"Ender's Game" movie faces a boycott

For anyone working on the film, stagehand, technician, engineer, whathave you, those people are already paid. They collect a salary throughout the years they're working on the film. They don't go unpaid until the movie releases, and hope for the best.

So for all of those men and women "in the trenches", they're a sunk cost, and won't feel the financial effects of how well the movie does or not. This is why some production houses end up posting losses on films. Even in those industries, the effects on those people are negligible. Movies are a journeyman industry, and quality work on a film is independent of viewer's end perceptions of it. By the time the movie is ready for release, those professionals have already moved on to other projects.

In fact, those who will feel the effects most keenly are not those at the bottom, who are already paid, but those at the top who's income is coming from the sales now that the film is completed. For OSC, who is most assuredly receiving royalties, this could be in the form of a much reduced paycheck. For the backers of this project, it could be a much smaller profit margin than anticipated, or even a loss.

For artists, one could go with the 'Wagnerian razor', i.e. does the artist make money by your individual contribution? Which would be the case if Card gets a box office share. Although even that is morally questionable, as you're part of the support and thus fund future projects, enriching the author that way.

I sadly file all that under "things that would make me a better human", like regular exercise or visiting the dentist twice a year. Although this one wouldn't be hard, as never was a big fan of Ender's Game, being a bit too old for the Mary Sue factor and not liking the morals of the book. I still play Monkey Island every few years, though...

Well known ones have enough negotiating power to demand a cut of the gross receipts and merchandising.

--

Edit: A little more on the Winston Groom aside from Wikipedia:

Winston Groom's price for the screenplay rights to his novel Forrest Gump included a share of the profits; however, due to Hollywood accounting, the film's commercial success was converted into a net loss, and Groom received nothing. That being so, he has refused to sell the screenplay rights to the novel's sequel, stating that he "cannot in good conscience allow money to be wasted on a failure".

Then I thought about it.

Ignore anything else the author has done: in this particular story, he poses a conflict between survival and ethical behavior, and illustrates it repeatedly... by having characters choose survival over ethics. He makes them heroes for it.

Well. That's a brave stance. Except... that every time a character is given that decision, it is also clear, whether or not the author intended it, that there was a third path that could have solved the survival problem ethically. Maybe multiple paths.

It's not clear to me that Card actually thought about that, though, which reduces the story to what it actually is: a tale of organized child abuse, hero worship and genocide, with a "hero" who doesn't understand what he's doing but gets a magical redemption that he does nothing to deserve.

(Although the last clause is probably intentional.)

Almost every undertaking is carried out by a large group of people. Most of them are innocent. All of them are probably nice. But bad things are often done by nice people -- sometimes because they don't realize that they're bad. Sometimes because they don't care enough. There are no bond-villains in real life. People who do evil don't think that that's what they're doing.

A possibly controversial example relevant to this forum is Google. I'm personally convinced that Google is one of the most sinister and "evil" (to use their own parlance) corporations that has ever existed, and I can support that claim (though I won't be doing that now). Yet, I know that not only are most Google employees really nice and innocent, even their top management has the best of intentions. Still, Google is evil.

Once you understand that good intentions often lead to evil actions, you get a different understanding of political action. Precisely because many people have participated in the making of this film, it is important to boycott it (if you agree with the boycotter's arguments). Otherwise, people will always have the defense of "but I'm just an actor", or "I didn't know". Everything we do is a political statement, and ignoring that fact is a political statement in itself, which says "I don't care about the message my work sends, I only care about my career".

Maybe if you boycott the film, those innocent actors will learn that next time they should make it their business to learn who they're working for.