Los Angeles: Director James Gunn, best known for his ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ films, has said that the movie industry is “dying due” to films being made before scripts are even completed.
Speaking to Rolling Stone, the ‘Superman’ director said that a lot of the bad movies being released are due to production dates being set before scripts are completely finished, as per The Hollywood Reporter.
“I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies. It’s not because of home screens getting so good,” Gunn said. “The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay.”
Other directors in the American film industry have also complained about time constraints imposed by production houses, forcing directors to hurry the shooting, and leaving the scripts unfinished, resulting in mediocre content which doesn’t satisfy either fans or the filmmakers, resulting only in losses.
Due to this, when Gunn took over as the CEO of the DCU, he said that shooting will commence only after the scripts have been completed and “finalised.” The director is well known for taking his time to make films, rarely reworking scripts and visuals, as he doesn’t shoot until he and the crew are satisfied with the work.
The ’Slither’ director even admitted that they “just killed a project” due to that very reason.
“Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go,” the Superman director said. “The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.”
Gunn added, “And we’ve been really lucky so far, because Supergirl’s script was so f****** good off the bat. And then Lanterns came in, and the script was so f****** good. Clayface, same thing. So, f***** good. So, we have these scripts that we’ve been really lucky with or wise in our choices or whatever the combination is.”
Not having a mandate from Warner Bros. to deliver a certain number of DC projects has also helped Gunn, who said that Disney’s growing focus on quantity over quality in the MCU is what has essentially “killed” Marvel films.
“We have to treat every project as if we’re lucky,” Gunn explained. “We don’t have the mandate (at DC Studios) to have a certain amount of movies and TV shows every year. So, we’re going to put out everything that we think is of the highest quality.
“We’re obviously going to do some good things and some not-so-good things, but hopefully on average everything will be as high-quality as possible. Nothing goes before there’s a screenplay that I personally am happy with.”