Belton Ag said:
You alluded to the middle-aged dudes, but the primary audience for a NASA related movie about Neil Armstrong or the Apollo 11 mission is going to be mostly 30-75 year old American white men. I don't think Ryan Gosling and Chazelle rate really high for that audience to be honest, and the flag controversy didn't exactly help, even if it's not what sunk the movie.
From my understanding the movie was originally going to be directed by Clint Eastwood, I'm willing to bet he would have had demographic turn out.
Right. And again, I'm admitting that the base concept might have been flawed. I personally thought Chazelle did a fantastic job, and likely gave us something more unique than Eastwood ever would have, but Universal probably should have hired Eastwood regardless and maybe gone with another lead (though I don't know if that really mattered that much), and those opening weekend numbers likely would have seen a bump.
But the story would have been roughly the same.
Chazelle didn't approach Universal with this concept. Universal approached him. And only when Chazelle found out that they *didn't* want to make a typical biopic, and were *already* developing it as roughly the movie we eventually got, did Chazelle commit. They saw eye-to-eye and he executed their shared vision.
Which plays into my overall point - that this basic concept might have been doomed from the get-go. Yes, Eastwood 's iteration might have had a couple more flag-waving moments, and his name gotten a few more butts in the seats, but he would have been under "mandate" to adhere to basically the same story, structure, percentage of family life scenes, etc. In other words, not the movie "middle-aged dudes" or "30-75 year old American white men" or whatever you want to call them apparently wanted.
But again... that movie could never have been made by a studio in the first place. Not in this day and age. Studios no longer commit budgets like this to movies that don't span across more quadrants or demographics. Hence the female lead. Hence the family stuff. And all I'm saying is that if that stuff HAD to be in there for this movie to get made, all things considered, I don't see how THIS version could have been executed much better. The Neil-Armstrong-with-no-family version simply doesn't get made today. So the only other option was a mini-series, where everyone gets what they want, but Universal chose not to go down that road for whatever reasons. Maybe they should have.
