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If you watch a lot of movies, then you start to notice that many films feel a bit formulaic - and that's because they are.
Well, at least lots of the scripts are. Because screenwriters generally only have about two hours, give or take, to tell a story, everything on the page needs to be justified. They can't be like George R.R. Martin writing paragraphs about the types of stuffed quail and sweet potatoes on the table of a grand meal. No, there's a stringent, 12-point outline that's generally used to pace a screenplay.
What happens, as a result, is that movies begin to feel a lot like each other, and that's something that studios are convinced that they want. Because if a movie feels like other movies then they can compare that film to another movie's box office results - so why fix something that isn't broken? If it's going to make you money, why should you go and try something entirely different, especially when you and a bunch of investors have dumped millions of dollars into an idea?
But if these last couple of years in Hollywood proves anything it's that production studio formulas don't always pan out. The rated-R superhero film Deadpool ended up smashing box-office records. Get Out was directed on a shoestring budget for a major studio release and it ended up making box office history as well. Thor:Ragnarok threw the God of Thunder into a wise-cracking world of hilarity and it's now the best Marvel movie out there.
And all of these "unconventional" ideas ended up making tons of money (make a good movie that's marketed the right way and people watch it, who'da thunk???) while traditional Hollywood garbage ended up tanking. Take Transformers: The Last Knight for instance. Looks like people are tired of robot movies, no matter how dazzling the special effects. Or maybe it's because the scripts sound like they're written by a robot?
In what I'm convinced was an attempt to highlight how bad the scripts for many of the Transformers movies really are, Twitter user Keaton Patti said he had a bot go through 1,000 hours of the films so that it could learn to write its own. The script Patti's bot produced was...well...it was something.
I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of the Transformers movies and then asked it to write a Transformers movie of its own. Here is the first page. pic.twitter.com/Ma21ztfExA
That's right, the '96 Camry transforms into the '98 Camry, and if you don't think that's a big upgrade, then you're sorely mistaken. I love this movie.
If you thought it couldn't get any better, then you're wrong.
OK, something tells me that Patti didn't have a bot write this thing, because there's no way any robot could write this without realizing how funny it all is. And unless someone found a way to take the soul of dead comedians and infuse them with complex algorithms, there's no way robots know comedy. And this is all comic gold.
People, understandably, are in love with Patti's robo-script.
I had to cover my face with a pillow so I didn't wake my kid up 😅😅
