maybe a silly question, but serious....

who do bad movies get made? seriously, how do scripts for 'daredevil' and 'elektra' make it into production without someone throwing up a thousand red flags and run screaming through the offices, 'this sucks! this sucks! this sucks!'? especially for characters that have been around for a few decades or so. is movie quality so subjective that it's all just a total crapshoot?

now, i can see where a movie doesn't have the money to make a movie all that it could be with script doctors and $80m budgets, top shelf actors and inspired directors, but for those that have that, what goes wrong? with all things i place, how is it possible to turn it into such a dismal mess?

obviously it's the script. my thing is how do bad scripts get made? sure, i can see how a movie may take a turn for the worse in editing, which is an artform in itself, though i doubt that's typically the case, for example, spielberg never intended 'indiana jones and the temple of doom' to be quite so dark, that's just the way it came out in editing.

i realize they make a movie to appeal to a certain audience. STILL, that's no excuse for a bad script.

is it just me or does the more money plunked into a horror or comedy movie tend to make it worse?

that could be how it happens. i can understand novels more, though. theoretically, only the writer and editor need ever see a novel before it goes to print. more do, of course (agents, interns, proofreaders, beta readers, etc.), but at the same time there's not the high-stakes involved.

tonight i watched 'xxx: state of the union' and 'stone cold' with tom selleck. guess which one was better. clearly they're trying to force a 'xxx' franchise, but even as popcorn fare it sucked, only entertaining in its level of awfulness.

it makes me wonder how so many professionals (*PROFESSIONALS*!!) let's something like this snowball into such nonsensical garbage (for the record, i love action flicks in general given they don't play into every single cliche possible-- the sequel made the first 'xxx' look like shakespeare in comparison). more mind-boggling, even insulting, is the fact that the studio expects to crank out this stuff and expect audiences to keep seeing it.

i don't mind big-budget movies, but they sure are more disappointing more often than not. just when you get psyched up for a really great version of the arthur legend do you witness 'king arthur' (from a few years ago) and it was just sooo painful to watch (then again, i believe it was a jerry bruckhiemer flick, so that should have been a big tip-off right there, eh? just on the heels of 'pirates of the caribbean' i held out some hope).

bad novels i can grasp. those don't go nearly through the same filters only to be adjusted by focus groups. consequently, thousands of books are published a year as opposed to how many movies reasonably available? three to five hundred, if you count nearly everything? just a guess. and i'm not referring to movies that just don't fit personal tastes, i mean movies that have virtually zero going for it. i personally despised 'the phantom menace,' but i can see where some people would be onboard for it.

how many people see a script before it starts production? probably at least a dozen, if not more.

good reply, JC, i appreciate the thought invested and expressed. i know this isn't the norm, but since we're on the subject of 'DD,' it had a killer weekend and FAST hit the skids, afair. in the end, i don't think the american b.o. matched production costs, though, like you said, i'm sure it made money in the long run with overseas sales and DVDs. they actually pumped an additional 30 mill into it? hard to see where-- the f/x were terrible, lol. you're right, too, in regards to the casting. who was smoking what? then again, i thought affleck as jack ryan was a terrible choice. okay, i admit it, affleck in anything is a bad choice for the most part, which is funny because i otherwise like affleck. well, before he went big-time, that is, and took on a bunch of films with a lot of action in it.

on the other hand, i have to think MW is onto something. from what i've gathered over the years, rick mccallum had both hands buried deep into the morass that developed into the star wars prequel mess. when george lucas needed a swift kick in the arse back into reality, he got a yes-man only too willing to fellate lucas at the drop of a clonetrooper helmet, imo. i can see situations like that arising a lot. only in washington and hollywood would i expect to find raging egos in search of validation by over-eager bandwagoners and coattail-riders. for what it's worth, i think my career in hollywood could by timed with a stopwatch because i'm a 35 year old dude no longer trying to impress people with what i think they want to hear, lol. (okay, i'm busted-- i never did that anyway... except where women and alcohol and a dark room were involved.) i imagine there's a game to be played there. no, i'm convinced of it.

one thing i thought about last night and touched upon in another forum, tweaked here for context, is that i think *some* movies are almost intentionally bad. by 'bad' i mean not meant to be art in any way, shape or form, rather just to appeal to a certain market who likes their horror simple and gory and the comedy sleazy and raunchy. horror, for instance, has a certain population who likes the low-budget stuff. i know i do, don't know why. so why is low-budget horror made? certainly not because the makers think they're making something good by any stretch, nor because there's not already a huge library already in existance. no, it's because, i think, those who want cheap horror don't want to watch cheap horror from the 80's, they want cheap horror from the 00's. just like mainstream likes to update older movies, a lot of remakes aren't necessarily meant to improve on the original or there's a terribly derth of ideas they could have gone with instead, they just want to remake the movies for a new generation *knowing* it'll make money. i mean, i'd certainly take my kids (if i had any) to see a benji remake because i loved 'em when i was six years old. it's really cheap manipulation, but it works so well.