Bad Writers, or Impossible Writing Tasks?

Last year Arnold Schwarzenegger (you know, the slap-fighting promoter) blamed the problems of the Terminator film franchise on the later films having been "not well-written." A little while later (as I remarked at the time) the functionaries at Marvel blamed the weaker response to their more recent films on the writers.

As I also remarked at the time that the buck-passing was nothing short of staggering in its stupidity and shabbiness. At the time my emphasis was on the presumption that there are some clearly identifiable "better" and "worse" writers working in Hollywood, and megabuck Marvel, which had long ago gone far past the point at which the sheer resources and visibility of this most successful division of the most successful studio in Hollywood meant that it could get anybody, declined to hire the best it could get--an extremely stupid claim to make. This is all the more the case as executives hardly ever sit back and let the writers do their thing, instead interfering all the way up and down the line for the crassest of reasons to the point of routinely bastardizing scripts out of all recognition, as they are able to do because they, not the writers, call the shots.

However, there is another level of stupidity to these claims, which is that in their insane (and increasingly self-destructive) fixation on exploiting run-down franchises they ask writers the impossible. On the whole audiences do not seem to have loved Terminator 5--but, even before considering the extreme strictures of the studio system in which even those few writers allowed past the gate are required to work, can you picture anyone managing to create a fourth Terminator sequel that they would have loved? Of course not. The franchise was done, and it was time to admit that--but they would not, and neither would the (again, apropos of such characterization as they truly deserve) courtiers and claqueurs of the entertainment press whose idea of doing their jobs is respectfully transcribing the words of the idiots they deify as gods.