"Sometimes we'll only get one script in a year that we want to make that we feel is good enough"
About this Quote
In an industry that looks like a content firehose, Jerry Bruckheimer is quietly describing scarcity. Not the artificial scarcity of marketing hype, but the real bottleneck of taste: the gap between what gets written, what gets sent, and what actually feels worth spending years of money, labor, and reputation on. Coming from a producer synonymous with scale and spectacle, the line lands with a useful irony. The guy often blamed for “more of the same” is arguing that the hardest part is finding something that clears an internal bar at all.
The intent is partly defensive, partly aspirational. It rebuts the casual assumption that producers simply greenlight whatever resembles the last hit. “Good enough” is doing heavy lifting: it signals craft (does the story work?), logistics (can this be made?), and marketplace calculus (will anyone show up?). Bruckheimer doesn’t separate art from commerce because his job is the collision point. The subtext is that producers are gatekeepers, not merely financiers; they curate risk. One script a year suggests not pickiness for its own sake, but triage amid a flood of competent, “fine” material that still won’t justify a nine-figure bet.
Context matters: modern film and TV development is famously noisy - endless drafts, attachments, IP, packages, notes. This quote is a window into why development feels slow and why studios lean on franchises. If you only truly love one script a year, you either protect that one like a rare mineral or you default to safer machinery. Bruckheimer is naming the paradox of blockbuster culture: abundance everywhere, conviction almost nowhere.
The intent is partly defensive, partly aspirational. It rebuts the casual assumption that producers simply greenlight whatever resembles the last hit. “Good enough” is doing heavy lifting: it signals craft (does the story work?), logistics (can this be made?), and marketplace calculus (will anyone show up?). Bruckheimer doesn’t separate art from commerce because his job is the collision point. The subtext is that producers are gatekeepers, not merely financiers; they curate risk. One script a year suggests not pickiness for its own sake, but triage amid a flood of competent, “fine” material that still won’t justify a nine-figure bet.
Context matters: modern film and TV development is famously noisy - endless drafts, attachments, IP, packages, notes. This quote is a window into why development feels slow and why studios lean on franchises. If you only truly love one script a year, you either protect that one like a rare mineral or you default to safer machinery. Bruckheimer is naming the paradox of blockbuster culture: abundance everywhere, conviction almost nowhere.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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