Time & Perspective Quote by David Zucker

Hollywood loves to pretend success is a meritocracy: make a good movie, watch the audience show up. David Zucker punctures that fantasy with the blunt arithmetic of distribution. "Ruthless People was a good movie" is less self-congratulation than a weary baseline, the kind filmmakers lay down before they explain how the game actually works. In his telling, quality isn't the variable; the release is.

The phrase "It didn't happen every time for every movie" carries the bruised pragmatism of a director who’s seen the limits of authorship. Zucker, coming out of a comedy era where studios could still mint breakout hits, is describing the point where craft collides with corporate logistics: dates, theater counts, ad buys, trailers, press commitments, the invisible machinery that decides whether a film arrives as an event or as background noise. When he says "They completely blew the opening", he’s speaking the industry’s most unforgiving dialect: opening weekend as destiny. You can hear the subtext: the film didn’t fail, the rollout failed it.

There’s also an implied power dynamic. "They" is doing a lot of work, separating the creative team from the marketing apparatus, and quietly indicting a system where the people who make the product have limited control over how it’s sold. For a director known for precision-timed comedy, the irony stings: the audience’s first chance to laugh depends on someone else’s timing.