To be honest, Lotus, I don't think Steven gives a damn any more, or else he'd pay more attention to what he's doing. I think it's rather sad, really. I don't think he knows how many people want to see him make a really good film, with a good script and a good director. He's churning these movies out, probably just for the money, and he's disappointing a lot of people along the way.
On the other hand, I somehow don't think he's got much of a choice. He has to make movies, or go broke. And, as I said before, the good directors and the good scripts just aren't coming his way. He has to take what he can get, and what he's getting isn't good enough, for him or for us. He doesn't seem to have anyone in his camp to help him get better opportunities, either.
You should check out a website called
www.scriptsales.com. It lists all the scripts that have been sold (though not necessarily in production just yet). You'll see a couple of recently released films there, but read the synopses of the others. At first, I thought this site was a joke site because I couldn't BELIEVE how bad some of the stories were. But the site is for real, and the scripts are for real, and they really have been sold. And 98% of them were so bad, they made me choke.
Really good scripts are so rare as to be practically an endangered species these days. Do you think a studio is going to risk a good script on an actor they consider these days not even as a has-been, but as a never-has-been? On someone they are fairly certain will keep movie goers
away with wild enthusiasm? It would have to be a pretty damned good script, and they certainly wouldn't offer it to our Steven, even if he went on bended knee and promised to behave himself. They'd give it to someone they figure would be a guaranteed audience draw, like Jackie Chan or Jet Li or Wesley Snipes or whoever else is out there doing action pics. Steven's had so much bad press, he'd be poison at the box office, insofar as studio management is concerned.
Maybe over the next few films we'll see an improvement. We can only hope.
-TD, optimist extraordinaire