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Comment by sbacic | Hacker News Reader

This! I am absolutely flabbergasted by the difference in the quality of the visual effects and acting when compared to the dialogue and storytelling.

I feel like the script is either intentionally dumbed down or that the script receives a disproportionately small part of the overall budget.

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If you are making a product that has an intended market of billions of people, it needs to have incredibly universal appeal. This is in direct opposition with producing a memorable piece of art.

That doesn't really make sense to me - a market of that size ought to have niches and market segmentation. After all, no matter how generic and broad-appealing the script is, I don't think my 60+ year old mother is going to get excited about the next Marvel movie.

A great example is Blade Runner 2049.

In my opinion, it is essentially a perfect movie. Fantastic music. Gorgeous sets. Great fight scenes. Good story. Interesting characters. Proper science fiction.

Most importantly, it stayed true to the original, while still having a novel story, that nonetheless touched on the theme of the original without being overly repetitive like the latest Disney-made Star Wars movies.

I thought the movie was basically genious, and I will now watch anything Dennis Villeneuve directs.

But if you listen to reviews by typical moviegoers, they panned the movie. "Too slow", "Boring", etc...

Interstellar similarly polarised viewers.

This is why most movies are made the way they are: to avoid negative reviews by the mass market viewers and hence to maximise profits.

Or to put it another way: Their only metric is ticket sales, not the level of your enjoyment. They don't get a cent more if the movie touches your soul.

It's a bell curve issue. Most of the audience is close to the centre. If you challenge them too hard and don't give them the roller coaster ride they're paying for and expecting, they get bored and tune out.

Subtlety and nuance are not the point. Big Dumb Movies are a theme park ride, and deliberately designed that way.

For example though, Interstellar is a convoluted mess, where the resolution depends on the unseen hand of the future humans (with the characters in the film having to take some risks to carry out the plan the future put into place...).

Nolan tends to do that though, wrapping science words around some magic thing that is needed to drive the plot.

Precisely.

Yes but if you're making a movie that costs $200m then it needs to target the average of the planets expectations for a movie to make money. Any divergence from that ends up confusing some of your target audience.

Sure this will end up turning off a bunch of people who have tastes that demand something more authentic, but you don't care about that because most peoples tastes are clustered around the mean.

Look at pop music for comparison. Or imagine the Apple of the 00s announcing Memoji as a feature.

Part of the problem is that writing a script is a logistical problem as well as a writing problem.

You have to account for actors maybe not being available, scenes getting cut, action scenes being shot early for various reasons which means you have to retrofit them into the story you're writing, some actors being so expensive that any retake you shoot with them has to be justified, etc.

In a book you can afford to write a plot where every little detail matters. In a big budget movie, you need to keep to the broad strokes, because course-correction is expensive.

I think the reason is in theory. When you read movie analysis and contemporary writing advice, following them literally leads to those repetitive boring scripts.

They are not badly written, then are well written, but in tradition that is fundamentally stiff and don't allow complication.

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