Today in: Really? That guy?

Again, far be it from me to criticize the film industry and how it--huh? Yes, ok, I do do it all the time, but I don't like, know what I'm talking about. I'm just talking, you know? So when I say how come that guy is in charge of making the next Star Trek movie, know that it's coming from a place of uninformed, yet surprisingly strong, opinions.

Above: a spool of movie, uh, film and the clack thing
you clack when you say action. See? I know some things...

Stewardship largely entails eating cherry
tomatoes while a hobbit sings a haunting tune.

That said, how come that guy is in charge of Star Trek? Which guy? Simon Kinberg. He's evidently going to be the producer of the next Star Trek film, and is maybe also going to be the "'new steward of the franchise'" which is the wording used in the article I read about this, and which I take to mean: the person in charge of the general direction of the series. Begging the question: really? That guy? And to be clear, I don't know Simon Kinberg, I'm sure he's a nice guy, but I have seen some of his movies.

The bad X-Men movie is a tittle it
held for like, a couple of years at most.

Back in 2006 he wrote X-Men: The Last Stand, which at the time was widely regarded as "the bad one," but is now simply thought of as the first bad one. It was the point at which that series began the downward spiral from which it only occasionally, and briefly recovers. He went on to produce several more genre movies including a few X-Men movies including Deadpool and Logan which were great, and X-Men: Apolcalypse which was also a movie.

He also wrote and produced Dark Phoenix; essentially a remake of The Last Stand that was somehow even worse. Oh, and he directed it too, so, there's that. 

"Let's get, you know, whatsisname? They guy that fucked it up last time?"

-someone at 20th Century Fox, evidently

I guess if someone came in to buy 2.8
million copies of Anne Pachett's Tom Lake,
and I just kicked them out or said no?

Like I said, I don't know much about the movie business at all, but I do have access to the internet and can do searches for X-Men movies by box office and X-Men movies by critical score he's got like, less than a fifty percent hit rate. Like, if I did something at work that lost a hundred million dollars of money--admittedly difficult given that I work in a bookstore and not a film studio--I'd probably be fired or at the very least wouldn't be put in charge of an entire film franchise. So why--and again, nothing against Simon Kinberg as a person--but why would they give him the keys to another one?

I suppose, as we've discussed before, that movie making is a business and more about returns rather than quality, and surely somehow the decision to put Simon Kinberg in charge of the Star Trek films must math out in some way that makes it look like a good idea. I can't fathom how, but it has too, right?

Unless we live in a culture where certain people are allowed to make mistakes
while other, less privileged people's failures have permanent consequen--oh, right.