Current Events > I feel like studios insist on *not* giving viewers what they want.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Which is like, a major violation of the #1 Rule of showbusiness...

I dunno I guess.

On the other hand, if people will throw money at you no matter what you do, you might as well ignore what they want.

They know better what you want than you

WingsOfGood posted...

They know better what you want than you

I think it's more like those chefs who throw you out of a restaurant for asking the waiter for salt. What you want is irrelevant; I'm a genius and if you don't understand that, that's a you problem.

We'll see

They try to hard to make something more important than it really is.

Care to elaborate on this point?

Some producers are probably stuck on a power trip like that. Others probably feel there's a difference between what works in a comic/novel/cartoon/TV series/etc. and what works in a feature length film.

FortuneCookie posted...

Some producers are probably stuck on a power trip like that. Others probably feel there's a difference between what works in a comic/novel/cartoon/TV series/etc. and what works in a feature length film.

There is a difference, but it's a pretty overstated phenomenon.

One good example is the Green Arrow villain Onomatopoeia. Screw Batman; he was a GA villain first! The guy is pretty much just a normal thug with pretty conventional weaponry, who somehow manages to mow down a bunch of superheroes serial killer-style.

The one noteworthy thing about the guy, aside from accidentally setting up an interesting story through no merit of his own, is that he speaks exclusively by mimicking the sound effects drawn on the page (with the exception of the one time he said his own name). It's not clear whether he imitates the in-universe sound perfectly, or if he just approximates it with an onomatopoeia, but neither would make any sense with actual audio. For example, if the author used BLAM as the gun sound effect, the villain can just say BLAM in a speech bubble and it's perfectly clear that he's mimicking the sound. But a gun in a movie isn't going to make that sound exactly, so it might be lost on the viewer why he's saying BLAM, or in the opposite case, it might not be clear why the sound effect was played twice.

But this does nothing to explain the dystopian world where dinosaurs evolved into humans in Super Mario Bros.

That's a good example about a villain who mimics comic book sound effects. How would you ever translate that onto the screen?

RetuenOfDevsman posted...

But this does nothing to explain the dystopian world where dinosaurs evolved into humans in Super Mario Bros.

The Game Historian did a good video on this (if you have a full half-hour to kill, lol):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve26GpPDTgY

Basically, the husband-wife director duo wanted to do a sci-fi movie patterned after Blade Runner and disregarded the source material altogether. They were riding high off of the success of Max Headroom and thought that anything they touched would be golden. (Everyone else thought otherwise.)

It's like they get off on being withholding.

1.Viewers dont know what they want until they have it.
2.For all the viewers who want a specific idea or element, many other viewers, if not more, dont want that element or idea present.
3.Studios dont actually know what people want so theyre doubling down on IPs because theyre stuck in yesteryears mentality.
4.Movies and shows are expensive, so the studios can, to a degree, dictate what people want.

5. Producers have their heads up their asses about their own personal artistic vision that is often at odds with the audience

Viewers, as a whole, don't know what they want. Or, at least, they want a bunch of contradictory things.

'Give us something fresh and not stale, but don't go be messing with the stuff we want to always be the same way'.

It's the job of creators to lead, not to follow. When they forget that, we get tired of what they give us.