4 Things Movies Get Wrong About Jobs (Office Space, Batman Begins)

Harley would love to make movies about businesses because that's where all the peasants and their audience work but writers and directors aren't exactly corporate experts and often don't even know what an average office job is like that's why they've come up with these weird misunderstandings of how companies work the myth countless plot points have turned on the 51% rule where if you own 51% of a company's stock you are the supreme ruler of the company and can do anything you want the villain and mr. deeds have the power to sell the company because he controlled 51% of the shares even though the owners of the other 49% were unanimously against it tons of other movies ranging from the secret of my success to Richie Rich have been based off of pivotal 51-percent moments where the villain could only stare dumbfounded as the hero was discovered to have 51% ownership despite paying millions of dollars for the other 49% of shares the other stockholders apparently have zero say in any business decisions and probably would have to bark like a dog if the 51% king ordered them to the problem the truth is that most corporations require a two-thirds majority vote and are actually legally bound by some state laws to do so before big decisions like whether to sell the company which makes sense is it really a good idea to give your company a self-destruct button that can be activated when almost half the shareholders don't want that at all even if the company doesn't require a 2/3 vote for a decision as big as basically killing itself there are laws to protect minority shareholders from oppression that's the legal term which kick in during a number of different circumstances like if the majority owner is doing something that makes no business sense for the corporation and only benefits himself if the majority tramples these rights minority owners have the right to sue their pants off a legitimate case can be made that the owners of the 51% in these movies both villains and heroes make some decisions an outsider could consider questionable Richie Rich spontaneously appoints a team of street urchins as his R&D team with minority owners could use to at least start a lawsuit and cause some serious headaches for the supreme ruler sure maybe the most dramatic choice for mr. deeds climax was for the girlfriends who appear out of nowhere and discover a secret heir but it could equally have ended with a bad guy going down in a storm of lawsuits from what appear to be a couple hundred people I mean neither ending is ideal it's not a great movie the myth there's no boardroom scene Hollywood loves more than a dramatic unexpected firing in Batman Begins a corrupt executive fires Lucius Fox with the quip didn't you get the memo aligned which Fox himself cleverly uses to counter fire the corrupt executive at the end didn't you get the memo and there's plenty of surprise firings with a twist like this one in Entourage where the fire uses some kind of clever gimmick or catchphrase your fire we mentioned mr. deeds above 51% rule but the climax of that movie also involves firing almost the entire board and of course look no further than Robocop for one of the most extreme firing scenes in movie history the problem both the spontaneous firing scene and 51% rule are based on the notion that the boss at a company can do whatever he or she wants it was CEO fired someone so definitively in a real boardroom he probably ended up it's fixating on all the red tape he'd be tangled in HR departments have extensive bureaucratic guidelines for how to fire someone and are so paranoid about building a paper trail of documentation that the process for firing someone usually takes weeks they're justified in their paranoia since there are a number of laws that allow at-will employees to fight wrongful termination for various reasons most employees especially at the top actually have detailed contracts to protect themselves in case of a firing that's why HP CEO Mark Hurd got about 40 million dollars as a reward after being fired for sexual impropriety and fudging expense reports because it was in his contract Mercedes booted exact earn sleep for billing his home improvements and vacations to the company's account but couldn't even get him out of the company because of the paperwork and legal nightmare that firing an executive usually involves the payoffs are called golden parachutes because you now have enough money to equip your fleet of gold and Lear Jets with the appropriate safety equipment if they dumped him they might have a lawsuit on their hands and what's at stake if the company loses well when Renault fired three execs accused of corporate spying the company's CEO and six other people involved with firing them lost their jobs for improperly firing the first three so while Morgan Freeman's comeback was certainly snappy actual executives would gladly go through the tedium of filling out HR forms and letting the bureaucracy slowly grind out the termination process instead of seizing the opportunity for a clever spontaneous firing despite what their name would have you believe firings are best served cold the minute not only does how I would have a baffling idea of how most people work they also seem to have a disproportionate idea of what most workers wear there's plenty of high-ranking characters wearing suits Wall Street's Gordon Gekko American psychos Patrick Bateman Bruce Wayne whatever Richard Gere's character was named and pretty woman the list goes on meanwhile blue-collar workers wear uniforms even if they manage the plant office peons get to wear a tie just like the boss but they must have their forearms exposed for at least part of the workday for some reason everyone who looks for a company has to wear something restrictive if anyone goes to work in shorts or jeans they're a surfer an artist and off duty or undercover cop or a stunted manchild hacker the problem in real life 55% of workers report that their workplace has no dress code and tech companies in particular commonly have workers of all ages wandering in and around 10:00 or 11:00 a.m. wearing shorts and sandals not little quirky companies but giants like Cisco Google and Microsoft companies have even started hopping on board a trend where they encourage employees to wear shorts in order to save money on office air conditioning in this economic crunch yet you would probably be hard-pressed to name a movie where well-adjusted nine-to-five worker and father of two shows up to the office in a t-shirt so this watch any movie where a character's company duties are in conflict with something else family finding love being a good person and you'll almost always find their source of stress is a big presentation or an important account maybe they need to develop a campaign for Nike what women want or make a big presentation on a merger plan RV or land an important client Dinner for Schmucks the reason Jim Carrey character and liar liar' failed to spend enough time with his kid is because he's always got an important case to get to an important client to coddle Sarah Jessica Parker's greatest challenge and finding time for a family and I don't know how she does it is having to - about pitching an important deal about retirement funds that was a movie the problem how many of you out there have a job that constantly revolves around big presentations and landing important accounts don't most of us have jobs where we have to process X number of Records a day or six cars or process claims or ring up customers or answer calls jobs where we don't have one really big thing to do but just a set of duties we carry out every day Hollywood can't imagine those kinds of jobs being stressful enough to cause a dramatic career family crisis but they easily can be is the job sharing the main character away from his family maybe his company just laid off a bunch of claims adjustors and as one of the few remaining he has doubled the work to do with not as much hours if he's an accountant maybe it's tax season the average overworked person who needs to rethink her priorities isn't someone who's moving from exciting presentation to exciting presentation she's just a person who's got too few hours even if they need a plot point where the character has to get something done by a specific date we all have those they're called deadlines the end of a project or a quarter or just some arbitrary deadline your boss sets which works great for a plot where the workplace is supposed to be oppressive and unfair so why is it that Hollywood thinks clients and presentations are what the face of overworking looks like well because that's what it's like in Hollywood work there is always about a big project a film or a big presentation a pitch or a big client for agents that's what being busy and stressed out looks like to them their experiences pitching projects the studios gets translated into an advertising executive character trying to sell a campaign or slogan to clients after all those sleepless hours they've spent getting a movie ready to put on their silver screen they'll naturally invent a character frantically putting together a flashy PowerPoint projecting the boardroom they've managed to translate their experiences into the settings most be working without translating them into the way that most people actually work get a job Hollywood hey everybody thanks for watching that video if you want to subscribe to our channel click the Big C in the middle and to get notifications hit the notification Bell icon and they'll send notifications about that now let's wrap it joint

Channel: Cracked

Views: 752,084

Rating: 4.8531799 out of 5

Keywords: Batman Begins, Liar Liar, Office Space, Richie Rich, Bowfinger, Entourage, Mr. Deeds, jobs, movie jobs, movies, 4 things, 4 things movies, richie rich full movie, batman, office, space, cracked, cracked.com, sketch, comedy, funny, spoof, humor, satire, parody, hilarious, sketch comedy

Id: d468J2i54gk

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 06 2017