Idk if economics was the right flair but I don’t know how it’s economically feasible for big studios to lose money on a lot of films with huge budgets and to make them so bad.
In: Economics
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Because they don’t know in advance that they’re going to be bad.
Every movie is a gamble, especially a big budget one. You’re talking a ton of money, and sometimes thousands of people, working toward a goal that is not guaranteed. And often some of those people (ahem…shareholders) aren’t the most creative or innovative people, or even working in the same interests as one another. And as a result, sometimes the final version of the product is nowhere near what it was supposed to be when it was conceived.
So a lot of studios take the path of least resistance to ensure that their films make the most money possible — hiring very famous faces, using the same (or already known) IP, making simple, easy to understand stories that will translate the world over and be offensive to the least amount of people, and oh — a LOT of money spent on marketing, at least if they want the best chance of being successful.
But sometimes, even with all of that working toward making your film money, the public just has no interest in your John Carter or the next plucky young animated hero and it bombs. Because there are indicators of success, but there’s no guarantee of it.
But to answer the other part of your question, for every John Carter there’s a Blair Witch Project, and studios usually find their balance / make their money back somewhere (including other forms of revenue, like merchandising).
They aren’t trying to make bad movies.
Sometimes, a great idea with a great director and a great cast just… doesn’t work. Movies are incredibly complex to make and you don’t *really* know until the end how it’s all going to turn out.
To answer your real question, nowadays most big budget movies are really being made by committee the entire time. And that’s a bad way to make anything creative.
Instead of a writer having an idea, a studio or director finding that idea and deciding they want to make it, and so on etc etc until they build the team. Now a studio will decide “we need to capitalize on this brand we own, let’s make a movie”. And they’ll hire a writer (or 2, or 4, or a dozen) to keep rewriting the movie until a room full of executives are satisfied that it hits as many of the things as it can to be “successful”.
It’s basically movie making done by committee, and that committee is trying to copy previous success and rely on things they think they can measure, and none of it works and it strips all of the creativity.
Then! At the end, even if a director magically made this Franken-movie great, the studio steps in again and says “hey we’ve been focus grouping this movie and people don’t like X-y-z” and then there’s a whole OTHER round of creative by committee.
And so what you often end up with is an uninspired, nonsensical, uncreative hodgepodge of old recycled ideas and cliches and everyone who maybe cared about making it great has had the passion beat out of them by overpaid executives who don’t even care of the movie is good, just if it makes money to make them look good so they can keep their jobs.
Why yes, I do work in film
Movie production is kinda like gambling. Studios make bets on which script might make a good movie and make them into movies. At the end some make money and some don’t but (generally) on average the make money as some loser movies are out weighed by winners.
This is why studios really like making remakes and sequels as they have already proven to have an interested audience.
It’s not sustainable, especially with current interest costs on borrowing money. But as to why they make them, it is due to being risk averse and wanting to make lots of money.
There are only so many screams and so many days in the year. So they want to make lots of blockbusters that do huge box office in the weeks or less and be able to release it in screens all over the world. So this means they make pg-13 films that are based on something that was already successful in some form that can easily be edited to be acceptable in multiple markets and thus it turns into a lump of beige. Comic book movies and cheap loans have them a false sense of security as it introduced a fresh genre that was very amenable to being broadly pleasing with simple plots and if something failed, you could pay the near non existent interest for a long time so you could drag out the consequences of a failure until a successful one hit and have you capital to pay it back.
But even with success, they were just spending too much. A good example of that was fast X. The box office was solid for a sequel in a franchise, but not enough to cover the $300+ million budget and massive advertising blitz.
If this summer is all like the last few weeks have been, I suspect there will be real, tangible consequences in the industry. Even with getting budgets under control and offering up fare other than superhero movies, they are still losing money hand over first. The big winners are just breaking even.
They have bad executives who try and ride coattails on something that was successful. They milk whatever formula that made something successful while ignoring unique concepts without commercial appeal
probably money laundering on a massive scale. I would guess that their supposed budgets aren’t being paid out anywhere close to as much as they report, and there is a bunch of shady stuff going on behind the scenes.
While, yes, you can try to do the producers method of making bombs for profit and such, it’s not really a thing.
Since these are big productions usually, the idea itself may be sound but execution is where it falls flat, likewise it may be something too late to the party. Kind of like how some horror tropes are only good the first time.
A lot of great comments posted already, but i wanted to add that unexpected compromises need to be made constantly when making movies. “You can have the horses, or the castle, but not both, because the horses eat what the castle is made of”.
As others have said, it’s not that they *wanted* or *expected* to lose money. Your question is basically, “Why do people lose money investing?” They’re not *trying* to. They just bet wrong.
And also, bad movies and movies that don’t make money often aren’t the same thing. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. And made over 800 million dollars. Just because a movie is bad, doesn’t mean that it can’t be profitable.
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