More movie talk

I got a comment on my previous post, I love comments, it shows people are reading and maybe even care a little bit about my stuff, it reads:

For the record, there are stories that I've been writing (and envisioning specific people starring in them if they got filmed), but I doubt that Hollywood would be interested in anything not guaranteed to make millions, least of all since women are the main characters.

I have no idea who this person is but I am glad they chimed in because it got me thinking about that. We take it as a given that Hollywood(By which we generally mean the film industry) is racist and sexist, and not super interested in stories that aren't pandering to the straight white male. There is an(large) element of truth to that, but it isn't the whole truth. In reality, the stories any of us write are unlikely to get Hollywood's interest no matter who we have for main characters simply because to my knowledge none of the folks who are reading this blog have the clout or contacts to attract the interest of anyone in the industry who could champion a project like that.

As to the "Not guaranteed to make millions part", well I don't disagree but I fail to see how it is a problem in this case, moviemaking is expensive, and it is also a business in which a profit is expected generally, so I am not sure making millions is an unreasonable expectation if you are expecting to put millions into the production.

Another friend of mine made comments about Marvel films and one of them was something along the lines of that they take up space that could be occupied by something else. The implication being that something is better I imagine. But I wonder about that, I think he and my commentator may be falling into a bit of a fallacy in thinking that because blockbusters exist then it is hard or impossible for smaller or more cerebral projects to exist.

Get Out released in February of 2017, a glance at the movies out then showed it had to compete with a 50 Shades sequel, John Wick 2, Split, and Rogue One: A Star Wars story still being in theaters, among other things, I should remind you that Get Out is a horror movie directed by a dude known for his comedy, starring a black man, and telling a story that is... not complimentary to white people in general. In other words just the kind of film there should be no room for in a world dominated by blockbusters.
It was fantastically successful.

Avengers: Endgame came out at the end of April, but there where still something like 60 national theatrical releases of other movies during the month following it's release, to say nothing of the literal thousands of independent releases, festival stuff, and limited runs that happen all the time.

Now Jordan Peele is extremely lucky and connected, we are none of those things, so shopping our screenplay to major studios is going to be pretty hard, but I don't think the existence of the MCU is one of the obstacles that needs to be overcome. If you've written a screenplay that is, I dunno, a character study of a struggling millennial attempting to find meaning in a capitalist hellworld, then are you really planning on shopping it to Disney Studios? Will you take your script for a ghost story that is a metaphor for the patriarchy and march into 20th Century Fox demanding a global release and add campaign? Particularly when you know no one and have no credentials to present? It won't work, and that isn't the fault of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

I do want to point out that the examples I used are, to my knowledge, not representative of any works that any friends or acquaintances are working on, and if I have guessed your screenplay here I want a writing credit and for you to keep in mind that I am not disparaging those stories, just using them as examples of things that might be a hard sell for certain studios.

There definitely is a need for more representation in our blockbusters, and to date women and minorities have been pretty rare, Captain Marvel and Black Panther from the MCU are exceptions, as is Wonder Woman from DC, but that's three out of nearly thirty movies, last I checked women and black people accounted for more than ten percent of the population so yeah there is work to do there. But it ain't gonna get done by some rando from Portland.

If the MCU didn't exist, would we have better blockbusters? There is an interesting question, has the formula that Marvel/Disney come up with become so powerful that studios wont risk something else, maybe something better? I suppose that is possible, but what is the formula that they have exactly other than "Cast good actors, have a script that doesn't insult more than 45% of the population's intelligence, own the world."? Yeah there is the whole building the MCU thing, with it's crossovers and guest star potential, and that has proven to be a powerful weapon indeed, one that other studios have so far failed pretty miserably at duplicating, largely due to lack of patience. You could argue that Marvel/Disney are responsible for perpetuating and enhancing the desire for sequels and spin offs, thus minimizing original projects, but again I just don't know how much of that is the fault of stuff put out in the last decade or so, we have the conversation about "Sequelitis" pretty much every year and have since time immemorial, yet still original stuff happens.

Again I want to emphasize that Disney and the other major studios are not without flaws, they are terrifying in how much of our media they control and their desire to maintain control of their brands has I am sure stamped out innumerable projects that could have been great but were tangentially related, at best, to something they had a copyright on. Every one of their executives is due up against the wall when the revolution comes.

It's just not because of the product they make, that's all.