A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 2019 TWDC What are the most obvious signs from their movies that Disney is out to make money? Why are you asking such a silly question about The Walt Disney Company in general and specifically its Walt Disney Motion Pictures Studio division? Is there a valid reason for this, or are you jumping on the “let’s bash Disney because it’s a huge corporation” bandwagon? First of all, The Walt Disney Company was not created just to create “art” or provide entertainment just for the sake of making audiences happy. It was founded. in part, because Walt Disney was an artist who wanted to share his talents as an animator with the world, but it was also set up as a business enterprise. It wasn’t created to make art for art’s sake. Second, “Disney” exists to give its shareholders a return for their investments. When you buy stock in any business, you’re not merely getting a pretty piece of paper with the company logo; you’re purchasing a stake in that company’s future. Thus, if you o...

Is Star Wars: Episode IX just an excuse for Disney to make a bunch of money? All things being equal, all movies (except those small movies made solely by independent “artsy” production companies that hardly anyone sees), are made with the goal of making someone - usually a studio and its stockholders - “a bunch of money.” That’s why  movie studios  exist: they invest (read “risk”) millions of dollars in a movie - in this case,  Star Wars - Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker -  with a certain expectation of making a profit. The Walt Disney Company and its film division, Walt Disney Motion Picture Studios, are of course also making  Star Wars - Episode IX  to fulfill George Lucas’s on-again, off-again aspiration of creating a three-Trilogy Skywalker Saga, plus they have to finish the story that Lucasfilm began with 2015’s  The Force Awakens  and continued in  The Last Jedi.  Everyone involved in the creation of  Star Wars...

(C) 2000    Carol Publishing Group  R oman soldiers, as we all know, didn't wear watches at the height of the Caesars' power. Not because they couldn't afford even an inexpensive digital watch, mind you, but simply because the watch -- heck, even the mechanical clock -- hadn't yet been invented. Yet, as Bill Givens will cheerfully point out in his extremely amusing (and for some film producers, dismaying) collection of film flubs, some ancients were way ahead of themselves. Modern watches, wedding rings and other anachronisms make their little unexpected cameos in such set-in-ancient-times epics as The Ten Commandments, The Viking Queen, and Spartacus. Givens' Roman Soldiers Don't Wear Watches: 333 Film Flubs -- Memorable Movie Mistakes is a compilation of continuity errors, slips of dialogue, film-flipping flaws, and other unexpected mistakes that often pop up during production. Some of them have been published in other volumes of his successful ...

I think the main reason for so many remakes and “reboots” is simple: economics. The movie industry - or “Hollywood” - is not an altruistic community of artists who seek to entertain and/or enlighten us  just for the sake of it.  It’s a business, and its primary goal is to make a profit by producing a product that is intended to entertain or enlighten us, the consumers. The artists themselves may have some artistic impulse to create, of course, but “Hollywood” really means  the studios,  which are run by business people. Superman: The Movie  is a classic….did it need a reboot? Now, studio executives are extremely risk-adverse when it comes to making movies. Financing a film project is almost like gambling; the suits at 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Universal, and Sony don’t have a money-printing machine in their basements, so they prefer to play it safe and go with tried-and-true concepts instead of taking a leap of faith and financing an origina...