Nobody wants to see Speed Racer
by
I'm not home this evening so there won't be much coming out of here until Monday morning. It looks like the Wachowski brothers can't buy success these days -- Speed Racer, which looked visually impressive but wholly uninteresting, is going to crash and burn this weekend. I don't think this coming as a surprise to anybody. Michael Bay may be able to get away with all visual effects and no story, but he's some wild, inexplicable, freakish exception to the rule. What you've got here is punishment for leaning too heavily on old, lame material that died off for a reason -- nobody wanted to watch it. The only things that have found success have done more than just reshoot what was already done. Remakes suck. I'm sorry, but they just do. Bionic Woman sucked, Speed Racer apparently sucks Knight Rider will suck, and the fifty million ridiculous rehashings we'll have to put up with for the rest of our lives are going to suck, unless Hollywood execs stop making obviously stupid decisions about a medium they clearly do not understand.
None of these three properties should have been greenlit to begin with, and blaming it on a miss-or-hit flaky audience is obtuse. This is a system that regularly allows failures to drain resources, reward a lack of creativity, and generally waste our time without any significant consequence. And no, I'm not talking about firing studio heads here -- that's about a random and brainless idea as those that push these loser projects forward in the first place. Like any industry, this one refuses to take the blame for its problems. Nobody will spend the time to find systemic problems and fix them because to do so would be admitting failure in creating the system, hiring the people, creating these policies that result in failure in the first place.
Something absolutely has got to change even if it means throwing out the entire studio system as it exists today because this kind of failure rate with these skyrocketing budgets simply cannot be sustained forever.
May 15, 2008 5:04 PM | Reply