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
A movie can sound good in the board room and be bad on screen. Hell a movie can be *really good* and bomb at the box office. Movies are art, they can’t predict public taste.
If 4 risky $50 million movies bomb but the 5th movie makes $500 million back, the studio won. If they passed on all 5 movies, they wouldn’t have made any money.
Because they aren’t pissing away their own money. They care more about looking cool to their colleagues than doing their jobs.
BILLIONS they have blown on obvious woke bullshit. Star Wars has been destroyed.
Ever ordered a meal that sounds delicious but was bad?
That’s why.
The chef can tell you a meal has all your favourite ingredients, but if he cooks it wrong or adds too much salt or does something else it will turn it worse.
You didn’t order a bad meal, you ordered a good meal! But sometimes cooking is real hard and goes wrong.
Because plenty of bad movies have made money. The studios aren’t in it to make art. Sure, Oscar-winning movies can make some money, but the big action movies make far more and lend themselves to merchandising and franchises.
When a studio greenlights a movie, it’s not really about the script, it’s the package: yes, the script is part of it but also who’s attached to star, direct, and produce. They’re looking for a package that puts butts in seats and can potentially lead to sequels, toys, video games, theme park attractions…lots of revenue streams.
So when you look at movie making through this lens, you’re not going to care about a good quality script with good actors as much as you care about a decent script, probably from an existing IP that already has a built-in fanbase, with proven bankable talent attached.
It’s not new; studios have approached filmmaking this way for decades. They’ve always been about money over art. But the ’70s and ’90s were kind of a golden age of independent filmmaking – movies made outside the major studio system that were cool and smaller-budgeted. Now a lot of that type of content goes straight to streaming.
Bc they’re mainly woke crap. They’re willing to lose money, just to get the “message” out.
There’s another take beyond the difficulty of predicting the final outcome. The people making the decisions have changed. Namely, finance people.
Personally, I find this convincing.
Two words: “Hollywood accounting”.
If a movie is a smash hit at the box office, the studios can and will nickel-and-dime every expense that they can against its revenue to turn it from something that would be considered profitable in most any other field to a loss on the ledgers; if it’s truly a bust and never even recoups its budget (including its marketing), it likewise gets marked as a loss on the ledgers.
In the end, it’s all about the tax write-offs for those losses (either real or manufactured); a recent example is David Zaslav’s taking a chainsaw to WBD’s divisions, such as Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. (such as shitcanning a late-in-production *Batgirl*, because Zaslav would rather take a tax loss on it than complete it, have it not make its money back at the box office, and end up on Max).
Big studios make bad movies because:
1. **Playing It Safe**: Bosses prefer to use well-known franchises (like superheroes or sequels) because they already have fans. New ideas are risky and might not make money.
2. **Blame the Franchise**: If a movie flops, they can blame the franchise instead of their own decisions. This way, they don’t look bad.
3. **Copycat Culture**: Everyone in the studio, from top to bottom, is told to follow the same safe formulas. New, creative ideas get ignored.
4. **Money Focus**: The main goal is to make money. Taking risks with new ideas is scary because it might not pay off.
5. **Fear of Failure**: No one wants to be the one who approves a risky project and then gets blamed if it fails. So, they stick with what’s safe.
This leads to lots of boring, repetitive movies instead of exciting new ones.
The premise of this question is wrong, most movies make money eventually. Traditionally, even if a movie underperforms at the box office it could make its money back eventually through ancillary markets – dvd, streaming/cable rights, etc. And even if it does lose money, that tax write off can be very valuable too.
Before a studio even green lights a movie and insane amount of research is done comparing similar movies performances. Oh you want to make a Ryan Reynolds action comedy in August? Here is how 3 of his others have done. Stuff like that. Granted they aren’t perfect but they have a general idea of how a movie should perform before they write the first check.
The movies that genuinely lose a studio large amounts of money are few and far between.
Big Hollywood studios make bad movies that lose money for a few reasons. Sometimes it’s because they take risks on new ideas or unproven talent that don’t pay off. Other times, they might rush production to meet deadlines, leading to lower quality. And occasionally, it’s just the nature of creative endeavors – not every movie can be a hit. Even with big budgets and experienced teams, success isn’t guaranteed in the movie industry.
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