You're fired!

Here's a given if you're a movie executive, and as the past year has shown us, it extends to producers. Not just any producer either – the biggest.

The day will come when you'll be history.

I read an article years ago when somebody asked a bunch of studio executives what the new generation could expect from the business. There was a lot of the usual, 'filmmaker relationships', 'think in terms of story', 'integrity', blah blah blah. One responder said something short, sharp and shocking. The exact words were this; 'you're going to get fired'.

Of course, he was talking in generalities. What he meant was that a constant string of hits in Hollywood is like a writer that gets respect, an actress over 50 who still gets roles and rain in Los Angeles. They just don't happen.

The day will come when a project you shepherded to the screen bombs and you'll have to do the Walk of Shame on Monday morning past everyone's office, all of them trying not to meet your eyes as you stare at the floor. Sometimes you can blame a former colleague who bought the project to life, a change in strategic direction that was over your head or a writer or director the star insisted upon.

But someone's head has to roll, and eventually, when you can't deny that what was on screen was your baby from beginning to end, it's going to be yours. Get used to it, this long-forgotten anonymous executive said, because it's inevitable (I could probably look up who it was, but by now he's probably been fired).

As 2013 proved, it's not just studio employees but private contractors, ie producers who'll all face the chopping block. And as the saying goes, you're only as hot as your last project, so despite pouring what must be several billion into Disney's coffers since 1995's Crimson Tide, it only took one flop for the Mouse House to cut ties with Jerry Bruckheimer.

Even after the twenty eleventy squillion dollar haul of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, rumblings about Bruckheimer and Disney parting ways started soon after the box office performance of The Lone Ranger*. A few short months later and it was announced he was moving back to a first look deal with Paramount, the studio where he and coke-addled late partner Don Simpson honed their rock and roll technique back in the early 80s.

So you see, none of us are safe – even the biggest producers in the world are going to get fired eventually.

 

* In the way these things usually work, damning early chatter about The Lone Ranger being a monumental flop caught on early. Yes, Disney suffered a stock price bath because of it, but the film took $260m worldwide on a $215m budget – far from the catastrophe it was made out to be.