No matter how this scenario plays out, everybody loses.
Hollywood studios have been ramping up their production schedules, trying to get as many movies before the cameras as possible by the beginning of next year, before contracts with unions representing actors and directors expire. The Writers Guild contract expires next month, however, and those crafty scribes have figured out that many of these projects being rushed into production lack finalized scripts. So if they strike now, the studios are screwed.
Hard to have much rooting interest in a pissing contest between gazillionaires, but what is really made clear is how slipshod movie production is. Many, many movies, including megabudget tripe like Justice League Of America and Another Night (the much-unawaited sequel to A Night At The Museum) start filming before anybody's even bothered writing the damned things. I realize this occasionally works--studio execs love to hold up the example of Casablanca, which was written on the fly--but in general, this is like constructing a building without bothering with a blueprint.
Of course, what good is a blueprint if the architect is incomepetent? Could a sequel to A Night At The Museum filmed without a script conceivably be any worse than the original with a script? The screenplay for Justice League (Jessica Biel turned down a part in this because she didn't find it interesting enough. Let me rephrase that: This movie doesn't even sound good enough to interest Jessica Fucking Biel!) is reportedly "not ready," but can anybody who sat through, say, Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 or Transformers believe those scripts were worth filming?
Summing up: If the writers go on strike, we'll be deprived of awful Ben Stiller movies. If the strike is averted, more crap is on the way.
My head hurts.
