I really hope that the Brain Trust model becomes more common. According to Ed Catmull's book, there's a similar (but different) Story Trust at Disney, and I've got to believe that something like that is either already in place or is being developed by Marvel Pictures and the more recent prodcos like Bad Robot. The success of Marvel has everyone identifying the wrong cause of success, which is why we're hearing about every property becoming a shared universe, and I guarantee that the Marvel movie success comes from the inner workings, the demand of quality, well told (if repetitive) stories, strong characters, a unified vision... there's something going on beneath all of the movies that makes them all stronger. Everything integrating together is a nice result, but it's the process (let's call it the Marvel Trust) that creates that. And it'll probably happen more and more just because of how appealing it sounds. I read Tom Lennon/Robert Ben Garant's book about screenwriting and it made me really doubt my career path, what everyone was doing sounded just horrible. But then I read Creativity Inc and thought "I can't imagine anything better than doing this." And I can't be the only one. So I think there will be a tilt towards more community-centric development as time goes on.

I feel that, generally, a visual solution trumps any text solution, except possibly one that involves deleting lines.

There does seem to be something of a move on the part of some studios toward more of a Pixar approach. I've blogged about it here and here. Establishing a 'brain trust' is one thing. The commitment to story, strong characters, unified vision, as you note, Chris, is another thing. On that front, Pixar's commitment is sacrosanct. Hopefully we'll see more of this.

This anecdote by Bird supports your viewpoint as does this simple fact: Movies are fundamentally a visual medium.

Wow! what a great Article, i like it and i am a biggest fan of Hollywood Movies.

I figured that there would be a Star Wars Trust as well, given the number of projects over different mediums that we're going to get (and with the EU being rewritten). You'd need some sense of organization just to keep all the parts gelling together. Of course, WB is setting up theirs for animation, and Star Wars is essentially a cartoon with people in it. I want to see someone try this for live-action. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix developed their own Pixar-esque studio for their original films. You wrote a post here a while ago about "movie moneyball" and if anyone was going to play that, it's Netflix, and since they need a big number of original movies of excellent quality, a Pixar-type set-up seems like a no-brainer.