I wonder if there’s actually any way to know if a movie that has better writing makes bigger profits. From what I’ve heard, the main thing that determines how much a film writer gets paid is a track record of writing successful films. This makes sense if the producers know they don’t have good taste in screenplays—they just hire based on the metric they care about directly. But it also makes sense if the factors that affect how successful a screenplay is have very little to do with “taste” in the sense you mean. Maybe the writers of blockbuster films know that more intelligent characters won’t affect profits, but (for example) faster pacing will, and so they ruthlessly cut out all those in-universe decision constraints that take up screen time. Maybe they even want the characters to be kind of dumb, to get the reality-TV effect where the audience gets to feel superior because they never would have been THAT dumb.
This. The movie industry has been around long enough, and is diverse enough, that I’d be very surprised if there were million-dollar bills lying around waiting to be picked up like this. It can’t just be that no one in charge ever thought about trying to hire someone to suggest plot-hole fixing tweaks. Plot holes are so easy to find and fix that the best explanation IMO is that finding and fixing them doesn’t actually make money; perhaps it actually loses money.
Analogy: Lots of people on the internet care about historical accuracy. And it is utterly trivial to make movies set in some historical era more historically accurate; you can probably find dozens of history grad students willing to do the job for free. For example: “The flak coming off that aircraft carrier is way too thick; the Japanese relied mostly on CAP for defense. If the flak was that thick, more of the bombers would be dead.” Or: “You want all the officers to charge down the street and engage Bane’s thugs in melee? OK, there should be about 100 or so dead by the time they reach the steps; then the thugs should retreat into the doorway to create a chokepoint.” The reason why this is not done is, obviously, that doing it doesn’t make any money.
The movie industry has been around long enough, and is diverse enough, that I’d be very surprised if there were million-dollar bills lying around waiting to be picked up like this.
Prediction markets for box office results are more than a million dollar bill, I think, and yet reduce the power of the people who decide whether or not they get used.
Also, speaking of people caring about accuracy, it reminds me of the story Neil deGrasse Tyson tells about confronting James Cameron about the lazy fake sky in Titanic, and he responded with
Last I checked, Titanic has grossed a billion dollars worldwide. Imagine how much more it would have grossed had I gotten the sky correct.
It wouldn’t shock me if a firm of smart rational-fic writers could do this sort of ‘script doctoring’ cheaply enough to be worth it to filmmakers, and the main problem is that the buyers don’t know what to ask for and the sellers don’t know how to find the buyers.
I was under the impression that movie producers DO hire experts for this sort of thing. At the very least, I know they hire science consultants for scientific accuracy problems; I assume they often do the same for historical accuracy.
I’ve heard of that happening too, even in movies that have enough historical inaccuracies that I can spot some myself. (Oh, also this happens for scientific inaccuracies, of course.) My guess is that they listen to some of the advice their expert gives them, and ignore the rest, using their judgment to decide which of the advice will boost profits and which won’t. For example, in the police charging Bane thugs scene, probably someone told them that it was stupid for the thugs to stand there until the police got in melee range and stupid for them not to be mowing down hundreds of police, and probably they were like “whatever lol it looks cool.” (Update: Actually the scene was stupider than I remembered; the thugs stopped shooting their guns and counter-charged the police! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCEo7SCvYH4 Also there were way more thugs than I remembered, probably enough to keep the police from ever successfully closing to melee, if they just stayed in a line and fired their guns.)
Note that the historical accuracy case avoids your response about the difficulty of hiring experts. It’s not actually difficult to hire experts to tell you how heavy the flak should be or how many police officers should die or how the thugs should react. (I predict.)
That being said, I might be wrong, and I hope I am! I think we should look for opportunities to make this movie industry change a reality. High risk, high reward, etc.
I wonder if there’s actually any way to know if a movie that has better writing makes bigger profits. From what I’ve heard, the main thing that determines how much a film writer gets paid is a track record of writing successful films. This makes sense if the producers know they don’t have good taste in screenplays—they just hire based on the metric they care about directly. But it also makes sense if the factors that affect how successful a screenplay is have very little to do with “taste” in the sense you mean. Maybe the writers of blockbuster films know that more intelligent characters won’t affect profits, but (for example) faster pacing will, and so they ruthlessly cut out all those in-universe decision constraints that take up screen time. Maybe they even want the characters to be kind of dumb, to get the reality-TV effect where the audience gets to feel superior because they never would have been THAT dumb.
This. The movie industry has been around long enough, and is diverse enough, that I’d be very surprised if there were million-dollar bills lying around waiting to be picked up like this. It can’t just be that no one in charge ever thought about trying to hire someone to suggest plot-hole fixing tweaks. Plot holes are so easy to find and fix that the best explanation IMO is that finding and fixing them doesn’t actually make money; perhaps it actually loses money.
Analogy: Lots of people on the internet care about historical accuracy. And it is utterly trivial to make movies set in some historical era more historically accurate; you can probably find dozens of history grad students willing to do the job for free. For example: “The flak coming off that aircraft carrier is way too thick; the Japanese relied mostly on CAP for defense. If the flak was that thick, more of the bombers would be dead.” Or: “You want all the officers to charge down the street and engage Bane’s thugs in melee? OK, there should be about 100 or so dead by the time they reach the steps; then the thugs should retreat into the doorway to create a chokepoint.” The reason why this is not done is, obviously, that doing it doesn’t make any money.
Prediction markets for box office results are more than a million dollar bill, I think, and yet reduce the power of the people who decide whether or not they get used.
Also, speaking of people caring about accuracy, it reminds me of the story Neil deGrasse Tyson tells about confronting James Cameron about the lazy fake sky in Titanic, and he responded with
But the ending of the story is that later they hire him to make an accurate sky for their director’s cut, and he made a company that provides that service now.
It wouldn’t shock me if a firm of smart rational-fic writers could do this sort of ‘script doctoring’ cheaply enough to be worth it to filmmakers, and the main problem is that the buyers don’t know what to ask for and the sellers don’t know how to find the buyers.
Fair enough. I definitely think it’s worth a shot.
I was under the impression that movie producers DO hire experts for this sort of thing. At the very least, I know they hire science consultants for scientific accuracy problems; I assume they often do the same for historical accuracy.
I’ve heard of that happening too, even in movies that have enough historical inaccuracies that I can spot some myself. (Oh, also this happens for scientific inaccuracies, of course.) My guess is that they listen to some of the advice their expert gives them, and ignore the rest, using their judgment to decide which of the advice will boost profits and which won’t. For example, in the police charging Bane thugs scene, probably someone told them that it was stupid for the thugs to stand there until the police got in melee range and stupid for them not to be mowing down hundreds of police, and probably they were like “whatever lol it looks cool.” (Update: Actually the scene was stupider than I remembered; the thugs stopped shooting their guns and counter-charged the police! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCEo7SCvYH4 Also there were way more thugs than I remembered, probably enough to keep the police from ever successfully closing to melee, if they just stayed in a line and fired their guns.)
Note that the historical accuracy case avoids your response about the difficulty of hiring experts. It’s not actually difficult to hire experts to tell you how heavy the flak should be or how many police officers should die or how the thugs should react. (I predict.)
That being said, I might be wrong, and I hope I am! I think we should look for opportunities to make this movie industry change a reality. High risk, high reward, etc.