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It’s Saturday. Let’s face it, you can either be hanging out here with your fellow Outposters, or doing something horrific with family that probably involves shopping for things for the house that you really don’t need. There is nothing that an Outposter likes more than a vigorous debate, so once more unto the breach! Get your arguing pants on.
Hollywood, as we know, is a town run by morons who are wrong about nearly everything, all the time. Some kind of weird cognitive dissonance seems to exist throughout the studio system where decent ideas go in, and frequently, absolute horse piss comes out. We aren’t just talking about the quality of the products, we are talking about the quality of the decision-making.
Whether it is taking well-loved characters and franchises that were entirely built on your male audiences, and deciding what they need is to be feminised, or thinking that what the entire market wants to see can simply be disregarded in favor of something that supports the worldview of the writers’ room, the town has often been stricken by corporate and creative stupidity. Recently, this has seemed to be happening more and more.
That is on a general level, but what about specifics? Today’s debate is this:
What is the craziest, most mind-boggling, nonsensical decision to have come out of Hollywood?
This one popped into my head this morning as I was musing, as I often do, about movies. Universal’s aborted Dark Universe. Announced in 2016, at the height of the “Cinematic Universe” craze, all of Universal’s monster characters were to be combined into a single franchise. They really did assemble an absolute A-Team of talent to bring this to life.
Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp, Javier Bardem, and Tom actual Cruise! This was just the start. Channing Tatum was in the mix, as was Luke Evans and even Dwayne Johnson. There were going to be new movies featuring Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, even a new Phantom and Hunchback.
Behind the camera, people like David Koepp and Christopher McQuarrie were writing the scripts. The whole thing was announced with glamorous photo shoots. Then the Cruise-led The Mummy came out, and while it made over $400 million globally it didn’t hit expectations.
So what did Universal do? Did they have courage of their convictions and stay the course for a second try? Did they course correct? Adjust plans and strategy slightly? After all, the talent was locked and the plan was formed.
No… they simply trashed the whole thing.
Now THAT is a mind-boggling crazy Hollywood decision.
The post DEBATE: The Craziest Thing In Movies appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
