ok I just watched this haven’t read up on it at all but here is the only explanation I will accept for how it came to be:
a bunch of wealthy film executives’ teenaged children are in their private high school’s rendition of Heathers:  The Musical and on closing night they go to the diner for their cast party, where they get hopped up on milkshakes and antagonize the staff.  At some point one of them says “guys 😳 what if we wrote a movie 🤪 ???” and then another one says “omg yeah.  so what if there’s this orphan.”  and then another one says “wait can he be played by tom holland??? omg.”  and then the whole group gets involved, increasingly loudly egging each other on as they come up with more overly tragic backstories, edgy plot twists, and shallow references to religion for maximum shock value.  and as they decide that robert pattinson and sebastian stan should play the child molesting preacher and the corrupt cop respectively.  “wait a sec,” one of them says.  “this all takes place in the south, right?  cause I’m imagining all of them having southern accents.”  and everyone is like “omg wait I was too!!!”  after that night ends, they each take on the task of writing from the perspective of a different one of the central characters.  many nights are spent reading draft versions in awful fake southern accents in the same diner.  then when they finish, they show it to their parents, who are like, “great job, sweetie, let’s make this into a movie!”  then they do, except they couldn’t get a hold of daniel radcliffe to play the crazy arachnophobic preacher guy so they got the guy who played dudley in harry potter instead.
This movie sucks