“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.”
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.
Hancock
What’s the story with that one? I’m unfamiliar.
It was a Will Smith movie about a Superman-like superhero who became reviled and then became a bum. It was exciting because this was during the height of Will Smith’s action career and it would have been the first high-budget serious superhero movie starring a person of color.
The original script reads like pure art and adrenaline from what I remember. The actual movie turned into some shit-fest that made a white PR Rep the main character and then shoehorned some weird love triangle with ancient beings and super-amnesia.
You read that right. Somehow, the first big budget gritty superhero movie starring a black man got turned into a milquetoast semi-rom-com starring a white man as a media specialist with no superpowers.
Blade.
Blade had a $45 million budget, Hancock was $150 million. Blade: Trinity had the highest budget of the blade series at $65 million, and each entry introduced more white heroes who reduced Wesley Snipes’s heroic screentime.
To be fair there was a lot of rumor that Snipe’s reduced screentime had a lot to do with his own antics.