As the great screenwriter William Goldman once wrote in his book "Adventures in the Screen Trade," when it comes to generating successful films in Hollywood, "nobody knows anything." The astute observation Goldman was making is an evergreen one, which is that despite the film industry's constant quest to minimize risk and maximize profits, there exists no surefire formula for a movie's financial victory. Although we're going through a particularly bad moment in time when it comes to studios and other financiers assuming that any work adapted from intellectual property will be a hit, this mentality has plagued the movie business practically since it began. Due to this, the issue has cropped up during the production of literally every movie ever made, and most often in the dumbest of ways.

While there can be some understandable logic to executives and distributors being wary of films that seem too aggressively antagonistic or feel too undercooked,...