Herr Doktor,
How did this film get made? Why did the suits green light it?
For the same idiotic reasons that all bad dumb sequels always get made.
1. The first one was a hit.
2. The suits still now, as much as ever, smell big money to be made and like usual, wouldn't know a good screenplay from a bad one if it bit them. Just rush it through and count all the theater tickets before they've been sold.
3. You can bet that someone smelled something rotten before filming began and would have liked to spend more time in the development phase to fix it. Just a month or two more is all they would have needed. I have a suspicion that the problem was, the studio pre-sold it to the theater chains and said it would be delivered by a certain date. Rather than take a chance of losing all those screens that were waiting for this film to a competing studio, you guessed it, commerce before art won out again. I can hear the bean counters agree in a meeting behind closed doors now: "It ain't no Citizen Kane, but of course people will see it, it is a sequel to a hit."
4. It is a Horror movie, so they can easily dismiss it as nothing important. For some reason the studios never give Horror the respect and care in craftsmanship that it deserves, even though they count on Horror to keep the studio afloat as well as pay for the next ten movies in a more acceptable genre to be made.
It seems to me that I can even recall they barely made their deadline to opening day and they were working around the clock to get opticals completed up to the 11th hour. The same reason that the first Star Trek film was such a turd. I think both films were shuffled from person to person in development for years. The suits get tired of paying out money to development and seeing nothing come back, so impose an opening date as their ultimatum.
How did this film get made? Why did the suits green light it?
For the same idiotic reasons that all bad dumb sequels always get made.
1. The first one was a hit.
2. The suits still now, as much as ever, smell big money to be made and like usual, wouldn't know a good screenplay from a bad one if it bit them. Just rush it through and count all the theater tickets before they've been sold.
3. You can bet that someone smelled something rotten before filming began and would have liked to spend more time in the development phase to fix it. Just a month or two more is all they would have needed. I have a suspicion that the problem was, the studio pre-sold it to the theater chains and said it would be delivered by a certain date. Rather than take a chance of losing all those screens that were waiting for this film to a competing studio, you guessed it, commerce before art won out again. I can hear the bean counters agree in a meeting behind closed doors now: "It ain't no Citizen Kane, but of course people will see it, it is a sequel to a hit."
4. It is a Horror movie, so they can easily dismiss it as nothing important. For some reason the studios never give Horror the respect and care in craftsmanship that it deserves, even though they count on Horror to keep the studio afloat as well as pay for the next ten movies in a more acceptable genre to be made.
It seems to me that I can even recall they barely made their deadline to opening day and they were working around the clock to get opticals completed up to the 11th hour. The same reason that the first Star Trek film was such a turd. I think both films were shuffled from person to person in development for years. The suits get tired of paying out money to development and seeing nothing come back, so impose an opening date as their ultimatum.
