The answer is, of course, complicated. Filmmaking is a decentralized business where no two movies are put together the same way (compared to the standardization of building construction or Coca-Cola bottling), where hundreds of people who may have never met before spend three months together creating the end result (compared to the close-knit fraternities of banking and legal systems), and where tens of millions of dollars go into producing something you will likely use for only two hours (compared to cars that last many years or a tube of toothpaste that you'll squeeze for weeks). It's a crazy business unlike any other.
But here's a quick rundown of some factors that might lead to that bad movie showing up at your local cineplex.
1. Profitability trumps quality. You may think that movie is lame and ridiculous, but if the studios are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars, they don't much care what you think. To then, it's a huge success and they're already planning two sequels. Hollywood is a business driven by profits, not artistic excellence. This is even more true of the six major studios who have to answer to shareholders.
2. The movie wasn't made for you. In other words, "crappy" is in the eye of the beholder. Except for those handful of sophisticated movies made with an eye towards Oscars, Hollywood studios mostly market to younger audiences. Teenagers represent the biggest audience. Not only do teens go a lot, but if they find a movie they like, teens might go more than once. This repeat-business is what drives super-hits like Avatar, Titanic, and Star Wars into the box office stratosphere. (This is also why most movies stick with the PG-13 rating. More and more, R-ratings are seen as a risky move that cuts out that lucrative teen audience. The Hangover is the rare R-rated superhit.) What this all means is that if you're a 40-year-old with discerning tastes, you probably won't like a lot of what's released by Hollywood because they're not making movies for you. They'd like if it you came, sure. They hope you will. But they design many of their movies with the assumption that you probably won't go. (The grail for Hollywood is the so-called "four quadrant" movie - a title that appeals to all four demographics: young male, young female, older male, older female. Movies that can draw all four and hit that bullseye are always monster hits.) Bottom line: your 12-year-old nephew loves that movie you think is terrible. Which of you is right?
3. Someone powerful wanted it made. If you're watching a bad movie that involves some A-list actor or director, it's a good possibility that what you're seeing is something called a "passion project." Translated, that means it's a project that would never get made in a million years were it not for the involvement of the big name. It's that pretentious period piece the Oscar-winning actor always wanted to make or the dark World War I drama the superstar director wrote eight years ago and has been obsessed with ever since. These get made, if only because the producers and studios want to get in the A-list talent's good graces. We think the best example of this is Click, a deeply weird and dark movie that would have never gotten made were it not for Adam Sandler starring in the lead. We also suspect this is how Larry Crowne happened. (Then again, there is a bright side to this phenomenon: it's also how Inception got made.)
4. The thing just went off the rails. There may be some in Hollywood who gleefully crank out bad movies, but for the most part, no one consciously sets out to make a crappy film. Everyone goes into it with the very best of intentions. Everyone dreams of Oscars and winning the weekend box-office derby. If you were going to spend 12-18 months of your life on something, would you really waste your time on some awful, cheesy project if you could help it? But with countless creative and business decisions involved, the whole thing can very easily go sideways. Not every choice is the right one. You just hope to be right more often than you're wrong. (It's always an interesting exercise to read the original script of a bad movie - the script is usually much stronger than the final product, which shows how far off-base movies can go as they grind through the whole process.)
5. There's a pre-existing audience for the material. Not only do movies now cost millions to make, but they cost millions to market. With so much entertainment competition out there, it's harder and harder for movie studios to cut through the noise and make an impression on audiences bombarded by internet ads, TV spots, billboards, video games, and 200 TV channels. One marketing executive put it thus: unlike most companies that might launch a new product once a year, Hollywood releases a new product every Friday. So marketers have to go from zero awareness to creating enough incentive to get people off the couch and standing at the box office to spend their $30. Nike doesn't have to do that. Starbucks doesn't have to do that. Which means that if a movie can be based on a TV show or a toy or a previous movie... that's a pretty attractive project. Instead of starting from scratch, now the studio is starting with something that audiences already know. And with tens of millions of dollars on the line, it's easy to see why Hollywood might pick a film version of "Bosom Buddies" over a strange new comedy no one's heard of. In short, Hollywood wants to mitigate its risk. The best way to do that is to create a movie that has some element audiences already know. (The other way to mitigate risk is to cut the budget, so that the movie doesn't have to do as well or attract as big of an audience to earn back its money and turn a profit. A lot of good movies are seen as failures only because their budgets were too big for the limited appeal they had with audiences.) While this strategy gave us Alvin and Chipmunks, it also gave us The Help.
6. Hollywood is driven by fear. Always remember that the producers and executives who make the decisions want to keep their jobs. And the best way to that is to play things safe. If they make a Tom Hanks movie that sucks, it's an easy position to defend: "Hey, it's Tom Hanks! He's a star!" No one will be fired for greenlighing a Tom Hanks movie. It's perceived as a slam dunk. Likewise, no one will be fired for greenlighting a movie based on a Hasbro game. What does get people fired? Greenlighting something risky or different or edgy (the kinds of things that usually result in great movies) that doesn't do well. If a studio spends millions on something out of the ordinary and it tanks spectacularly, someone will have to be held accountable. This rarely happens because no one wants to stick their neck out. And why should they? How often do you risk your job?
7. Audiences tend to like crap. Whether you agree with this or not, the simple fact is that audiences vote for movie quality every time they buy a ticket. If audiences stopped going to see mindless-mayhem action movies or insipid, sexist cookie-cutter romantic comedies, Hollywood would stop making them.
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