How Studios Sabotage Their Own Movies 

This reminds me so much of Wonder Woman: the entire film is about Diana figuring out there isn't a big bad guy but people do bad stuff. Then in the last scene everything is reverted because: surprise! there was a bad guy after all. If you stop watching the movie a few minutes before it ends it's still a pretty great movie, but I have no doubt in my mind the weird ending is because of studio interference.

Talking about the Fantastic Four and the executives who signed off on the script - I think you're hitting upon a dirty secret. I have nothing to base this on but a hunch, but I think that when these big tentpole release movies go totally off the rails like Fant4stic did, the people who signed off simply didn't read the thing. People are lazy and cocky and don't want to put in the work so they sign off on something they only have a vague notion of, and then they're genuinely shocked when they see what they get.

1. Make a project. 2. Give to a young and creative director with a unique vision. 3. Kick him/her off and reeshoot 90% of the movie because the director had a unique vision.

Studio execs need to start taking the fall for this shit, instead of the director often taking the heat while the anonymous corporate worms slink away in the background unscathed.

If studios want a safe business model they should be selling bread, not making movies.

"Alien 3's production is perhaps a more entertaining story...than Alien 3" Alright, I'm subscribed.

I'm now convinced every tragedy on film could be improved by changing the ending to "And then everyone started dancing."

I think the Last Action Hero is actually an objectively good movie for what it was trying to portray. Its a fun action flick with a lot of meta self referential material. Its deconstructionist, and points out how absurd a lot of the action movie tropes are but in the same regard, also does it in a loving way. To me it is really the culmination of Arnolds career from the 80s and also provides an excellent cautionary tale which is ... yes it is ok to be inspired by these heroes in movies ... but do not let that inspiration fall into delusion like Danny did in the beginning of the movie, because the real world is a lot more brutal then we give it credit for.

A similar thing happened to Dark City. The director wanted the movie's premise to be a mystery until later on in the film, but the studio made him put in an opening narration which destroyed the mystery and atmosphere which was the film's greatest strength. Also, if you haven't seen Dark City, and like movies like Brazil and Blade Runner, I would highly recommend it. Just MAKE SURE YOU WATCH THE DIRECTOR'S CUT!! It's really an amazing movie experience.

Another example; the Hobbit movies. They were being filmed as two movies. In the middle of production Warner Brothers told Peter Jackson the studio wanted 3 films. To end Desolation of Smaug & do the beginning of Battle of the Five Armies, Jackson had to have his crew / actors immediately create an hour of big budget action footage. Awful experience but a stretched out, mediocre 3rd film made Warners another $ billion. In the end $ is all that matters.

I think that it would have been great if 10 Cloverfield Lane ended right when the protagonist saw the alien ship. An ambiguous ending would have been better than what was released.

I guess "Joker" is the antithesis of this - where a studio was actually bold enough to give a director free reign to deliver a subtle and unformulaic product. Joker was mega profitable, hopefully it'll set some kind of new precedent for taking risks and establishing character development over commercial multi-movie franchise concerns.

I Am Legend is another example, since the ending holds the meaning of the film and the title, and many of the changes from the book accentuate the ending. Instead, the ending was completely replaced, and now it's mostly remembered for having a terrible ending.

I was at the opening night of the original Bladerunner here in Sydney some 30 years ago. I could not believe how BAD that tracked on ending was. It was 15 years later before I saw the "Directors Cut" with the dream sequence and original ending; which was playing to packed houses. "Brazil" was and is one of my favourite Gillian films; and fortunately we got the original ending when it was shown here in Australia. Can you imagine someone standing behind Da Vinci saying; "The smile, make it bigger, NO, bigger".

The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Avengers Age Of Ultron, Fant4stic, Green Lantern, Suicide Squad, Justice League are recent examples of studio interference.

The problem is that these studios have these high level execs that try to impose their vision on a movie they know nothing about. It doesn't matter if the movie is a hit or a flop since these execs still make their money. Perhaps the studio board of directors should not allow execs to have any say in the creative aspects of the movie and leave that up to the movie director and producer. The exec's only concern should be in the financing and distribution of the movie and it's production budget.

Haha, I believe Hollywood would probably put a "Hey, Totalitarianism ain't that bad!" ending in 1984 these days. Joss Whedon's Justice League cuts are also pretty funny, *spoiler* especially the scene where Cyborg and Flash robs Superman's grave while making funny quips. It was all shot like a Full House or Big Bang Theory episode, where they used a Plan 9 set they cobbled together in an afternoon. Flash decides to dig at normal speed (???). Cyborg glows in dark and is the worst person on earth to something conspicuous at night. At least they only had to dig 2 feet deep to find Superman's grave.

the Fan4stic Doom scene is on dark psychological anime levels of terror, i love it

I rather like The Last Action Hero

So The Last Action Hero supposed to be more like Lèon: The Professional?? Woah.

I think WB is ruining their superhero franchise by constantly interfering with their films. Scenes were cut out of BvS, causing parts to not make sense, and both Suicide Squad and Justice League were victims of reshoots. Man of Steel made me think this would be my favorite movie series, but WB has turned it into a raging dumpster fire. When movie studios go through all the trouble of finding great writers, directors, and actors, they should probably take their hands off once shooting starts and let their film makers do their jobs.

I know Last Action Hero is a mess, but I still like that movie.

Yes the Lava lamp is back 😀😀😀

John Carter was the subject of practically a civil war inside Disney as people inside Disney proper feared that Andrew Stanton, then a Pixar wunderkind, with a successful John Carter would signal a Pixar coup over Disney live-action in the same way they "took over" Disney animation in the decade prior. Could that be why TV and print ads for the film in the weeks before the premiere were as rare as actual Martians?

Just watched an hour long video on RU-vid of someone saying the same thing about Kingsman The Golden Circle,

Origins of "woke" and Chinese dabbling... doesn't seem so obtuse now...

I'm looking forward for your video about nostalgia exploitation in nowadays media.

How do you make this video without talking about Justice League

I personally like Last Action Hero, it's a fun Meta parody. I do understand the problems though. Fant4stic though seemed doomed to fail, I've seen it so many times with Fox's 'Marvel' movies in that they're just in name only with what they're called, their X-Men films are guilty of that too. They've hardly even touched the surface of what the Fantastic 4, the X-Men & villains are. That's why I feel the MCU has been successful, they (somewhat) care for the material they're based on (for the most part).

"Panic is a great way of resonating with the audience, if it's convincing." Another great example of palpable panic is when the reavers arrive at the opening scene of Serenity. If you've already seen the Firefly show, you know how dangerous they are. But if you haven't, all you have to go on are the reactions of the crew. And their panic is VERY convincing.

The ending of 10 Cloverfield Lane felt like from almost different movie - it magically turned from quite believable chilling movie into comics movie with superwoman. For me, the action scene in-grafted onto the ending damaged the movie.

Fantastic Four 2015 has an excellent first hour that showed a bit of the Cronenberg style body-horror Josh Trank said he envisioned. I absolutely believe him and I would love for his cut to be released one day. The agony of The Thing, the grotesqueness of Mr. Fantastic, the obviously disturbing (and with historical implications hard to ignore) of a black Johnny Storm on fire... I wonder what he had in store for the last 45 minutes to an hour, because that portal BS last 30 minutes we know were not his choice. What was he planning for Sue to suffer? Maybe a little Verhoven's "Hollow Man" madness?

Editing can improve a film if it improves cinematography instead of changing its tone. Obligatory mention of how the original Star Wars was saved in the edit, and how The Justice League became a mess for changing its mind and tried to copy The Avengers towards the end of the shooting.

There is this documentary about screenwriters and they interview HUUGE amount of them (people shouls check it out, it's really slept on). But anyways, one of the writers say that in the pitchs meetings with studio execs he sets things up that are already in the script in a way that the exec's would propose the thing. With exec's they think they are smarter than they are, they think they know more about film than they know and they always wants atleast one scene to the movie where he can say that that was my idea (because they are egoistical pricks). Also gotta say that the test screening are the stupidest idea ever. Some age groups or social groups can be with the movie till the end and it doesn't show in those tests. It's so small group of people that in scientific fieöd they would laugh at the idea of getting accurate results with so few people.

I think execs see a filmmaker's work and assume their past success and style will carry over to their new movie, but are ignorant or arrogant towards the creative process and don't realize until the end that they're getting Fant4stic instead of a tone like The Avengers. It all comes back to their bad communication

The youth division 1970's was set up to let indie filmmakers do it the way they wanted and not interfere and SILENT RUNNING and AMERICAN GRAFFITTI was made as a result. Why can't they do that again? Silent Running was considered terrible by the studio but they still gave them final cut and did not interfere. they did this as an experiment, like engineers. Well try something new and when it doesn't work we will know not to do it that way again. But it did work and the rest is history.

The Dr. Doom scene sure reminds me of Elfen Lied. Just switch Dr. Doom into naked anime girl, and add a few buckets more blood.

"It's almost as if art by committee DOESN'T WORK!" yup

Speaking of John McTiernan, the Rollerball remake is also a textbook example of executives gutting a movie at the last minute.

I personally have to disagree that Ridley Scott's cut of Blade Runner being better than the studio cut. Implying Decker is too a replicant ruins all symbolism with Roy saving him at the end.

That lowkey name drop of 10 Rillington Place.

I know they had to make the fantastic 4 to keep the rights to the property bit you are 100% correct in that I could have been a very dark very good movie. The fact that the cool parts fro. The cool parts in the trailer where not even in the movie and says it all.

Yeah, but your horror scene is deeply undermined when your villain looks like a crash test dummy. And I'm not saying that something like that can't be scary, but this was a person, not a dummy brought to life. It probably wouldn't be hard make a dummy look scary, in fact it might have actually been creepier if it was an actual dummy brought to life, but Fant4stic could have had "Dr. Doom" look better than that and have the scene be horrific. And I suppose maybe it's our fault for knowing what Dr. Doom looks like, but he has an iconic look that everyone has known for 60 years, same as the Fantastic Four, just make them look like the characters. Could you imagine the Darth Vader scene from Rogue One if he didn't look like Darth Vader? It would ruin the whole scene.

Isn't the Doom scene almost the same scene from Akira in the hospital.

Dab that gravy off boi

If you want to talk about studio interference, I got two words for you: Tom Rothman

I think the points you make are all great. However, this is just one scenario out of dozens. Executives and committees are ruining movies for so many reasons, it's becoming the norm more than the exception. Even series which had previously been ground-breaking or handled well suddenly do a complete 180 and throw out everything fans liked about them (Ghostbusters, DC superhero films, live action remakes of Disney animated movies, anything with Star in the title, etc). But sadly, none of this matters. Because despite many of these movies being panned by fans, they still make $500+ million. In other words, no matter how bad the remake/sequel is, people still go and watch it. So from the mindset of a studio executive, they are a success. And they're not going to move away from meddling until they start losing money. And of course, they don't care about art. They have taken a system entirely about subjective opinions and taste and turned it into an assembly line. Which is exactly why they shouldn't be in the business of funding movies. They should go make predictable hardware products like smartphones or cars. But the irony is, Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s was also an assembly line. They just made hundreds of low cost films a year instead of dozens of high cost ones that current day Hollywood does. So if a movie didn't do well, they didn't care because there was ten more coming out next month. But today, if something like Iron Man 7 doesn't do well, the company is out $500 million. The root of the problem as I see it is Hollywood is bloated and needs to return to their old system of medium to low budget films. Which wouldn't send the shareholders and executives into a panic about taking risks.

Say it Frenchy! Say Chowder!

Another movie ruined by studio meddling was Justice League and Suicide Squad

What is going on with the signature lava lamp, it's shining green, this is an affront to decency. When i watch GRS i expect a well structured and thought-out theory, an interesting subject and a reddish orange lava lamp. The first two you delivered but not the third.....NOT THE THIRD!!!

Hahah. "Then everyone started dancing" sounds like a lot more wholesome ending than "he loved Big Brother" alright.

"...they all dance to Bros." So you do believe in dystopian futures. You dark-hearted soul, you.

Ohhh...the timing of the video. I came here after watching the Black suit scene from Justice League.

Cool video, I just have one issue: The last ten pages of "1984" by George Orwell have nothing to do with Winston and they are actually hopeful. "1984" is one of my favourite books, I've read it more than a dozen times, and I used to make the exact same mistake. If one assumes the end of the story is the end of the book, "1984" is incredibly depressing. If one realizes the end of the book is, in fact, not the end of the story, and Winston, and the REAL end of the book is the sole appendix on Newspeak, then one realizes Orwell's ultimate message: fascist dictatorships, like those of Oceania and those used by Orwell to model Oceania, are temporary and can never last. The first line of the appendix is: "Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism." The first thing to notice about this line is it is written in the past tense. Newspeak WAS the official language of Oceania. It HAD BEEN devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc. The last line of the appendix, which comes after a brief discussion on the difficulty of translating Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift, goes as follows: "It was chiefly in order to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as 2050." We aren't told if the full adoption of Newspeak was ever accomplished, but reading the rest of the appendix implies that it wasn't. Oceania and the world that destroyed Winston Smith didn't even last 100 years and was finished before 2050. "The Handmaid's Tale," by Margaret Atwood, has a similar conceit: academics in the future examining the records of a past fallen authoritarian state. The appendix of "1984" is written the same way.

i always wished I could have lived to see the team up of Kubrik and Gilliam. That would have been an epic festival of bizarre weirdness and abstract avant garde idealism's lol

Craptastic Four was doomed from the beginning,even before Fox,screwed everything up.The director never understood the source material.The FF comic,was never a grimdark body horror story,it's oldschool,lighthearted adventure. Turning the FF into bodyhorror is just as stupid as turning Batman into silly camp,like they did with the Schumacher movies,it doesn't suit the source material.

I don't know but I watched the last action hero at least 3 times when I was a kid. It wasn't that bad. It was very funny but at the same time kinda scary at some point. I still remember the last arc when I thought the Arnold was gonna die and the kid was gonna end up like Arnold's movie child. The bogeyman figure was the most scary though. I almost cried when the kid had to let Arnold comeback in order to save him and never be able to meet him again. The film was cheesy but very entertaining and had many different tone which made it unique at least for me. Kinda bias but I love every movie Arnold in.

When I first saw Brazil, I thought it had a great ending. My sister watched it later and was wondering what I was talking about, it turns out there was a scratch on the dvd that jumped my viewing from the 'escape' to the credits because I cleaned the dvd before I put it back in the box my sister got to see the inbetween bit I missed. I kind of like my ending better.

Fant four stic 😂😂😂

Kingdom of Heaven wasn’t a perfect movie, but the cut-to-hell version that screened *was* a travesty

George “rockhard” love the vids

Fan4stic wouldn't have been good, even if they had let it be more of a thriller, because making it a horror/thriller movie fundamentally misunderstands F4. They are a family, and that sense of family needs to be the core theme of the movie. It needs to be "The Incredibles", not horror X-Men in space.

Literally loled at the dab joke. Great video, love your stuff 👌

Nobody remembers when studio interference did good. Studio brought in skilled editor to get some kind of sense to three hours long rambling road trip. Result: Easy Rider and even director himself found final version better than his original edit. If it works nobody notices.

Oddly, sometimes studios intentionally sabotage their films for political reasons. Gilliam's 'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' was hampered on release to balance their internal books and to make a departing David Puttnam look bad.

I just finished working on my second small budget film (art dept.), and I can absolutely confirm your comment about the time restrictions that studios place on a project sabotaging its success. They want a film done in the absolute shortest amount of time possible, and that can be understood in the context of big business, high-dollar investment logic, but by placing arbitrary time restrictions on a project they undermine its chances of achieving the returns they aspire to from the very start. As you say, art by committee seldom works out well.

"Alien Cubed" now has me thinking it would be interesting to see a mash-up between the Cube movies and the Alien franchise.

You just hit the nail on the head with your comment about executives who need to be willing to take the blame when things go bad. That's one of the biggest issues. They want to tell the directors what to do, then when things go bad because they didn't go well, they want to step back and let that director take the blame.

I actually think The Thing being in constant pain could have been removed, honestly. The movie would already have been rather dark with out that, we, didn't really need that.

Well said. I have recently watched three American films which began with interesting scenarios (for example, a time when currency is replaced by hours of life), but deteriorated into tedious car chases and fist- and gun-fights. I imagine that this was due to interference by the studios. It's a bit like allowing a book editor to completely rewrite the ending of a novel "No, no, Charles, we can't have that ambiguity. Pip and Estelle must end up getting married and having lots of kids. Then they can sing a big number at the end." Humbug!

That Dr. Doom scene is very similar to a scene in Akira. Plays out the same way.

Fantastic Four wouldn't have worked with Josh Trank's dark vision or not anyways. Because as comic book readers we're well aware of what the Fantastic Four is/was from the original comics and it wasn't that ugly 2015 movie, and especially cos Dr Doom got screwed up yet again. He isn't a horror character of any kind but a high-tech armored suit wearing Machiavellian arch-villain of the Fantastic Four. Who also knows of magic. So scary hallway scenes be damned that certainly wasn't Dr Doom either. Thats why fans like myself absolutely hated the movie!

Brazil is one of my favorite movies! I first saw it when I was around 12-13 years old and I loved it. I can't remember if I ever saw it with the altered "happy" ending though.

"Alien cubed" THANK YOU

I worked as an assistant animator in the animation business doing commercials and features and working on multiple commercial failures because their stories stank and greed. Everything shot to a script and story-boarded out and the constant hunt for more investors. Thank goodness for the Beatles George Harrison, he'd been friends with and liked the Monty Python crew. So when he was asked to lend them some money he'd mortgaged his house and business to get The Life of Brian made. You're quite right when you said, ''Art by committee doesn't work''. You have one director with one vision, not multiple ones, especially when they're corporate.

Speaking as an author: Hollywood stay away from me and my works.

I think you’re overlooking the main reason that Trank was taken off the project; it wasn’t (just) that his idea was a bad direction for the movie, it’s that he had undergone a mental breakdown where he destroyed his hotel room and was becoming increasingly hostile towards his actors and crew, and clearly wasn’t cut out for a project of its scale. Fox began by giving him a lot of leeway to try and avoid their reputation as being meddlers, but ended up having to meddle anyway to get the film finished in the first place because Trank was clearly unsuitable for the film.

_The Last Action Hero_ is so troperific about the action genre I really think that if it was made today it would be called a masterpiece.

I love that Bros went on to be in Blade 2. Nothing about that sentence is a mistake btw.

NO movie made from a comic book is ever any good. They are all putrid stinking garbage. For me, if a film is "popular", then I know it is trash. Conversely, NO ONE likes the movies that I adore. Hollywood has not received a dime of my hard earned money in the past twelve years. "Cheapness has nothing to do with the budget of a film. But, it helps." ~Frank Zappa~

You've missed a trick not calling your channel or videos "The Schmidt Show"

Ah yes, because that scene really encapsulates Doom, who’s well known for being a weird generically evil guy with psychic powers who is obsessed with an inter dimensional planet. Of course. What’s a Latveria?!

I wish Fantastic Four had just been called Planet Zero and ditched the property

Fantastic 4 suffers from studios wanting to be WOKE. Instead of creating a great movie they want to change things to pander. As for the scene you liked so much about Dr. Doom. It looked like a ripoff of Elfin Leid’s beginning. But when you can’t create anything new you just steal. Movies are dead until they starting writing scripts and not remaking or part 45.

HOLY DANG that's a rad lava lamp! Where did you get it??

I have always liked Alien3, it's dark and nihilistic, perfect for the evolution of Ripley's character. But I definitely see what you mean with all of these examples. For shame, Hollywood.

Really looking forward to your aside on Brazil.

fanstatic four 2015 is a bad movie with edit or without edit

I saw that moment in Fantastic Four and it was called Akira.

Viktor Von Doom should be terrifying, but he should at least look something like his character

What happened to your lava lamp? If only there was a network of studio executives to stop you from changing things up. As a viewer and a consumer I am strongly opposed to new things. Change scares me and I do not like things that are a different color than what I am used to.

I've been diving into Orson Welles's filmography of late, and the number of times this happened to him is so sad. The studio would hire him because they wanted an Orson Welles picture, then hire someone to re-edit and reshoot half the movie... then complain when his films made them no money. Dude, you shot yourselves in the foot there...

Until 9:17, I thought Georg lived in a void .

Doom looks way too silly in the fant4stic, for a dark superhero movie.

It used to be like that, but now it's about implanting ideologies and agendas.

George kinda looks like a Skinner DSP

Before I even read this, an age-old tried-and-true method of advertising is “the illusion of choice”. Obviously you have seen this used in Political Campaigning. Much like coke vs Pepsi, Comcast vs dsl, iPhone vs Android...consumers like having an option, or a choice, giving them the illusion of freedom (even if the products are bizarrely similar). Well movie studios that release movies against themselves follow the same advertising scheme, sometimes even teaming up with rival studios to make this happen (ever wonder why movie studios release similar themes and almost the same movies around or near the same time as other movies? Well, it isn’t coincident....if you believe there ISNT a board with every movie release for the next five to ten years in every movie studio, then you crazy). Giving the viewer the option of which movie they want to see, gives the illusion of being in a land where anything is possible. Bam, you’re welcome. Continue being consumer ho’s (I’m one too, don’t worry).

THAT DAB WAS BEAUTIFUL LOL

They didn't sabotage them. Voldemort did.

All hail Mystery Boxes!!