Why are some filmmakers less affected by flops than others?

Maybe because Villeneuve had already brought in: $122m for Prisoners with a $46m budget, plus $10-20m physical media sales. $85m for Sicario with a $30m budget, plus $10-20m physical media sales. $203m for Arrival with a $47m budget, plus $20m+ physical media sales. Plus \- he probably has a reputation for making visually strong films while staying on budget, and working well with producers etc. \- any loss for BR 2049 was shared across Alcon, Sony, Warner Bros, so it wasn't one company taking a hit. \- and the business perception may be that the material was the cause of the poor performance, and not that the Director was unreliable in some way. And... Legendary were immediately in talks with Villeneuve for Dune when they acquired the rights in 2016, which was before BR 2049 came out.

Your premise is off base because Gore Verbinski's career *didn't* end after the Lone Ranger. He directed A Cure For Wellness in 2016, which also flopped, and he has a new movie out last month, Good Luck Have Fun Don't Die, which also flopped. So the idea that he was cut off after one flop is just wrong. He keeps getting work. Denis keeps getting work because even though BR2049 underperformed, it clearly pleased a lot of producers and moneymen in the Hollywood. His films before this were not IP-driven high concept stuff, they were more grounded thrillers and dramas, and BR 2049 showed that he can steward an IP project, elevate it artistically, and serve a more sophisticated adult audience. Thus the $200 million budget for Dune.

Wes Anderson has a billionaire backer so he can do whatever he wants

I didn’t realize BR 2049 was a flop at the box office. I will say it was an infinitely better product than Lone Ranger.

At the box office Good movies flop all the time and trash movies Crush it. Blade Runner 2049 was a movie that could have been trash - but it was good. Lone Ranger was a movie that could have been good, but it was trash. Guy just tried to make Pirates of the Prairies basically and make Jack sparrow an indian.

I'm no expert but I guess it's because The Lone Ranger was terrible and it flopped whereas Blade Runner 2049 was great and it flopped.

Prestige. I'm pretty sure none of Paul Thomas Anderson's films made a profit but they've always been acclaimed and won awards.

Blade runner 2049 might have been a big office failure, but it's a really good movie. The lone ranger was horrible. 

I think it would be too much to say Verbinski is difficult to work with, but the BTS of the Pirates movies gives the impression he’s fairly uncompromising. Now it did deliver 3 Pirates movies that people liked, but he was fighting with Disney execs every inch of the way. Once he delivered a flop, there’s really not many reasons to give him another blockbuster. I feel like studios would rather have a semi-competent “yes man” they can push around, over a very competent but uncompromising director.

People who make movies know good movies. Good movies are good movies. That they flop doesn’t make them a bad movie, it makes them commercial failures. Generally you’re looking for people who can do good work and ideally on commercially viable projects. It’s more on the studio as a whole to be commercially viable; people in the know attribute these things appropriately.

I suppose it depends on how man flops you deliver vs how much capital you've built up for the studios already. Also probably factoring in how fast you can deliver on a timetable, how in budget you can keep + general reputation with the studio you have.

BR 2049 was (is) a critical darling which has had longevity whereas The Lone Ranger was loudly mocked by just about everyone. I will say I think The Lone Ranger is overhated. It's actually quite funny and corny in a good way. It reminds me of an early 2000s B movie. I think they marketed the movie wrong. The Lone Ranger is a really old IP and the movie was marketed as too goofy for Lone Ranger fans, but not goofy enough for general audiences. There was also controversy over Johnny Depp playing a Native American. Which is too bad as he is pretty much playing Native American Jack Sparrow if he were less of a conman and more of a well-meaning but brain damaged Shaman, which is very entertaining. He steals the show.

A lot of people really enjoyed Blade Runner it seems like

Because some flops still make the director look valuable. If a movie bombs but gets great reviews, awards buzz, strong visuals, or proves the director can handle a huge production, studios still trust them. If the flop feels overpriced, messy, and avoidable, that trust drops fast.

Frankly, there is a lot that the general public doesn't know. Mainly, what are a filmmaker's relationship with casting directors, writers, producers, executives, studios, costume designers, agencies, agents, set designers, choreographers, stunt performers, special effects studios, VFX studios, set builders, film investors from private equity firms to financing companies to wealthy people, actors, etc.? You'll probably get more chances if you've made a lot of friends along the way. You'll have a lot of people rooting for you to fail if you're mean and/or hard to work with.

Blade Runner 2049 and The Lone Ranger are not remotely comparable. Blade Runner made money. The Lone Ranger is, adjusted for inflation, [possibly the second biggest box office bomb of all time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biggest_box-office_bombs). Gore Verbinski was also hired by the studio for his ability to make them shitloads of money with the Pirates movies. Nobody was out there funding his singular artistic vision or anything like that. Blade Runner was well regarded and won Oscars. This is not remotely the same thing.

With Denis the difference is that 2049 is actually a good movie while Lone Ranger most definitely is not.

If you take critical success into account, even a small amount, the Lone Ranger definitely flopped harder than Blade Runner 2049

You can still make money back with streaming. Also awards play a factor. Stufios like to show off the prestige of the bigger awards so if you bomb but can nail a best picture nom studios will give you a shot

I think it's a matter of 'what is in your skillset' and if you f*** up a movie that's in your limited range of skills as a director you're not going to get much more work. Richard Kelly is a prime example of that. He's not Stephen Soderbergh and he's not going to be very useful in the 'director for hire' market. He makes oddball science fiction movies and those have to be successes unto themselves if he's going to keep getting funded. If the only type of film he knows how to make is going to lose studios money then they aren't going to keep him going. A string of flops ends your career. Wes Anderson, however, has enough successes in his limited range to justify a few flops along the way. Meanwhile George Miller or Ridley Scott can have flops because they're otherwise technically proficient to make any type of film a producer needs made. Directors like them will never hurt for work. And then the other layer is 'are they an a****** and hard to work with?'. The final layer is 'how much of the production are you putting up yourself?'. Like Francis Ford Coppola's last couple of movies had a lot of self financing. If the risk is yours to take then you get a lot more grace.

There's more to a director being given work than just the financial aspect. What are they like to work with? Do they deliver the film on time? What's the final quality of the work? Did it earn any awards or even nominations? Of course a studio wants to hire someone who will make them a lot of money, but there's other kinds of investments beyond the financial that will hopefully earn them far more money in the long run.

You really comparing the Lone Ranger to BR2049? Like decision makers can only see numbers and don't actually watch movies? The Lone Ranger has got to be a sad lonely weird hill to die on.

You're comparing Bladerunner 2049 to The Lone Ranger?

Blade Runner 2049 was really f****** good though

Wait, Blade Runner 2049 _flopped?????_ I thought the world was united in agreement that that movie was a masterpiece. I f****** _love_ that movie. One of my favorite films ever tbh.

I think if everybody agrees that the movie is great, they are much more likely to give the filmmaker a pass. There are also a lot of different revenue streams on top of box office that make flops less floppy than they look nowadays.

Blade Runner 2049 was a great movie and is basically already considered a modern classic while no one remembers The Lone Ranger

Films often fail or succeed for reasons that have little to do with how good of a job director does. Maybe someone has a reputation for going over budget, breaking schedule, having personal conflicts with the crew and who knows what else, so if their films also stop making money, it becomes an easy decision to just stop working with them. Not saying that that is Verbinski, just that there's many possible factors.

I think the factors around the flop matter. Sometimes it’s hard to say exactly why a movie didn’t do well financially. If the process of making the movie was smooth and the director wasn’t directly to blame for the flop, then they get more slack.

Golf

TBH - and I am off-theme here - I was thinking in terms of how certain actors can have a string of duds and still be headliners. This after watching 10 minutes of ***Mercy***(2026) and turning it off. Simi Liu was right - "other" - performers would never get that many fails and still be offered leads. *I imagine something similar for filmmakers but probably centered on who-you-know or who-is-your-cousin.*

Depends on how good those flop films actually, the reasons for those movies flopping, and how much they want to spend on making movies after those flops.

One thing with Gore is that he is a director that seems to have more projects or not stuck in development hell between Bioshock and a few others that resulted in him having larger gaps between his films.

Ron Howard is totally immune. 

Some film makers are more connected than others

I guess having your flop movie receive a ton of awards nominations, and securing an Oscar and a couple of BAFTA's goes a long way.

Imagine you are a developer and hire a contractor to build a house. Would you want someone that fights you on design, comes back to you for more money, takes longer than you expected and possibly builds something different than you had in mind. Or someone that builds exactly what you say, on time, doesn't fight you and it actually costs less than you initially thought. Now also imagine that you have 15 different guys building 15 different houses and you know you can tell the 2nd guy what to do and you know it'll get done, but the first kind of person you have to constantly keep checking in on because you don't know how far they are straying from your vision. Kevin Feige said that Sam Raimi is the second type of guy. Michael Bay is also known to be like that.

It’s like any business based on relationships and politics. If you are well liked or have a strong backer who will invest in you then you will be forgiven for a miss. But if you are someone who is super talented but has personality issues if you miss once you will be done. It’s like this everywhere even in healthcare.

There are a lot of reasons that directors stop directing movies, sometimes the fact that they had a flop is just a coincidence. It's also true that the director isn't always the reason that a movie flops. There's a screenwriter and there are producers and there are actors and there is marketing and all kinds of things. Good directors can make shitty movies. That doesn't make them bad directors.

Good news, Zank Snyder has stop making more flop. Guy Ritchie, after the massive flop of King Arthur, still have a career, because he usually makes good movies. So they can take risk giving him another project.

Some directors that I grew up and I’ve enjoyed their previous works, I’ll definitely consider. But for the most part, unless you made a complete piece of shit previously (Brett Ratner and Josh Trank), without being able to blame the company, I’ll probably check it out.

An example I can bring up is M. Night Shymalan. There’s three reasons why, despite having a lot of critical and box office flops, he still has a career 1. People still remember him for his earlier works, more so than his newer stuff. 2. Most of his films are on the mid/lower budget side. 3. He is usually the main financier for the films themselves, which is less risky for the studios involved. 4. His name is big enough to bring in an audience. 5. Despite the flops, he has had more hits than flops in his overall career, especially considering the as mentioned fact that they usually have lower budgets.

If you strike gold in terms of box office returns once, you’ve got that as a track record and can suffer through a few less-well-performing films and still seem like a possibly good bet from a film financing perspective.

it actually comes down to studio relationship dynamics and how reliable you are with a massive budget behind the scenes. verbinski is a visionary but he has a reputation for being absolutely impossible to budget because he wants every single frame to be perfect and practical which costs a fortune. denis is the opposite because he manages to make movies that look like they cost double what they actually did and he hits his milestones without the drama.

I think the financiers knew there was a good chance BR2049 wouldn’t be a mega hit. It reviewed well but performed disappointingly, but not a bomb. He also had two success stories - Sicario 2015 and Arrival 2016 - both years prior to BR2049, which demonstrated consistency. When your films are that consistently praised actors will want to work with you, which can help get your projects funded. Meanwhile, Lone Ranger was expected to be a huge hit but failed and was ridiculed by critics and audiences. And he hadn’t made a great live action film since the first pirates movie almost a decade earlier. Then he followed up Lone Ranger with another disappointment with A Cure for Wellness. Two very different career trajectories.

Gor probably didn't get offered any movies he wanted to do, or no one wanted to finance a movie he wanted to do. Or maybe he wanted to take a break. I'd recommend googling it instead of coming to listnook for guesses.

I think it has a lot to do with what the director brings to the table. Some studios want a certain amount of awards and recognition, so they hire a visionary director even if their films are flops. Like if you want your back catelogue to have value 20 years later, you need a bunch of "greatest film of the year" films.

Personally, I think the key difference is that the Lone Ranger was a dreadful film and Blade Runner is a modern classic. Outside of established franchises, your best chance at making money in the film industry is by making good films, and if had to bet your money on one of these directors making a good original film in the future, you’d bet it on Villeneuve 10/10 times.

BR 2049 was sick tho

aueters are forgiven way easily compared to directors that can easily be controlled by the studios or have no directorial voice themselves.

Look at it this way, if you're a bus driver, you're always punctual, the bus always arrives on time and you never have an accident, you're going to get a job with another bus company, if the current company you work for goes bust.

Because they've slept with the right people or they know where the bodies are buried or through sheer dumb luck.