In his book COLLAPSE, author Jared Diamond says that in order to effect a change in a large company, one has to determine “which links in the supply chain are sensitive to public pressure.” For instance, when mad cow disease was a potential threat here in the states, the FDA issued some edicts to the meat industry, but the meat industry was slow to enact any changes. However, once McDonalds noticed a distinct decrease in customers and determined that the lack of business was due at least in part to fears over eating meat that could possibly have been infected with mad cow disease, they went to the meat industry and complained…which produced near instant results.

This got me thinking about the current state of science fiction in television and movies. The reason all these crappy SF movies keep getting made is because people keep going to the theater to see them. We allow the lure of special effects and pretty movie making lure us to the theater to see movies that usually don’t turn out to be any good, yet no matter what is said about the movie critically, our money is still going into the production company’s pockets; if enough of our money gets into their pockets, they translate that as a successful movie. So you end up with a director like Paul W. S. Anderson (or a screenwriter like Jeff Vintar, post-I, Robot), becoming, in the eyes of the production companies, authorities on science fiction, when in fact–to quote From Dusk til Dawn–they “don’t know rat shit from Rice Krispies.”

Unfortunately, the way Hollywood works, the failure of any SFnal movie would be bad for all SF movies; while it would be nice to see the genre not be further disparaged by the likes of films (and I use the term loosely) such as Battlefield Earth, the failure of any SF movie would only make it more difficult to get *any* SF movie made, even one with a brilliant script.