Elaboration

A few days ago I suggested that the trailers for the movie Battleship, based on the strategy game, indicated that the movie industry was out of ideas. For one, Sub Search was a way cooler game: Three levels, depth charges, submarines that could shoot back. If you're going to reduce your level of creativity to the place where you try to dream up a movie story that matches a game, then pick a better one.

Kyle Smith, a movie writer for the New York Post, wrote a much longer piece than mine about the matter, which could have to do with the fact that the Post pays him and I do this for the love of seeing my own ideas set in type -- I mean, "for fun." And also because he's also reviewing a book, Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! by Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon.

Smith's column is fun and should be read in its entirety. The high points surround a couple of main problems. One is that the movie industry rewards success rather than risk, and "success" is defined solely in terms of box office receipts. Critics and movie writers can howl all the "art form" claims they want, but the beautifully autumnal melancholy meditations on life's fleeting fancies that they love so much happen because studios have money to spend on them, and they get that money from blockbusters where things blow up. A studio exec who shepherds a bunch of those "little movies" into the theaters only to see them right back out again the next week with just enough take to buy him or her a bag of popcorn can probably expect an invitation to work for another studio. But a studio exec who spills Transformers 4: Yes, Shia LeBeouf Still Has a Job over the edge of the slop bucket and rakes in every dollar ever printed will be rewarded with more work.

The other major problem is you and me, because we see this stuff and reward its makers. There probably will be a fourth Transformers movie, even if I'm a little off on the title, because a lot of people paid money to see the first three. Pirates of the Caribbean nos. 2 and 3 exist because Johnny Depp's sly Keith Richards impression was one of the most fun parts of a fun movie. The original story requires no sequels in order to finish it off, but Disney whipped them up because it's hard to get people to pay for tickets to the same movie a couple years later unless you tweak the story and slap a number after it (Roman or otherwise). Pirates 4 exists because we were stupid enough to pay Disney for making 2 and 3.

So in sum, we have a group of people who behave badly by making movies that stink, and we go and reinforce their bad behavior by rewarding them for it. I think every mom who's tried to transform her toddler from the self-absorbed and self-centered menace of the preschool years to the marginally acceptable creature she can pawn off on the public school system understands why this is a bad idea.

And maybe I'm starting to as well. I never sailed On Stranger Tides, for example, nor did I visit The Dark of the Moon. I'm also going to skip out on watching Andy Serkis take another step in cementing his career as the most-watched actor you'd never recognize.  I'm just one guy, after all, but we have to start with baby steps.