Max Bomba. Who the hell thought to green light a Max Steel movie in 2016.
Estimates for when it's been out for less than one day at that time, so I'm not sure that indicates anything. That said, it is writing by Christopher Yost, whose current hold to GAF-fame is being the top credited writer on Thorrer and Thorred (so Thor 2 and 3), and I've seen his writing in the fifth season of the TMNT 2003 series as well, and he is one of those fantasy writers where I don't know how he has a job that requires competence.
Example:
"there is a storm coming"
* freeza cringes as there is a long awkward silence on the show *
another pure cliché line
* cringe harder *
And setting up characters that are clearly meant to die, and then they all do, while having done nothing. And then later they're all back (for some reason), splinter's dream worry turned out to be nothing (a thread that played the entire fucking season! Big whoop, it's fucking nothing), magical powers are all reset at the end, and that's pretty much that.
And how do I know it. was. hiiiiiim. that wrote that? Because Thor 2 pulled the exact same shtick, just with a hint of better writing to hide it, presumably all the other credited ... ehm, people.
Not that I really care or anything. But writing habits and thereby quality are really predictable, even if the ability increases with practice. So if newbie stuff like that makes into a production, I'm not going to call you a decent writer. More importantly, the previous four seasons had great continuity and great writing in more than one place, so it's not like the framework wasn't there. Different showrunner at that time though, and obviously I don't know if the transfer was a mess. The following season, Flash Forward, was decent enough again, in my opinion, so I'm going to say it was really a writing issue.
Weird to bring up in a BO thread, I know. But good writing brings greater interest from people who can (also) immediately tell how well something is written, and those tend to be critics and influencers. So a movie bombing because it's poorly written is always a 'no surprise' for me. That said, there is also no clear correlation between good writing and deserved success. As far as I've seen, bad writing can make your movie fail, but good writing cannot make it succeed in extreme degrees either. But that might be a budget versus expected ROI thing.
I was looking at Scott Rudin's imdb page and it seems that he picks 'difficult' (drama) movies to produce, makes sure they're well written and / or made, but always at the lower end of the budget scale, like 30-60 million. It's weird to call that 'the lower end', but that's what that is now. Point here is that at that budget, those movies still return enough money to make them worth making. Go higher than that and you're basically in with the summer turds, because you have to make such ridiculous amounts back there is no other way to get that money.
