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Sony Spider-Verse discussion thread

Gaith said:
Not exactly, because the movie was slimmed down much more than he wanted. When I wrote about "clauses that ensure scripts aren't radically b̶u̶t̶c̶h̶e̶r̶ , er, revised," I meant for that to include final product edits that are significant enough to amount to de facto script revision.

(In that case, I side with the studio over the actor, but, that's neither here nor there.)

Maybe, but if actors had script approval, including control over edits that are so significant that they amount to script revision, you'd probably have fewer cases of actors being unhappy with the de facto script they ended up with. (I often wonder what the Sequel Trilogy might have ended up as had Mark Hamill insisted on script approval, including whether Disney would have agreed and hired him at all.)

That said, I disagree with your assertion; I think that on average, actors, being storytellers at heart, probably do have better "understanding of what makes a story work" than studio execs, who tend to come from less creative, business/managerial backgrounds. Also, recognizing good writing is not the same thing as being able to write well.
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Madame Web was a b movie with b movie expectations, that hired c-list actors. They don't get script approval. Script approval is for winners who can double the box office on name recognition alone.

The little Latina who had almost had no lines, is an international pop star, who should have bought all of south America to the table for Sony.
 
To defend Dakota at least a little, I would like to say that it is impossible to tell whether a film will be a success just by the script. Otherwise only box office-hit would be produced.
 
Skipper said:
To defend Dakota at least a little, I would like to say that it is impossible to tell whether a film will be a success just by the script. Otherwise only box office-hit would be produced.
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1. Her agent said it was an MCU movie, and later when pressed did not understand the difference between a Marvel Marvel movie and a Sony Marvel movie. They were fired.

2. She agreed to do the movie after reading a version of the script that was nothing like the final shooting script.
 
Skipper said:
To defend Dakota at least a little, I would like to say that it is impossible to tell whether a film will be a success just by the script. Otherwise only box office-hit would be produced.
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Exactly. A script is just a starting point, revised continuously throughout every stage of the production. And in the feature industry, where writers have zero power and scripts are seen as disposable, there's no guarantee that even a single line of the script will end up in the finished film.
 
Rich Watson said:
She did fire her agents & publicists after the release of the trailer. Beyond that it's up to you to decide how much of a coincidence it was or wasn't.
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I can absolutely believe that they convinced her to take part in a disaster that will go down in history and for this reason she fired them. I would like a reliable and valid source that they didn't know the difference between an MCU movie and a Sony Spider-Verse one.
 
Skipper said:
I can absolutely believe that they convinced her to take part in a disaster that will go down in history and for this reason she fired them. I would like a reliable and valid source that they didn't know the difference between an MCU movie and a Sony Spider-Verse one.
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The only thing we have is Johnson and Sweeney tagging Marvel Studios and not Sony on Instagram when their casting was announced. But that doesn't prove they weren't the ones to make the mistake rather than their management.
 
Rich Watson said:
The only thing we have is Johnson and Sweeney tagging Marvel Studios and not Sony on Instagram when their casting was announced. But that doesn't prove they weren't the ones to make the mistake rather than their management.
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Well it could easily have been the mistake of some intern. Where did all the narrative about her agents' ignorance come from?
 
Turtletrekker said:
As far as I can tell, the fans. It's a valid and logical assumption to make, but it's an assumption all the same.
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Logical perhaps, but valid? In logic, an argument is only valid if its premise is true, or if it gives a true result for any input. I don't think either of those applies here, since the premise itself is merely an assumption, as you say. If the assumption is untrue, the the conclusion is untrue and the argument is invalid.
 
Skipper said:
You can improve some lines in a scene, not the entire movie story. And in a CGI-heavy movie I suspect that space for improv is very limited.
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Yeah, especially with movies like this, most of the time if they improvise something, it's one or two lines in a few scenes, not enough to make a difference in the overall quality of the movies.
Christopher said:
Exactly. A script is just a starting point, revised continuously throughout every stage of the production. And in the feature industry, where writers have zero power and scripts are seen as disposable, there's no guarantee that even a single line of the script will end up in the finished film.
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I can't remember who it was or what movie, but I remember watching some behind the scenes footage/an interview somewhere, and an actor was talking about how the movie they were working on was constantly getting new and different script pages as they were going the though the production. Each time they got new pages they were a different color, and by the time the movie was done filming their script looked like a rainbow.
 
JD said:
I can't remember who it was or what movie, but I remember watching some behind the scenes footage/an interview somewhere, and an actor was talking about how the movie they were working on was constantly getting new and different script pages as they were going the though the production. Each time they got new pages they were a different color, and by the time the movie was done filming their script looked like a rainbow.
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That's entirely normal, and the page colors for different drafts are standardized, at least within a given production. All creation is a process of successive approximation; any work undergoes constant revision until it's finally released, and sometimes even after (which is easier in the age of digital media).

But there's a difference between the original creative team refining their own ideas as they go and a director or studio executive throwing out a writer's work and replacing it with a different writer's work, or fragments of a dozen different writers' work, as is not uncommon in the feature film industry. Revising a work in progress is natural and necessary; the issue is who has control of the process -- whether it's a writer who actually knows how to tell a story or a venture-capitalist executive who knows nothing except finance and business.
 
Christopher said:
Logical perhaps, but valid? In logic, an argument is only valid if its premise is true, or if it gives a true result for any input. I don't think either of those applies here, since the premise itself is merely an assumption, as you say. If the assumption is untrue, the the conclusion is untrue and the argument is invalid.
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Well, we do know from her own statements that the script she was presented at shooting was a very different script from the script she signed on to. We also know that those early scripts had direct connections to either the Tom Holland or Andrew Garfield Spider-Man franchises. I would call that solid evidence of her being misled about the nature of the movie. I don't know if that adds any validity to the assumption or just makes it more logical, but that's where I was coming from.

ETA-- It reminds me of Matthew Vaughn's story about the "Hallie Bailey script" for X-Men 3 that was created just to get her to sign on to the movie.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/deadli...halle-berry-fake-storm-script-1235575096/amp/
 
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Turtletrekker said:
Well, we do know from her own statements that the script she was presented at shooting was a very different script from the script she signed on to. We also know that those early scripts had direct connections to either the Tom Holland or Andrew Garfield Spider-Man franchises. I would call that solid evidence of her being misled about the nature of the movie.
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But does that follow, given what we've been saying about how common it is for scripts to be rewritten throughout production? It could be that the information she was given about the script was accurate at the time, but the script was drastically rewritten afterward. That's a frequent enough occurrence that there's no reason to assume deliberate deception was intended.
 
Christopher said:
But does that follow, given what we've been saying about how common it is for scripts to be rewritten throughout production? It could be that the information she was given about the script was accurate at the time, but the script was drastically rewritten afterward. That's a frequent enough occurrence that there's no reason to assume deliberate deception was intended.
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I will concede my misuse of the word "valid". As for there being "no reason" to assume deliberate deception, I refer you to the Matthew Vaughn story that I linked in that post but you didn't quote. How often are the "rewrites" themselves deliberate deceptions?
 
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