As sad as I am that the Lovecraft project got canceled, I have to hand it to Mr. Del Toro for refusing to budge on his vision. Far too many projects don't come out the way their directors intended them to because the studio wants to lower the rating or market to their perceived demographic (A reason why I am deathly afraid of the long-rumored God of War movie- that movie would ONLY work if it was rated R, but I know the studio in question will go "Oh, video game movie! Let's get in the teenagers and neuter it to a wide-spanning PG-13!). Mr. Del Toro clearly has a clear goal and idea set for his Lovecraftian dream, and I'm willing to trust that his idea is a proper and good one. I hope the project gets made some day!
As for the topic at hand, the main point of the video was not really a discourse on whether Scott Pilgrim was good or the Expendables was bad. (For me personally, I absolutely loved Scott Pilgrim and saw it twice in theaters, but I had zero interest in The Expendables) The idea that Bob was trying to put out there was that box office numbers have bigger consequences for the film industry as a whole than simply how much profit the makers in question get. The Scott Pilgrim example is one that he simply likes to use a lot since he likes Scott Pilgrim so much, but one could observe this effect in a number of other original, low-grossing films across the industry, and the effect reproduces itself in the worlds of video games, literature, and other such mediums. I think that most of us can agree that the loss of a daring project like the Lovecraft one is sad for both those involved and the movie going public as a whole. It's sad to see how much Universal got burned on all of its ventures into uncharted waters but only made profit with a cookie-cutter fourth car-racing movie. The moral of the story is, in order to get the original and daring stuff out there, audiences have to take chances and try new things. Got some extra money? Go see something new and fresh. Sure, you might not like it 100% of the time, but you're encouraging studios to take chances and push new boundaries, and the film industry will be all the better for it. Sequels and the like have their place, but there's always room for new blood and new stories to tell. Sadly, people in general enjoy spending their money much more on safer things that they know, so this attitude probably won't ever spread on a truly major scale, but every little bit helps. And who knows- sometimes we get stories of brave, original projects becoming box office smashes, like Inception and Black Swan.
