I really don’t get it how it works. Making a movie costs a lot of money, even if it is not a blockbuster.
So many TERRIBLE movies are being released every month. How are all they making profit?
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they’re not choosing to release and make bad movies?
“Terrible” according to whom/what? Not all movies make money, but that is not different from any other business venture. Apple, Google and Microsoft are the cash cows we all know and they still release bad products that don’t make money and get discontinued.
Studios don’t deliberately make terrible movies just for fun. Some will be better, some will be worse. Hopefully there are more good than bad ones and the good more than pay for the bad ones.
Just because a movie is terrible doesn’t mean that it won’t sell tickets. Try flipping through cable TV or the magazine rack by a grocery store checkout sometime, there are entire industries dedicated to producing absolutely garbage content because enough people consume that content for it to be profitable.
[Hollywood Accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting) is a term you should research.
Even if the accounting was done in the same way as other industries, I read recently that a movie that cost 65 million to make is considered a flop because it only made around 67 million. That is 2 millions dollars in profit, but they put 65 million at risk to make that, so that is like a 3 percent return. Investors want a higher return than that, so they call it a flop.
Are you talking about theatrical releases in actual cinemas? Or are you including streaming services?
Streaming services have to keep new content coming so that subscribers don’t leave. They have enough subscribers that not one movies has to be “great” to keep the company profitable. They need to be just good enough that folks won’t cancel. That is a lot lower threshold than being good enough to get people to leave their houses and go to a cinema to see a new movie.
Yes, there are blockbusters going into theaters that are a real risk to produce, but streaming service made originals help the cause of novel content, even if they aren’t that great. The film-makers get paid. The streaming service get new content to keep subscribers. Everybody wins. Who cares if the movies are terrible? They are already paid for by subscribers.
Many “bad” movies still make a lot of money. And the cost for making movies can range from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars.
A movie that cost $20 million to make, but makes $40 million is a successful movie.
A movie that cost $200 million to make, but makes $40 million is a major flop.
Sometimes the movie is a work of love and the movie has investors that share that dream. Or it might be in a sector that is trying to improve the quality of the involved people.
The “Christian” movie scene is a good example, there are a couple faith centered production companies that are facing the fact that the “good” writers and actors don’t want to be involved, so they are building up the skill sets of those involved
The Lifetime “rom coms” or other made for TV movies are an example of the subscription model, many of the actors are under contract to do several movies, the scripts are just modified versions of past movies, the sets are generic. The cost of producing the movies is a business expense and as long as they get enough eyeballs to sell to advertisers all is good.
Whether a movie is good or bad is only somewhat related to how much money it earns. There are movies that are poorly reviewed yet make money: for example, 50 Shades Darker has 11% on Rotten Tomatoes yet made $381 million against a $55 million budget. On the flip side, there are movies that are well reviewed yet underperform: for example, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has 93% on Rotten Tomatoes yet only made $208.2 million against a $150 million budget. The general rule is a movie needs to make at least double its budget to be profitable (the budget doesn’t include marketing and distribution costs), so here the “bad” movie was profitable and the “good” movie lost money.
As we can see above, one factor is simply the cost of the film. If Fifty Shades Darker had cost $200 million to make, it’d have lost money. If D&D: HAT had cost $100 million, it’d have been profitable. A lot of “bad” films released every year are simply cheaply made, so they don’t need to be super popular to make a profit.
The other factor is finding an audience and marketing to them. 50 Shades Darker is a sequel to a film adaptation of a popular romance novel, and the original was considered trash/smut fiction, so it had a built in audience with low expectations that didn’t particularly care if the film was “good.” While D&D has a reputation for being a hobbyist’s game, and people who have never played the game may have felt they weren’t the target audience for the film, even though critics assured them the film was “good.”
So it’s a mixture of setting the right budget, finding the right audience, and marketing to them. Reviews can help in that they can influence people unsure of whether they want to see the film, but they do not guarantee the success or failure.
People ITT are just pretending that they live on another planet, so I’ll try and answer. What you’re talking about, the seemingly constant stream of garbage, uncreative, poorly made movies, is the result of a bunch of different systems that are dedicated to making movies that make money. So in fact, it’s the opposite- so many terrible movies are being released *because* they make so much money.
The quality of a movie is not what determines its success. In fact, good movies are often less successful for reasons I’ll explain. Hollywood is a business, and today at least, their only goal is to increase the returns at the box office.
Audiences, in general, do not care or notice if a movie is well made or not. In fact, a lot of peoples measure of a well made movie is as weak as ‘I liked it’. This is a lesson Illumination learned with the first Despicable Me: they put a ton of effort into making a good story with characters and stakes that people care about, but what most audiences took away was ‘hahahahaha banana minion’.
So with each next movie they made, they put less effort into the things that made the first one good, like story, characters, and decent animation, and dedicated more screen time to the thing that actually got butts in seats, the minions.
On a macro scale, this is what is happening in the mainstream film industry. They are actively trying to produce ‘hits,’ using more and more cynical tricks to draw in audiences, rather than making a good piece of art that becomes a hit organically. All through the creative process, every decision is being made with the goal of increasing the movies profitability/audience appeal, rather than some artistic goal.
TL;DR: Movies are worse now because the motivation of the people making them is not to make a good movie, but a profitable movie, and the things that make a profitable movie almost always make it less good.
Blackrock funding. This company funds movies and projects for extremely low rates as low as their DEI and ESG scores are high enough (Or Woke enough if you prefer).
So when you borrow 300 million for your next dead in the water girl boss movie, borrowed at 0.5%, you don’t need a large profit to make bank, only a tiny sliver of it. That’s why we keep saying movies that seem to have no chance of making their initial budget and some of them make tiny profit, but are still counted as success because of them, even if they’d be catastrophic bombs by any other metrics.
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