Ultimately casting is an ineffable creative skill. Execs find it increasingly harder to trust in the simple skill of artists as the piles of money get bigger. H

Ultimately casting is an ineffable creative skill. Execs find it increasingly harder to trust in the simple skill of artists as the piles of money get bigger. Hence they invest more and more money into 'safe' and more measurable areas like name-recognition, special effects, and marketing. Eventually it ends in disaster though, hundreds of millions of dollars can only go so far to save bad story-telling, and the effort to create a 'guaranteed' blockbuster is revealed as simply putting all your eggs in one basket. There's an excellent memo by Jeffrey Katzenberg about the phenomenon in disney: https://sriramk.com/memos/katzenberg.pdf https://sriramk.com/memos/katzenberg.pdf I think the effect extends beyond artistic domains as well: how many times have we seen large organizations get burned by 'safely' spending billions of dollars on contractors and getting bad software anyway when they might have simply done their best to hire smart people and then pray for a fraction of the cost.