6 Major Problems With The Movie Industry (That Show How Dumb Hollywood Thinks You Are)

4. The Gunning For The Prestige Dollar

The Who sang it many, many years ago: €œWe won't get fooled again!€ But they were wrong, and we will. We get fooled many, many times. Hollywood executives are smart people who are very conscious of the image that they want to project for the masses to eat up: they want to find ways to distinguish their latest projects from the horde of similar-seeming intellectual properties, and to find a way to get early buzz going, even before a single frame of the film is shot. To do this, they try to fill the talent roster behind and in front of the camera with big name, prestige-heavy performers, hoping that fans will act on blind faith and assume that that much talent MUST mean that the finished product will have some distinctive qualities. No, no it won€™t. Or not necessarily, anyways. The problem is, the identity of blockbuster films are set in stone long before anyone creative actually gets hired, especially when you are talking about multi-installment franchise pictures, ones that come loaded with dozens of moving parts and varying casts and crews. The goal is to be as indistinctive as possible. Fans flipped when it was announced that Kenneth Branagh was directing Thor: it was a bizarre, out-of-left-field choice that seemed to herald that Marvel was doing something weird with their (to that point) weirdest and riskiest Avenger. Having seen the film, is there anyone that would argue that that was the case? Sure, Branagh loaded the film the dutchiest Dutch angles to ever be dutched, and it€™s true that he shoots the Asgard stuff with a straight-face, Shakespearian flare that is distinct from the more down-to-earth entries to that point. He earned his paycheck, for sure. But those touches don€™t matter at all for the vast, vast majority of the film. The look, feel, tone and story of Thor lines up beat-for-beat with the other Marvel flicks. There is nothing in Branagh€™s handling of the effects, the action, the look or arc that distinguishes Thor or Thor from the rest of his Marvel brethren. Good for Marvel Studios? Sure - but it leaves Thor feeling empty and bland, a surface-skimming of one the most rich mythologies and characters in all of Marvel. For a more drastic example, look at what happened with X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Fox hired the Academy Award winning director of a gritty, personal South African crime drama and they got€ X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Yeah. This extends to who goes in front of the camera. When guys like Alfred Molina or John Malkovich or Geoffrey Rush pop up in comic book or video game movies, there€™s an implicit expectation that they will elevate the material and deliver true pathos to ridiculous characters and scenarios. And yes, sometimes they do and you get Doc Ock, but other times... well, other times you get Jonah Hex. Yeah. The point is, prestige? That comes from hiring talented people with vision and creative drives and then giving them the resources to execute that vision. But cramming talented people into the straight-jacket of rubber-stamped product does not yield great, genre-breaking entertainment. It produces X-Men Origins: Wolverine.