LOS ANGELES—The head of a major film studio was fired after her bosses found out that she had given the go-ahead to start production on a sequel to a prequel. The gaffe became apparent when the sequel’s casting agent, who had worked on the prequel, thought the lines sounded really familiar. Industry insiders said that they weren’t surprised a sequel to a prequel—which would essentially be a remake of the original movie—had been approved, as hardly anyone reads the entire script anymore, instead preferring to skim the first and last 10 pages. (With budgets always a concern, some in the industry have even speculated that way of reading scripts may soon dramatically change the final product that audiences see, shortening the typical two-hour engagement with a beginning, middle, and end into a twenty-minute quickie with just a beginning and end.) One insider said he was most shocked that the studio head didn’t try to save her job with clever semantics, pitching it to her bosses as a “prequel to a sequel,” as prequels have been hot the past several years. And, he noted, the newest creative and marketing trend in Hollywood is “a remake with the entire original cast.”
