Well, maybe not your specifically, but the ones you run into all the time.

Since I kind of follow the world of Borderlands and I actually follow the world of movies, I keep seeing discussion about this forthcoming movie. Of course, since no one gives a fuck in the movie world about it, most of this discussion comes from the other side and it’s just horrible.

Sure, the movie will probably be bad. Just look at the director. Eli Roth has never directed a good movie. He has kind of made a couple of movies with some amount of cultural impact (Cabin Fever and Hostel come to mind), but they are more interesting from the point of view of the idea behind the movie than the quality.

You don’t really need anything more than this, but people are trying to dig up everything, so let’s talk about some of the things I’ve seen that are just meaningless bullshit.

Casting

Okay, so Cate Blanchett is 55 and Jamie Lee Curtis is 65 (right now, obviously the movie was shot some time ago). These ages have been brough up regularly.

First, Dwayne Johnson is 52, Jason Statham turns 57 next week and Tom Cruise is 62. Stars are aging. Still, did we see the backlash regarding their age when Statham is supposed to have had a shared childhood with Vanessa Kirby (36) in Hobbs & Shaw? How much flack did Cruise get for portraying a fighter pilot when he was close to 60, when that is clearly an unrealistic age. So, bringing up the age of Blanchett is just sexism. Also, science takes time, so in order to be an accomplished scientist, it is not uncommon to be old. Curtis is just a genre legend, so let her do fun movies.

Long Production Time

Yes, it took about nine years from the first news of the movie to the actual release. I haven’t even seen it, but Avatar: The Way of Water took 12 years and people seem to like it. The shooting of Apocalypse Now took over three years and that is widely considered a classic or just one of the greatest movies of all time. Eraserhead took six years to shoot. Barbie had been in the works since at least the 80s. Axel F made it out of development hell about ten years faster having been in works since the 90s. Deadpool was announced in 2000 and came out in 2016. The Irishman took 10 years to get into festivals from the start of the development. Fury Road took 20 years. I didn’t even want to bring up all the extended production times for various animations (because they are a whole different can of worms).

But yeah, you get the picture. Nine years is not that much. It didn’t even make it into the development hell list on Wikipedia (where I took most of the information above).

Twenty Writers

You might have noticed that Carrie Fisher didn’t do that much acting outside of Star Wars. Sure, she had a lot of roles, but many of them were more or less stunt casting or just small appearances in various products. What she did instead was writing, but you don’t see that many credits from her on that either. Why is that? Because she did script doctoring meaning that Hollywood would call her in and have her look at the script and what she could do to make it better. She stopped doing this after Hollywood moved to a model where they would solicit these ideas from a bunch of writers and then only use some of them, so they were basically using writers (who are underpaid anyhow) to do free work for them.

Most movies are not just a singular vision of a singular writer. Sure, some of them are, but studios are spending a lot of money on movies, so they want to make sure they are as good as they can be. While this doesn’t necessarily work in practice, this is what management does in all fields. They want to feel in control. However, this does mean that they want eyes on the work and that means a lot of writers.

It’s just that the guild does not allow all of these writers to be credited. There are rules. Each credited writer needs to have enough input into the script and there is a limit of three teams with up to three members each (which would be nine). This is where the difference between ‘&’ and ‘and’ comes in. If I remember this correctly, ‘&’ is used to separate members of the team and ‘and’ is used to separate teams. Also, producers can’t be credited as writers unless the other writers agree to it, and directors can’t be credited unless the team they worked in wrote over half of the script (I think the actual limit wa 55%). Other writers might get credits such as associate producer, but not always.

Reshoots

Okay, if someone is still bringing these up, they clearly haven’t been paying any attention. All big budget movies have reshoots these days. It’s the nature of how these movies are made. You get a lot of material and you make the movie in the edit. This often leaves a need for reshoots and they are usually budgeted and scheduled beforehand.

It should be noted here that Eli Roth did not direct the reshoots here and that is somewhat concerning, but on the other hand, he also has a number of other project going, so it might just have been a scheduling problem.

“Early Reviews”

These don’t exist yet. I assume some critics have seen it by now, but they are under an embargo. The “reviews” coming in are either from industy insiders, who don’t generally know what they are doing, or maybe they are based on focus groups, which are just random people, not the actual audience.

So, when you bring in just someone off the street and make them watch a movie and then ask questions about it, it this going to be helpful? Probably sometimes. They wouldn’t do it otherwise (although again, managers manage, whether right or wrong). So, if you bring in someone to be an expert on something like this, but they aren’t real experts, how do they approach it? They want to be helpful, so they give you the opinion they think they should be giving, whether it works or not. So, we shouldn’t really think much of this.

Again…

The movie is likely to be quite bad, but the points above are not indicators of it. Just having Eli Roth involved is quite enough.