This was in a recent quote in an article in the LA Times, talking to the green light guys at Universal Pictures.

What happened with "Land of the Lost"?

Shmuger: That was the one real miss; I think we would call it a real failure. We spent too much to make the movie. The tone was just too weird, and in hindsight we got it wrong.

The two men, Shmuger and Linde, continued to talk about a lot of films Universal put out in the last year and showed the studio made a lot of bad decisions with films. Even with one they claimed was a hit “The Hurt Locker” they talked about it having a good solid showing while also acknowledging it was a low budget film.

The article talked a lot about franchise and tent pole movies. Essentially, both the writer and the subjects agreed that the reason for Universal’s failure is the studio didn’t know what they had. The reason I put in the quote about Land of the Lost is because that film, more than any other in the past few years, shows what’s wrong with today’s movies.

Land of the Lost may have been a hokey kid’s show in the minds of some, but to others that show, despite the funky special effects, was cool in its own way. The studio made it a Will Farrell comedy. Before anyone had seen anything from the film internet film sites were declaring it a bomb. For some reason, and this has been mentioned in a lot of those internet sites, Will Farrell is thought of as funny because of Saturday Night Live, but as more time passes from him being on the show there are less people who remember or care about him. He increasingly makes unfunny movies.

So you have a movie that could have been a little more serious that bombs because they make it an all out comedy and put Will Farrell in it. In a sense they wanted to do what GI Joe did, get out there and make a lot of money before word of mouth comes along and kills it.

You would think after this soul searching article and the threat of being fired the green light guys would make some careful decisions. Well no. Just this week it was announced Bryan Singer would helm a Battlestar Galactica revival. Yes, a Galactica revival. I read that a number of times because the SciFi channel just aired the revival series to great reviews. Oh, just to know the lineage, SciFi is owned by NBC/GE which also owns Universal Pictures which owns Battlestar Galactica. Now this revival is going back to the old TV series, not the one that just came out. So you’re going to essentially reboot a series to go back to its 70s Star Wars rip off origins and you’re letting the man that killed Superman (as far as a revival franchise) lead this? It looks like a formula for disaster.

 

<< PREVIOUS
NEXT >>

Copyright © Chaotic Fringe LLC. All rights reserved.

Thinking of Bad Movie Making - August 17, 2009
Home | News | Entertainment | Blog | Podcast | IMVN | Everquest 2 | Links | Photos | V-Blog