Alien 3

After recently watching Alien 3 again, I've been looking back into the nightmare that the film was to produce (partly inspired by filmonic). To recap, the studio apparently suddenly found themselves with a very successful franchise, one that could make or break the company. The pressure to produce a money-making third film was thus ramped up. They went through hiring and losing several directors and writers (Renny Harlin, William Gibson, Vincent Ward etc: the full details are here). Only then was David Fincher approached. Fincher had never directed a full length film before. He was subjected to budget cuts and time constraints, and I believe he left before the editing process began. What was released in cinemas (with trailers that suggested the events actually took place on earth) was a terrible mish-mash of ideas, belonging to all and none. Whilst its development process might be extreme, it's not hard to believe that this sort of thing happens a lot in Hollywood. It's the battle between creative ideas and making money that I talked about a while ago. In this case, the relationship destroyed the film entirely, even though I think it did actually make its money back. And this is why we see so many remakes and dramatisations of books. They're a safe bet for the studio, who can be reassured that no matter how wild the director, he has to stick to the source material. They have a guaranteed audience who've read the book, or seen the original film or TV series. Creativity doesn't make money.