Nothing’s less fun than working on a marketing campaign for a movie that’s just… bad. Bad in a way that’s obvious and relentless. Bad in a way everyone is going to notice. Some bad movies are bad in a way people can love (Transformers), and others are universally understood as hatefully, wastefully bad.

Try working on one of those for a year.

The script is terrible. A comedy with no funny jokes, or a soul less confusing action script. You tell your team the first cut will look better than the script. Then new cuts come in and the improvements aren’t there. And you push ahead, hoping the effects will make the difference, or the reshoots, or the music. But every new cut just sucks as bad as the script. And you’re pushing out cuts of trailers and TVs, and the studio is getting scared, and overworking things, and pretty soon audiences can smell the fear oozing off the campaign. Then it’s released, and it’s a giant mega turd bomb.

In my experience, 90% of the time a major movie is a bomb , the problem is in the script. In the idea itself.

Hollywood has gotten its production processes down to a science. It’s very difficult to find a studio movie that isn’t beautifully shot, directed and acted. Special effects are consistently amazing. Take “The Emoji Movie”, for example. The voice acting, the art and look of the movie, was all, at least, competent. But the movie itself was soul-less, and pointless, and pretty much humorless. Its silicon valley product placements overshadowed any other organic purpose for its existence. And audiences quickly figured that out. Again, the problem was clear in the script. And everyone who read the script knew it, or should have.

Hollywood can deliver a beautiful, state of the art production based on almost any script. But of the major studios, only Disney (plus Marvel, Pixar) has an internal process that nails the script with consistent reliability. But in general, Hollywood doesn’t know how to deliver a great script with the kind of reliability and precision it can deliver a great performance, a great production, a great visual or sound design. Why is that?

Now that we are clearly in the era of streaming dominance, the studios and production co’s that drove the script development process are being eclipsed anyway, and generally the streamers have done a better job with script development, as they have hewed more closely to the TV model (in which writers are empowered) as opposed to the studio model (in which writers are fungible). And perhaps that is the answer right there. In the studio and theatrical production model, the deal mattered more than anything else, because the shareholders mattered more than the audiences. In the streaming model, that distinction is barely made. Because the audience has a much bigger overlap with the shareholders, for one thing. But mostly because they have to generate so much content to fill their pipelines, keeping their audiences are more important than any particular deal.