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
They can afford to lose money because, by in large, they’re paying themselves with the lost money. When a new movie is made, a shell company is formed to create the movie, to pay the studio, the director, for the ads, etc. At that point, it doesn’t matter how the movie does, everyone involved in making it is secure and safe.
The investors don’t mind, because as a whole, the industry is very profitable. Good youtube to explain it.
One of the main problems is the theater chains. They’ve been pandering to the lowest class of customer for so long that going to see a movie feels like being forced to spend a few hours at a Chuck E Cheese. I think they’d be wise to consider making it more of an adult experience – – people complain about ticket prices, rightfully so, but I think they’d feel better about it if the whole experience wasn’t geared to please a 12 year old.
Higher budget and streamlined processes for visual effects
Visual effects made a lot of epic/fantasy/sci fi and action visuals possible, but also required a lot of planning around filming and post production. This and more money involved in general meant people wanted higher yield films and naturally lower risk. People are a lot more careful with budgets of hundreds of millions or more than budgets of low tens of millions
Because of this, a lot of stuff is very very pre planned, because waste of time when you’re paying larger crews is much more costly. Things become less adaptable so there’s less stuff that can be changed. Smaller productions generally had more comfort being more free form and sometimes getting actors back after the primary filming phase for reshooting.
The larger amounts of money also put more pressure on the films being higher profit, meaning they want a film that is suitable for larger audiences, especially if it can be an international audience. This way they needs more basic, and more universal appeals, and be more adverse to potentially being offensive/politically incorrect in a much larger market
As the industry blew up, there just became a more standardized pipeline for how to make films; the producers of these general don’t know all the studios involved in great detail; so the more standardized every studio is the more business they will appeal to. This is more scalable but less creative
An Avengers movie has a lot of planning and a lot of effort go into how things are shot to save time for visual effects (which is a lot of effort even if things go well). A film like Joker gets to be a lot more creative in the process of shooting to see what feels better.
Snakes on a plane… who thought that film would turn a healthy profit? They must of all been intoxicated while making big decisions.
Hollywood studios use shady accounting to make it seem as if the movie is losing money by inflating the costs paid to the studio’s own subsidiaries. Here’s an article on this practice: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/19/business/nightcap-hollywood-accounting-strike/index.html
It’s not their intention to make bad movies. They just want a product that ticks the boxes that they think will amount to financial success. Unfortunately, that results in studios who hire creatives that they have more control over, that make movies they aren’t skilled enough to make because they believe the formula works, because it has worked in the past for themselves and other studios. Sony looks at the MCU and thinks, if we hire creatives we can control and have some overarching plan in place, we can maximise profits. This resulted in the Venom movies, both financial hits. This gives them the idea that they can keep doing this formula and then you have Morbius and Madam Web, both financial and critical blunders. They learned the wrong lessons from their success and made bad movies.
Movie studios aren’t like A24. They don’t care about subtext and themes, they care about money. Jurassic World movies are mostly awful but they all brought in big money for Universal. They didn’t bring money because of the creatives behind them, they brought in money because Universal made the creatives make a movie a certain way. Not defending bad directors and screen writers of course, but they were chosen for a reason. Loads of excellent movies don’t make money and many mediocre movies do make money. Also, movie studios have an awful approach of overspending which they believe will result in bigger gains when obviously, that is not the case. Hopefully studios understand that dropping $200+ million on one movie is not feasible in the long run.
Because studio heads are totally detached from Average Joe and what the later wants to see, therefore the boards rely on consultation companies and such to tell them what to do.
IMO here is the problem: If a studio hires people who actually don’t know or actively dismiss the Average Joes taste and rather push for something they personally enjoy, you end up with productions bombing.
The joke however goes full circle if these people then manage to convince studio heads that they are not to blame, but the audience is plain unreasonable, hateful, bigoted, sexist, racist, whatever to cherish these „brilliant“ productions.
There isn’t like an equation for the “good movie”. Otherwise every film would be a box office hit
Previously it was a gamble, now it seems they do it on purpose. Disney seems to not care, they keep spitting out that woke stuff off which much is making a loss. And their whole media department has reduced a lot. 70% of the revenue comes from the parks, and only 11% comes from media.
Latest Answers