James Gunn Explains the Problem with Movies Today… but Lets Marvel Off the Hook

Movies

However his Superman turns out, James Gunn at least understands why movies are so bad right now… or part of why, at least. In an interview with Rolling Stone to promote the film, the interviewer asked Gunn whether a movie getting a release date before the script is written is a problem, which is something Eddie Murphy once said to him (one wonders if Murphy was talking about his post-Nutty Professor career), and Gunn readily agreed, naming the practice as the biggest reason why movies mostly suck now:

Eddie Murphy once told me that nearly every bad movie happens because of Hollywood’s habit of setting a production date before they have a finished screenplay.

Yeah, totally. Listen, you can do everything right and make a bad movie. I’m really compassionate towards people that put their all into a movie. I know some people that were my former workers at Marvel — people who made some of the worst movies. There were people that were lazy and didn’t put their time in. And then there were other directors that worked really hard and maybe didn’t have the best movie come out, but they did everything they could. But I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It’s not because of home screens getting so good. The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.

And that’s one of the biggest rules you’ve made for DC — that they have to have finished scripts.

Yeah. We just killed a project. Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go. The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good. And we’ve been really lucky so far, because Supergirl’s script was so fucking good off the bat. And then Lanterns came in, and the script was so fucking good. Clayface, same thing. So fucking good. So we have these scripts that we’ve been really lucky with or wise in our choices or whatever the combination is.

This isn’t brand new information; James Gunn said this soon after becoming the co-CEO of DC Studios with Peter Safran. And he’s right that setting a production timetable and release date for a movie that doesn’t even have a script is insane and leads to many bad movies (although very occasionally, it can work; see Casablanca). I also like how he differentiates between bad movies that were made with good intentions and the ones that were disasters from start to finish. I completely agree, and you can tell the difference. Over the past couple of years, I’ve been watching a lot of older movies, partly to explore parts of cinema history I’ve never experienced and partly because modern movies are mostly terrible, and I want to watch good films that I’ve never seen. And while I’ve now seen many incredible movies, I’ve seen some I didn’t like as well. But I also see the difference Gunn suggests; the older bad movies at least felt like actual movies made by people trying to create good art and simply not getting there for whatever reason – miscast actors, a story that doesn’t hold your interest, pacing issues, etc. But when you watch modern movies, like many of the ones Marvel makes (to use an obvious but well-deserved example), it’s different; you can tell that nobody involved in the movie cared. The stories aren’t just underwhelming or dull – they don’t even hold together as narratives because of reshoots, script revisions, or whatever happened. I always think of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, where characters are clearly referencing other versions of the script, like Ant-Man whining about some deal he and Kang had. Actors who are miscast in older films are at least attempting to fit their ill-suited roles, while many modern actors just look bored, rambling through their lines so they can end a shoot their heart isn’t in. Perhaps this is a generational issue, with the newer wave of actors feeling entitled rather than lucky.

And I’m glad James Gunn says audiences still want to go to the theater and are just tired of seeing bad movies. He’s absolutely right, and I think I’m far from the only one who senses the lack of care that goes into so many films now. Later in the interview, Gunn is asked whether a Marvel vs. DC film could happen, and he says he thinks people are “over it” now, that they just want to see a good movie rather than something that lives and dies on its concept. And while Deadpool & Wolverine would maybe beg to differ, I still mostly agree; I think the multiverse soured people on these high-concept ideas because it’s been used as a crutch and executed so poorly and with so little thought (with the odd exception, like Spider-Man: No Way Home) that people want the mish-mashes to end. Do you hear a lot of excitement for Avengers: Doomsday and Avengers: Secret Wars, or do you mostly hear groaning at all the multiversal stuff that’s going to be jammed into these two films? I can see a Deadpool & Wolverine situation where people are drawn in by seeing some of the greats return, like Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and the promise of Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man (which I think is a guarantee), but this is a bell they can’t ring too many times, and if these movies suck, it’s over for that kind of nostalgia bait.

Curiously, Gunn lets Marvel off the hook later despite the studio being one of the worst offenders of this practice:

Over at Marvel, they’ve been pretty open about the fact that they realized what’s gone wrong over the past few years. They put out too much stuff.

And [longtime Marvel executive producer] Louis [D’Esposito] said that privately to me. I don’t even know if it’s really their fault.  

They were under a corporate mandate, yeah.

That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. And it killed them.

Apparently, this is just the party line anyone in Hollywood who talks about Marvel’s woes is going to repeat. Gunn cites Louis D’Esposito as telling him that they were mandated to make more movies by Disney, and I’m sure that’s true. But that’s not an excuse for the glut of garbage that’s come out of that studio, especially when you can point to numerous other factors. Having to put out three movies a year didn’t force Marvel to pepper their movies and shows with insufferable girl bosses or denigrate the likes of Iron Man and Captain America to prop up their replacements. It didn’t force them to hire bad writers and inexperienced directors who had no idea what they were doing with a tentpole superhero film. It didn’t create the mandate that their writers not read comic books. It didn’t inspire the idea of shoving intrusive political lectures into their stories that alienated viewers looking for a good time rather than a scolding. It didn’t turn Kang into an incompetent clown or the Skrulls into a bunch of lovable pussycats. I’m sure the mandate didn’t help, but Marvel’s problems go way beyond that, and it’s annoying watching people help them put all the blame on Disney wanting more content. It’s never their fault, even when they stop insulting their fans and admit they put out a lot of crap. And this mentality is why they’ll probably never get better, at least not under this regime. When you’re not allowed to tell the emperor he has no clothes, he’s going to keep walking around naked.

Let us know what you think of James Gunn outlining the problems with modern movies in the comments!

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