eli5 : What’s the job of Executive Producers on movies and TV series? How much to they contribute to the overall finished product and what differentiates them from regular producers?
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“Executive producer” is a title that people who are involved with movie or TV series negotiate for themselves as part of their overall compensation. It is not a role, it has no particular duties. There are no awards for “best executive producer”, there is no Executive Producer Guild where somebody can go and say “hey, I should have been given an executive producer credit on that movie”.
The people who are in the position of being able to negotiate that credit vary widely – they might be contributing money, they might be writers or actors. They might be the president of the studio who greenlit the project.
They might be a copyright holder or creator of original source material. They might be the most important person on the project: George Lucas is a great example. He never produced any of the movies he is associated with – including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies. He did get the executive producer credit on all of them.
Whatever “the job” of those people are, as OP asks, the job doesn’t come from their executive producer title. It comes from their other titles – writer, director, actor, composer, or whatever else they are doing on the project.
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