Charlie Kaufman Says Movies That Make Money Are “Garbage”

Yesterday I wrote about the 53 movies that have crossed the $1 billion mark in box-office history. I could only find a handful that were strong movies, the rest consisted of dumbed-down entertainment.

Writer-director Charlie Kaufman led a packed masterclass this morning at the Sarajevo Film Festival. The noted filmmaker is going to be receiving a career achievement award from the festival later tonight.

Kaufman didn’t mince words when tackling the current Hollywood studio system and the lack of art in today’s movies. In fact, he believes that any movie that makes a ton of money at the box-office is probably sh*t.

At this point, the only thing that makes money is garbage. It’s just fascinating. It makes a fortune, and that’s the bottom line. It’s very seductive to the studios but also to the people who engage and become the makers of that garbage, especially if they’re lauded for the garbage because they don’t have to look inward or think long about what they’re doing.

It doesn’t help that you now have film critics, and social media users, defending this garbage. Some are criticizing Kaufman’s comments as being direct shots at “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” but I think what he says goes beyond just those two movies.

Kaufman, who has written the likes of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Adaptation” and “Anomalisa”, urged the audience full of industry professionals to “make movies outside of the studio system as much as possible and think of ways to do that.”

Tackling the question of AI, which then led to the topic of the current writers strike, Kaufman, again, reiterated that if “garbage” keeps being written then there’s no reason for AI not to duplicate it.

Writers have been trained to eat and make the garbage too. As long as they are in that arena making that shit, then you might as well have AI do it.

Later in the talk, Kaufman criticized audiences whom he believes have “become careless consumers” of these “garbage” movies.

They don’t seem to see past the cynical sales pitch. Even though the sales pitch is presented in a way that suggests they are being fed something of value, they’re not. The diet is so corrupted and has been for so long. It’s like if you eat shit all your life, you want shit. If you eat processed food, you crave it. And you wouldn’t if you hadn’t been fed it all your life. That’s what the movie machine does and I find it really offensive. It makes me angry.

He’s right. Studios and producers see what sells tickets and they just go for it, not for the sake of art, but for the sake of money. There’s a reason why it’s called show BUSINESS. It doesn’t help that you also now have an entire new generation growing up not watching anything past 30 seconds on TikTok.