10 Trends That Are Destroying Modern Movies
1. Producers Are Overpowering Directors
One of the biggest shocks the Marvel film community has had in recent years was Edgar Wright leaving the big-screen version of Ant-Man, a project he'd been working on for eight years. The intimiate details probably won't be revealed for a long time, but as Wright put it in 2017: "I wanted to
The film's protagonist, Scott Lang, is much more of an anti-hero than a straight up good guy, acquiring the original Ant-Man's shrinking suit during a burglary. Kevin Feige, head of Marvel, didn't like Wright pushing this aspect and called for rewrites. The director wasn't impressed and tensions frayed (allegedly only to an amicable level according to the press-release).
This isn't the first time Marvel have clashed with their directors and is really just another case in a long line of studio interference. The likes of Feige and Jerry Bruckheimer (a producer so prolific he even has his own DVD box set) have as much an impact on the finished product as the director themselves.
With directors who are sole curators of their series now rare (think Lucas with Star Wars, Cameron with Terminator and contemporarily Jackson with Middle Earth) this has a growing precedent. Multiple minds on a product is not inherently bad, but when one of those minds is acting as an avatar of the studio, putting money ahead of everything else, the detrimental effect this can have on films should be obvious.
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What do you make of the current state of movies? Are we right on the money or do these trends not bother you? Have your say down in the comments.