Corporate conformity is the true bad precedent
We need to talk about the scary bad precedent that has popped up on social media since the official announcement of Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
No, it’s not the existence of the project itself. AT&T and WarnerMedia made a business decision for new original content to debut on their brand new streaming service, HBO Max. They were convinced last November that there was a viable audience for it, met with Snyder since then to discuss potential development and are fully supporting it as a service seller to bring subscribers to their platform. Nothing more or less on that one in a business sense.
No, the true bad precedent is the one where bloggers, YouTubers, “journalists” and other verified accounts on Twitter are actively defending multi-billion dollar studios from being “bullied” by big bad largely working class fans who favor creative freedom over the bottom line in an accounting ledger.
Yes that’s right, the studios, who have collectively run Hollywood for a century with an iron fist, and have made countless decisions that more often than not infringe upon the inherent creativity of a director or writer’s work purely for the goal of financial gain, somehow need to be defended by IGN, Collider and anyone that genuinely dislikes Zack Snyder because they have been “viciously attacked” for the past two and a half years by toxic trolls that are now “forcing them” to cave in.
Let’s really dive into how insanely ridiculous all of that actually is.
First there’s the idea of a corporate entity being bullied by fans. Illogical. Corporations don’t respond to people, they respond to dollars and cents. Whatever decisions they make in the name of their business are intended to make their shareholders happy in the long run, whether it’s cutting a film’s runtime down to get more screens in a theater every day, or greenlighting a new version of a prior project to sell subscriptions to their streaming service. It’s all for the glory of the bottom line, not because it’s “the right thing to do,” even if it is actually the right thing to do in this case.
This leads into the idea of treating corporations like people who have feelings and need to be respected as such, as though hashtag campaigns and calls to the offices are somehow emotionally draining to them.
Corporations are not people. They employ people to do their bidding. Big difference.
The only person that is emotionally affected by the hashtag campaigns and the office calls is the employee being ordered to deal with all of it on the front lines of the corporate entity. That person or persons have a thankless job indeed and THEY don’t need to be dehumanized by a nasty customer engagement at all, but the executive smoking cigars in his office several flights up couldn’t care less. He’s busy trying to figure out which minority character arc to slice out of a rough cut and get it to two hours.
Look, we know that at the end of the day these movies are owned and operated by the studios. They have the legal rights and permission to do whatever they want to them, including changing everything at the last second with incredibly haphazard execution. That doesn’t mean we should blindly accept that from them, nor should we just “suck it up” when they make decisions that we don’t agree with. The whole point of “It’s all subjective” is to acknowledge that it’s okay to disagree with a choice that is made, not that any and every choice made should be accepted.
The problem is, that is exactly what the “bad precedent” people are arguing in favor of, the idea that corporations know what we like and want better than we do, and we should just listen and agree with them no matter what decisions they make. We should just accept Justice League as is from 2017 because otherwise we’re making things more difficult for the studio and the audience as a whole.
How exactly does that track? I’ve been watching director’s cuts and extended editions of movies for years and at no point did I ever think “that must have been so difficult for the studio to deal with, making a new cut that flies in the face of their original version.” No, usually it’s more along the lines of “they made me pay twice for this when this is the one they should have given me in the first place.”
The idea that a studio can do whatever it wants with a movie and we should just deal with it doesn’t make sense. Yes we do have the choice to no longer support it and never watch it again, but if you have a situation where the creatives feel that their story wasn’t told the way they envisioned and they get an opportunity to share that original vision in some form, that shouldn’t be squashed just because the currently released studio-sanctioned version exists.
This is especially true in cases where the changes to that version were made at the last minute, like with Justice League, Suicide Squad, Solo and even Rogue One. I LOVE Rogue One and it’s one of my favorite Star Wars movies, but if Gareth Edwards wanted so strongly for his original vision to be seen by audiences and he got enough support for it, I wouldn’t call it a “bad precedent” to give him that shot just because I liked what Disney ultimately did to it.
Trusting multi-billion dollar studios to always be “right” is a bad idea, for too many reasons. We know all the reasons a movie can get cut down for time that have nothing to do with the story itself, and while we don’t expect three and four-hour epics to dominate the landscape because that’s not realistic, there still has to be a balance between the art and the business with these things and it’s when that balance is achieved that generally speaking you get the best results.
For situations where you don’t get the best results, sometimes you get the chance for a do-over, which not everyone in the audience needs, but there might be plenty that welcome the opportunity. If you like Justice League from 2017, you’re welcome to buy and watch it to your heart’s content. The existence of Zack Snyder’s Justice League doesn’t change that, nor will it ever. That’s arguably the most maddening thing about the “bad precedent” people. This decision doesn’t change their lives in the slightest. They don’t have to watch the new project, pay attention to it or even acknowledge its existence. In fact, it’s probably easier for all of us if they don’t because then we don’t have to hear them tell everyone that corporations are good and people are bad. They already have what they want. Let others enjoy the opportunity to have what they really want.
The only bad precedent that could be set here is trusting studios and corporations implicitly when it comes to balancing art and business. There are plenty of times where they subjectively get it right, but for all the times they don’t, it’s frightening to think there are actually people who believe a creator’s freedom to tell their story as intended means nothing, and that the audience who strongly wish to see it mean equally nothing as well. You wonder how these people would react if they were on the other side of the equation, and it wasn’t a director or writer that they irrationally loathe that was getting his way. How quickly would they trust the studios then?
Maybe too quickly. Then again, maybe not.