We all know Hollywood makes some crappy movies. What we usually don’t hear is studio executives calling themselves out for producing them.
Enter Universal Studios’ Ron Meyer who at the recent Savannah Film Festival described the output of his studio for the past several years, at times, s****y.
We make a lot of s***ty movies,” he said. “Every one of them breaks my heart.”
“Cowboys & Aliens wasn’t good enough,” he says. Forget all the smart people involved in it, it wasn’t good enough. All those little creatures bouncing around were crappy. I think it was a mediocre movie, and we all did a mediocre job with it … I have to take first responsibility because I’m part of it, but we all did a mediocre job and we paid the price for it. It happens. They’re talented people. Certainly you couldn’t have more talented people involved in Cowboys & Aliens, but it took, you know, ten smart and talented people to come up with a mediocre movie. It just happens.”
And he didn’t stop there. He also called out the studio for the Wolfman remake and Land of the Lost.
“One of the worst movies we ever made was Wolfman,” he says. “It’s one of those movies, the moment I saw it I thought, ‘What have we all done here?’ That movie was crappy. [The cast] was awful. The director was wrong. Benicio stunk. It all stunk.”
“Land of the Lost was just crap,” he says. I mean, there was no excuse for it. The best intentions all went wrong … Cowboys & Aliens didn’t deserve better. Land of the Lost didn’t deserve better. Scott Pilgrim did deserve better, but it just didn’t capture enough of the imaginations of people.”
Ok fine - no arguments there - but what are they going to do going forward ?