Once kings of Hollywood, directors are replaceable

Film has long been considered a director’s medium, with cinematic auteurs presiding over movie sets like gods. But as high-profile filmmakers are being replaced on big-budget projects with increasing regularity, some say film is fast becoming more of a board-of-directors’ medium, especially in the critical realm of the franchise.

This new reality was underscored last week when Colin Trevorrow was suddenly dropped from “Star Wars: Episode IX” because of creative differences; on Tuesday, Lucasfilm announced that J.J. Abrams, who directed “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” would take the helm.

There was a time when the replacement of someone like Trevorrow — handpicked by Steven Spielberg to direct 2015’s “Jurassic World,” a $1.67-billion-grossing hit — would have been earth-shattering news. But Lucasfilm currently has one of the highest divorce rates in the industry. In the past two years, co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were ejected from an upcoming film about Han Solo already deep into production; Tony Gilroy was reportedly brought in to assist with extensive reshoots on Gareth Edwards’ “Rogue One” and Josh Trank fell out of his planned “Star Wars” spinoff.

As Armando Iannucci wryly observed while introducing his dark comedy “The Death of Stalin” at the Toronto Film Festival, being a director on a “Star Wars” movie evokes the unnerving uncertainty that followed the Soviet dictator’s death: “You just don’t know from day to day what’s going to happen to you.”

And it isn’t just “Star Wars.” Over the past several years, an unprecedented number of filmmakers, including Edgar Wright, Patty Jenkins, Michelle MacLaren, Tim Miller, Ben Affleck, Seth Grahame-Smith, Rick Famuyiwa and Cary Fukunaga, have either walked away or been ousted from highly anticipated films at varying stages of development, most citing “creative differences.”

To be sure, directors have dropped out of — or been dropped from — projects for as long as there have been movies; films like “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz” saw their original helmers replaced along the way to cinematic glory. But never before have so many been replaced on such big projects in so short a time. And, not coincidentally, nearly all of those movies were centered on the ultimate power players: superheroes.

In an industry financially dependent on an ever-smaller handful of films, studio executives are less willing to take chances and more willing to make big changes if needed, even if the moves generate ugly headlines or expensive re-shoots. When hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake in ticket sales and ancillary businesses, no one is irreplaceable.

“When you are talking about a globally branded film, like a Marvel movie, executives are more like brand managers — they are very involved in the project,” said Chris Silbermann, managing partner at talent agency ICM Partners. “You are working for ‘the man’ — and I don’t mean that pejoratively. There are a lot of good things that come with that. You get the budget, the attention, the notoriety and the pay. But you are clearly working with someone else’s (intellectual property), character and universe. And there are different rules that go along with that.”

For a filmmaker, absorbing those rules can be a frustrating and sometimes humbling experience. “I learned that, no matter how compelling you are or no matter how great your idea is, these studios have huge responsibilities to a lot of people,” Jenkins told The Times recently of her experience dropping out of Marvel’s “Thor: The Dark World.” “It was heartbreaking because it was a movie I had always wanted to make.”