filmmaking processes which they believe will enhance the ability to market the film to their target demographics (generally speaking, 18-49 year old white males for any big budget actioneers, sports movies, and war films) even if those demands make no narrative sense whatsoever. This is why many filmmakers seek “complete creative control” over all aspects of their films so they can hire the people they want and film the story they want to tell rather than a script ginned together by committee and endless reshoots to appease test screening audiences that are often not sure what they are watching anyway.
