“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.”
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.
Ghost Dog, Shaft
I think Shaft might be closer to a superhero character than Ghost Dog, but Ghost Dog had a $2 million budget, which is pennies for a studio. Shaft is a blaxploitation film, which is a totally different discussion about representation in Hollywood.
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.
Lmao those CGI eyes will be remembered until the day I die
Also to be fair, if I were on a meteoric rise that made a relatively unknown IP popular and then was told that for the third entry, they were gonna reduce my screentime and most of my time on screen would be next to the two sexiest white motherfuckers in Hollywood, I’d be scared that they were trying to transition my strong black character out to be replaced with white actors. After living through that kind of white washing throughout my entire professional career and even having white writers write jokes for black people to call me dark-skinned, I’d probably start calling everyone racist and try to sabotage the production too.
Also also to be fairer, if I found out that my financial adviser was a moron and I’d likely get convicted of tax evasion, is probably be a huge asshole to everyone around me, even if I didn’t want to be mean.
Maybe so.
muhfuggin goalposts
I guess? Do you consider $45 million a big budget film? That’s a lot of money for a person, but for Hollywood it sounds like a pretty safe investment. To put it better into perspective and ensure that inflation isn’t the driving factor of Hancock costing so much more than Blade: Batman and Robin released a year before Blade and had an estimated budget just shy of $160 million.
At $48 million, 1989’s Batman was still budgeted $3 million more than Blade 6 years later.
$100 million is frequently thought of as the cutoff for a big-budget film, but obviously, subjective things have wide ranges. But case in point, Batman Returns had a budget of $80 million and Tim Burton still was mostly in creative control, but feeling some pressure from the studio. Batman Forever was budgeted $100 million and was when the studio suddenly shoved their grimy hands into the creative soup and fucked things up for everyone.
I’m not sure I agree that I moved my goalposts since I very specifically mentioned gritty, superhero, starring, and big budget. Yes, that’s a very narrow focus, but these types of movies are most analyzed by annoyingly specific people.
Okay.