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You are assuming not only that the expectation is that it would fail, but that this expectations is excused by a particular reasoning. Neither end of that has to apply, especially if you get into internal political dynamics over competition for resources and future developments. Poison pill strategies and setting projects up to fail or flounder as a means to a separate end are banal workplace dynamics.
Setting up something you don't like to fail, and publicly so, is a classic way to delegitimize something you don't like. It places an onus and responsibility on the nominal lead advocates both for it to succeed and if/when it fails, whereas complaints that failure is the fault of insufficient support is a classically and generally dismissed claim of the loser of a bureacratic fight. Since executive meddling is an extremely normal and non-controversial practice at the executive level, the advocates trying to problematize execute handling are implicitly casting accusations at more than just the interested meddler, which in turn draws a bandwagon effect by others because if executive meddling is a censorable act, it means those other executives would be acknowledging grounds for their own censoring.
I’ll also point out that there aren’t a lot of alternatives right now with the reach and scale of Hollywood and as such it’s a lot like pro sports. Yes there are minor leagues, or maybe college sports but most often people only choose them when they don’t have easy access to the big leagues and almost no one would deliberately choose the small leagues when given the option to see major league teams.
In movies, a lot of this is based around intellectual property— there are very few space stories that you can do without tripping over something owned by a big studio somewhere. Most superhero types have something like them in either the Marvel or DC catalog. And on it goes. So you either go with small movie houses — either indies or Christian, or possibly foreign, made by people who didn’t quite make it, or you go see a blockbuster made by the usual suspects who will own all the rights to those kinds of films and shows until the end of time. If this iteration of Joker fails, who cares, we own the rights and in five or ten years we make a different Joker movie. Not like anyone else owns the right to make movies about evil clowns like this.
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