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
If you look at the history of cinema, they came up with novel concepts, and new genres were created until the 1970s. After the release of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws, the term “*blockbuster*” was used to describe high return movies.
From the 1980s to the 2000s movies became very formulaic.
Here are three main things that have changed in the meantime:
**Big fish and small fish**. Peter Jackson’s trilogy of The Lord of the Rings and The Marvel movies showed that it was possible to have a colossal return on investment on a big budget movie.
Where in the past a studio would split $200 million across 4 movies of $50 million each, they now want to put all their chips on a single movie that has big earning potential.
**Risk aversion**. With higher stakes come higher risks, so in an attempt to minimise risk, the studios go for two things that are counterintuitive:
They avoid venturing off the beaten path. Instead of taking risk with something novel, they see it as a safer road to capitalise on material that has already proven successful. This is why we get remakes, sequels or prequels.
**Post #metoo and #blacklivesmatter**. There is a double prong incentive to challenge with a new recipe the way movies have usually been written. Straight white men should no longer be the main protagonists, women should be shown as boss girls (bonus points if you make them gay) and people of colour (British spelling) should be swapped in for white characters. Especially for redheads.
There is also an illusory incentive to win diversity, equity and inclusion points. The more perceived forms of oppression your character seems to have, the more points. And higher DEI rating is supposed to make your studio a better company to invest in.
So studios are losing sight of earning money from the box office and focusing on getting investors money. But as your premise outlines it: what is the point of getting funding if you are going to spend it on movies that bomb?
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Studios should do the opposite of everything they have been doing for the last 5 years:
1. Hire writers based on merit, not based on whether they tick DEI boxes.
2. Try novel ideas. You should be willing to push the envelope, and if you want some kind of proof of concept, adapting books or theatre plays to the silver screen has worked for most of cinema’s History. Don’t change a winning team.
3. Have character development and story arch. “*Show, don’t tell*” also means that your characters depiction should go way deeper than their *identity*. You should always be able to answer the following questions:
* Who is the character?
* What is their background?
* What are their motivations and goals?
* What are their strengths and weaknesses?
* How do they interact with the world around them?
* What is their internal conflict?
* How do they change over the course of the story?
4. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The Lord of the Rings and the first Marvel movies had an alignment of start that you cannot automatically repeat. Put your chips on different movies to spread the risk.
5. Be budget conscious. Hire people who can produce a movie on a shoestring budget. The 2023 *Godzilla Minus One* reaped $116 million on a $12 million budget. The 2023 Creator didn’t give good returns, but it exceeded Marvel movies in special effects for three times less budget, because they managed to avoid reshoots.
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