The Smurfs SHOULD have had a Belgian brain trust behind it. Much like Dragon ball (which I SWEAR Fox only made and rushed into production before their option ran out because of the whole unmade 1990's Watchmen fiasco) should have had some Japanese film maker or at LEAST someone who watched an anime behind it. Speed Racer, at LEAST they watched the show. Managed to actually get the character's names and personalities pretty down. I felt Inspector Gadget was written by someone with the barest minimum understanding of the series, and they managed to screw up a thin concept. Underdog? Don't even go there. That shouldn't have been made at ALL. Even the creators hated the result.
But the main bullet point I'm trying to make here is that some of these studios announce these projects and basically have the teasers, the merchandise, the ad campaign, and all that stuff done BEFORE they even can decide what the movie is about... and we wind up getting shoddy scripts from non-fans (Speed Racer, at least you got a shoddy script from fans) that gets rushed through before the projected movie date.
Disney has THANKFULLY done the opposite here. That is to say, ignore the "Cheapest Muppet Movie" flap, since that could have easily been one of those times... BUT they would have had the Muppet writer brain trust work out a script in that case. The "Greatest" script has been floating around for a couple years, pretty much even before Disney agreed to it. Thankfully, they saw there was a perfectly good script in front of them the whole time, and they're just getting some input from other Disney employees.