I frankly never had any interest in watching Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever, though I also had no real idea as to what it was about or anything like that… just that it acquired an almost immediate reputation as one of the worst films ever made. But I watched this the other day, this is a video which looks at just how and why it acquired that reputation… and I must say the backstory of how Ballistic was made and unmade by the studio to blame for it is compelling, almost certainly better than the film itself. Maybe not quite the catastrophe of the second Highlander film, but even considering everything that went wrong there, I don’t think the producers of that were actively scamming investors out of tens of millions of dollars like Franchise Pictures were doing…
I don’t think I’d ever heard of Franchise before, but it does turn out I’ve seen quite a few movies produced by them and at least heard of a few others; apparently studio head Elie Samaha’s modus operandi was picking up scripts that the major studios were dilatory about, that he then made cheaper than the majors because he refused to pay the people involved what they were normally worth (often on the grounds that, like John Travolta with Battlefield Earth, they were so desperate to just get their passion project made they’d do it for less than their usual fees, if not nothing at all), and which then got released to cinemas and generally bombed cos they were kind of shit. I still don’t have much desire to see Ballistic, but the story of what was happening behind the scenes is kind of amazing; the fact that Elie Samaha still has a job in an industry from which he should’ve been banned for life years ago is kind of appalling.
