James Gunn recently expressed his candid views on what he believes to be the most significant issue currently afflicting the movie industry.
He shared his unfiltered thoughts in an interview with Rolling Stone.
During that conversation, he was quite forthright, admitting immediately, “I do believe that the reason why the movie industry is dying is not because of people not wanting to see movies.”
He further clarified that it’s “not because of home screens getting so good” either.
“The number-one reason is because people are making movies without a finished screenplay,” Gunn asserted.
He elaborated, “Everybody wanted to make the movie. It was greenlit, ready to go. The screenplay wasn’t ready. And I couldn’t do a movie where the screenplay’s not good.”
Gunn noted a period of good fortune, stating, “we’ve been really lucky so far, because ‘Supergirl’s’ script was so f****** good off the bat. And then ‘Lanterns’ came in, and the script was so f****** good. ‘Clayface,’ same thing. So f****** good. So we have these scripts that we’ve been really lucky with or wise in our choices or whatever the combination is.”
He attributed this success to Warner Bros. and the fact that “we don’t have the mandate [at DC] to have a certain amount of movies and TV shows every year. So we’re going to put out everything that we think is of the highest quality.”
He concluded his statement by emphasizing, “We’re obviously going to do some good things and some not-so-good things, but hopefully on average everything will be as high-quality as possible.” He added that, on average, “nothing goes before there’s a screenplay that I personally am happy with.”
