Movie Execs Admit They're Making Crap, Part The Third: Sony's Introspection
Today's LAT uses Zathura's weak opening and the difficulties in finally getting Fun With Dick and Jane into theaters to kick off another installment of Journalists Making Studio Executives Admit That Their Movies Are Shitty. This time, Sony's Amy Pascal is once again forced to answer for Stealth, XXX: State of the Union, and the rest of her Little Columbia Underachievers, and plays the "Hey, they sounded like good ideas at the time" card:
But well before "Zathura" debuted, Sony began to examine and evaluate its decision-making procedures. "Nobody wants to be where we are today," says Amy Pascal, head of the motion picture group for Sony Pictures Entertainment. "And we've got to figure out how it happened." [...]
Pascal says the studio's philosophy hasn't changed. "It's always in the end about good stories and telling them well," she says. When the current crop of underachievers were green-lighted 18 months ago, she says, they "all sounded like really good ideas."
At the risk of yanking at the stealth bomber albatross dangling from Pascal's neck, we think that there is no amount of pitch meeting booze that would make a $135 million movie about a grumpy airplane that decides to nuke the world after getting struck by lightning sound like a really good idea.