14 DAY TRIAL // In an industry where honesty is never considered the smartest approach to anything, Universal Chief Ron Meyer stands out for calling a spade a spade, even if that means putting the movie studio in a bad light. During a recent press conference, Meyer owned up to past mistakes.
Meyer, who co-founded the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) in 1975 and has been president of Universal since 1995, was at the Savannah Film Festival the other day, where he talked the studio's hit and misses of recent years, Movieline informs.
Universal is also the studio behind “A Beautiful Mind,” a film that was both a critical and a commercial success but, as Meyer puts it, these films are very rare.
Every movie studio would want to come out with projects that fare well with critics and, at the same time, that make a lot of money, but in most cases, that's just wishful thinking.
As Meyer says, their primary concern is to make money and only afterwards they can wonder if they came up with something they should be proud of, or lower their head in shame.
Only “A Beautiful Mind” would apply to the former. Films like “Cowboys and Aliens,” “Wolfman” and “The Land of the Lost” are the exact opposite of that.
“We make a lot of [awful] movies… Every one of them breaks my heart… We set out to make good ones. One of the worst movies we ever made was Wolfman,” Meyer said.
“Cowboys & Aliens wasn’t good enough. Forget all the smart people involved in it, it wasn’t good enough. All those little creatures bouncing around were crappy. I think it was a mediocre movie, and we all did a mediocre job with it,” he added.
“Land of the Lost was just crap… I mean, there was no excuse for it. The best intentions all went wrong,” Meyer further explains.
“Scott Pilgrim” was actually a movie that came out just as they wanted it to, but that failed to attract the audience, for one reason or another. In this particular case, Meyer's regret is twofold.
“Cowboys & Aliens didn’t deserve better. Land of the Lost didn’t deserve better. Scott Pilgrim did deserve better, but it just didn’t capture enough of the imaginations of people, and it was one of those things where it didn’t cost a lot so it wasn’t a big loss,” the Universal boss said.
“Cowboys & Aliens was a big loss, and Land of the Lost was a huge loss. We misfired. We were wrong. We did it badly, and I think we’re all guilty of it,” he added.
However, he tries to make no mistake for “Wolfman,” of which he says it was bad from start to finish, including leading man Benicio del Toro, who “stunk.”