Eventually the money men become so risk-averse that they give up on originality entirely. Hence the endless stream of remakes, adaptations and formulaic additions to existing series.
It is always the businesspeople at fault for it. Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work any more than software developers want to naturally build CRUD apps for ad-tech companies. The employees go where the businesspeople and their money lead because working class folks need to make a living and most Hollywood creatives are working class.
> Creatives don't naturally want to create bland and uninteresting work
Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness. Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such. Once directors get the "make whatever you want" power it's not always a happy outcome. Same thing with authors - they get famous with a tightly edited 300 pages and use that to release a 1200 page barely edited brick.
Sometimes the balance of the two really works - the money man is the only representation of the audience and can cut out that nonsensical 45 minute dream sequence. I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
There are of course good businessperson led movies and bad businessperson led movies. The same is true for creative led movies. Maybe the "explore the liminal space of boredom" movie is bad, but that description certainly sounds more interesting than a bad version of Transformers 7 or whatever.
Creative led projects are at least personal and that gives them a unique quality even if the project is an overall failure.
>I guess what I want is not a money man as such, just an editor with a bit of power as an objective source of improvement.
Editors would generally be considered creatives and not businesspeople. There is also no such thing as "an objective source of improvement" when it comes to art.
> Detach the creative from needing to bring in an audience and we get projects that "explore the liminal space of boredom" and such.
If there is a project that literally and perfectly matches your description, it is "Paint Drying", a 2016 protest film against censorship and classification mandates in the UK [1].
I generally am not a big fan of the CGI-dominated action film catering to international audiences. But I'm mostly not a huge fan of art house fare either.
> Hmm. I've seen a few "passion projects" that reach new heights of uninterestingness.
This is what happens when the money men also think of themselves or their buddies as creatives. Extremely high production values on extremely stupid movies.
It’s normal to have creative flops too, but generally the landscape looks much better and healthier than now. And some of those dreamscape flops are likely low to mid budget or self funded projects.
How many of them have you talked to or worked with? The ones I know don't "snub their noses at the 'working class' and share none of their value of beliefs". But I have a feeling that you're not looking at the whole working class, only a subset.
Anyone who complains about “toxic fandom”, particularly for a franchise they inherited (which includes all of marvel and Lucas film) is thumbing their nose, you can call it what you like but the behaviour is evident. It used to be, when an adaptation was bad, writers and execs would blame each other and audiences would sorta side with writers. Then game of thrones proved it was possible to make an adaptation that was both faithful and good cinema, so now writers and execs blame audiences when they fall short.
> Anyone who complains about “toxic fandom”, particularly for a franchise they inherited (which includes all of marvel and Lucas film) is thumbing their nose, you can call it what you like but the behaviour is evident.
A bunch of people who didn't inherit a franchise also complain about "toxic fandom". What's the problem with saying that? Do creatives have to butter up their fans?
I know the cases you're referencing, and I don't disagree with you that "toxic fandom" was a fake complaint in those specific cases. But it's not the writers who use this to deflect from criticism, it's the investors behind the scenes. The writers (the ones that are part of the normal work force) want to write good stuff and create good entertainment.
But, say, the actress of Rose from Star Wars? She has every right to complain about a toxic fandom. Christ, they sent her death threats because she performed as asked for by the studio!
It wasn't the ending per se that everyone got mad about. It was how the ending was written. Silicon Valley has showed us that execution matters as much or more than ideas.
If you'd been paying attention to what the writers and actors on strike right now are saying—including some of the A-list ones who are genuinely quite rich and famous—you'd see that, at least as a class, they do not, in fact, snub their noses at the working class.
The idea that Hollywood actors and writers are arrogant elitists who look down on "regular" working folks is, to a large extent, propaganda, specifically intended to destroy solidarity in moments like these.
Reminds me of a movie from the 1960s, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, I was watching recently.
I couldn't help but notice how the wild artistic risks taken in the movie would likely never happen today unless the artists paid out of pocket for both the production and distribution
Funny that you mention Monty Python, they almost had to cancel the production of The Life of Brian since their original financier was apprehensive about the the film's content making fun of religion.
George Harrison of Beatles fame ended up funding the movie, I believe almost entirely out of his own pocket. This was back in the 70s.
The same was true for the holy grail too. Other financiers included (iirc) led zeppelin and other British rock greats.
The top marginal rate of income tax was ~90% and this heavily encouraged investments like this. It meant that there was more space for creative risk taking as well as more commercial/industrial capital investment.
The Beatles funded some very weird stuff. Ringo Starr in The Magic Christian is probably the best example, an extremely on-the-nose set of satirical sketches.
There was no one suggesting that the scene but cut, it was a clickbait-like appeal to the reactionary press to get some extra awareness of the project out there. And it worked.
It wasn't “someone has suggested/demanded it be removed, and we have refused” but “if someone did suggest/demand it we wouldn't”.
Monty Python was only ever possible with something like the BBC. There's no way a commercial network would have taken a risk with it, and even more so in the USA. Its popularity in the States began underground, with PBS affiliates getting the ball rolling in the 1970s. There's no way that major networks would have run the show, even in a late-night slot.
Back then, the short late-night voiceover, "Portions of the following program may be unsuitable for younger or more sensitive viewers," was the hallmark of Quality TV.
Studios are essentially big piles of cash to fund movies; rights to scripts, stories and IPs to make movies; and contracts to distribute movies (and, since everything old is new again, they now also own streaming services rather than movie theaters). So it makes economic sense to lock down as much IP as possible that can then be used to generate an endless torrent of remakes, sequels, adaptations, secondary media, adaptations of secondary media, remakes of adaptations of secondary media, and so on; much more cost-effective than hunting for new screenplays in the slush pile, and much more comforting to the investors to see the next two years of movies on a PowerPoint slide at the shareholder meeting, even if you have no idea what those movies are beyond a title and some executive producer's vague plan.
Very often the money printing is more a function of how many eyeballs you can get your product in front of, and reducing friction of consumption to a minimum, rather than their real preferences in a flat hierarchy of all the options out there.
"Market logic" is very easy to misunderstand. For instance, do people in food deserts really want cheez-its and ice cream for dinner? Or do they just not have sufficient access to healthy options that they prefer?
Sometimes it is as much because there isn't something better so people default. And there often isn't much better because it is more financially rewarding to get a “not bad” reaction from a large audience than it is to produce something that only appeals to a smaller one.
Sometimes people actively want something that allows them to, even requires them to, shut off parts of their brain.
