Wednesday, February 23, 2005
An interesting article in the New Yorker. Some excerpts...
There's also a good amount on the history of how Hollywood got where it is....In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them.
Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million...
About ten or fifteen years ago, it became dogma in the movie industry that you could make a movie for ten million dollars or for a hundred million dollars, but there was no profit in anything with a budget in between.
One reason for the Hollywood budget gap is above-the-line expenses—that is, the cost of the talent, as opposed to the cost of the crew, sets, travel, promotion, and so on ... the safe thinking is that only a handful of stars can open a movie worldwide. These stars command a healthy portion of the budget, and they usually take their money in the form of an advance against a percentage of the gross. If the movie doesn’t "make back," the star gets to keep the advance...
Thomson believes that profit participation has done the movies a lot of damage, because it allows people to profit from the success of an investment with no risk to themselves on the downside. He also thinks, more provocatively, that "creative control" is another source of trouble. When United Artists gave Michael Cimino the right of final cut on “Heaven’s Gate,” in 1980, it meant, Thomson says, that Cimino "owned a thing he had not paid for." He could indulge himself with other people’s money. “Heaven’s Gate” is, canonically, “the movie that killed the New Hollywood.” It almost killed United Artists, too....
[But] the risk of opening without a name is too great to take. The actors who provided the voices for the animated characters in “Shrek 2”—Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, and Cameron Diaz—were paid ten million dollars each for a few days’ work in the studio. No prosthetic attachments; no early calls. Stars are brands.
So, of course, are names from the pop-culture universe—Hulk, Spider-Man, King Kong—and sequels, such as the “Die Hard”s, the fourth of which is scheduled to shoot this summer. These are all ways of preselling the picture, before the reviews can unsell it.
The key to the system is marketing.... The all-consuming desire is to get as many ticket buyers as possible into the theatre on the first weekend, and, amazingly, people oblige.The crowds at the opening of a blockbuster are a fascinating window on mass psychology. If people just wait a couple of weeks, they can have their pick of seats. But when they get back to school or to the office no one will want to hear what they thought of the picture...
Deals are therefore made with the theatre chains which give the studio a large percentage, sometimes ninety per cent, of ticket sales in the first week, with a rapidly declining percentage in subsequent weeks. The theatre gets ... a hundred per cent of the income from sales of popcorn, soda, candy, video games, and anything else it can cram into the lobby. Concessions account for thirty-five per cent of the revenue in the major theatre circuits. This explains the three-dollar water.
“Hulk” set a record with a seventy-per-cent decline in ticket sales between its opening and the second weekend, but the average drop-off for all movies is fifty per cent...
Marketing costs for the “Matrix” sequels exceeded a hundred million dollars. The reason that those movies had such enormous grosses, despite terrible reviews and negative word of mouth, is that each opened on eighteen thousand screens simultaneously worldwide. As Shone says, about the typical blockbuster, “By the time we’ve all seen that it sucked, it’s a hit.”...
"Troy,” which is considered a failure, has grossed just under half a billion dollars. The poor reviews for “Troy” didn’t matter, because seventy-three per cent of its box-office revenue came from overseas.
Foreign box-office income started exceeding domestic box-office income for Hollywood movies in 1993. For the typical top-ten box-office hit, sixty per cent of exhibition revenue comes from overseas. This is a reason that the women don’t have much dialogue, and the men are too occupied with driving, wrecking, and leaping to utter more than an occasional mal mot....
The ideal product to market is a “four-quadrant” picture, a movie that appeals to men and women in both the over- and the under-twenty-five age groups. That’s one reason performers with high adult recognition—Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Billy Crystal, Robert De Niro—are paid so much for cartoon voice-overs...
Blockbusters today aspire to be “tent-pole franchises”—centerpieces for multiple spin-off products, from lunchboxes to soundtracks, comic books, children’s books, arcade games, and computer games. “Batman” earned three times as much from merchandise as it did from ticket sales ... Blockbusters today are commercials: they’re commercials for themselves.
They also include commercials, in the form of product placement. The all-time record for product placement appears to be owned by the Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies,” which sold screen time to Visa, Avis, BMW, Smirnoff vodka, Heineken, Omega watches, Ericsson cell phones, and L’Oréal...
The blockbuster is a Hollywood tradition, but blockbuster dependence is a disease. It sucks the talent and the resources out of every other part of the industry. A contemporary blockbuster could almost be defined as a movie in which production value is in inverse proportion to content. “Troy” is a comic strip, but what a lavish, loving, costly comic strip it is.
The talent, knowledge, and ingenuity required to make just one of the battle scenes in that film, or one mindless James Bond chase sequence, interchangeable in memory with almost any other Bond chase sequence, would drain the resources of many universities.
But why doesn’t anyone put more than two seconds’ thought into the story?...
After all, as the article points out, the basic economics of movie making haven't really changed since profit participation was handed out in the first blockbuster, "Birth of a Nation", and since Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists to secure the profits of and creative control over the films they were providing the talent for -- Dreamworks 1919.
So what started off there as a slowish book review turned into a good read, worth following the link to get the full story if you are interested in such things.
(The dismissive treatment of George Lucas's baby is worth it by itself, IMHO: "Not that people haven’t tried, God knows, but there is just nothing serious to say about the larger implications of 'Star Wars.'")
