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The costs to make a movie have both gone down, and gone up. Sure, you're not paying for film, processing, rushes, transportation, etc. you're still paying for a DIT, endless backup solutions, archiving, QC, etc. For a "mid-budget" film, the costs are negligible. In fact, for a while, you could go to Technicolor, Deluxe, etc. and get insane discounts on their film suites because they weren't being used at all. With it you'd get an old guy who'd been coloring film since before your parents were born and you'd pay him a rate so low that you felt really bad for it, but he'd take it. Now those labs are being shut down. It's a real shame. Here's the three biggest hurdles to making a mid-budget film: 1.) Scaling - When you're making a microbudget film most of the time you're calling in favors. If you've ever worked in the creative field you know the conversation "I'll get you for the next one" and all of that. Your hands are tied. You don't have any money. The project is just scraping by and always in danger of collapse. However, when you do a larger budget film, what you can pay is regulated by union contracts. In some cases it also requires you to hire certain amounts of people - people you may or may not need/want. With this comes certain other budget pitfalls, the higher the budget the more destructive going over time on a single day can be. SAG has a number of penalties that you are required to pay your actors for a number of things (Like using a fog machine, non-continuous days, etc). You're also going to need just a larger amount of people, and more skilled people since you have a lot riding on the line. This all costs money. A lot of money. It's easy to think that a higher budget will give you more resources, more freedom, but often the budget is just as tight and as constricting as a microbudget. This comes to a big problem when it comes to the creative side, as when a budget needs to come down it leads to a shorter shoot. That leads to a lot of problems for a filmmaker, he has less time with his actors to develop/find the character, they can't explore the space in a way, a scene has to be shot in the most basic/easiest of manners because clock's ticking. Any filmmaker would prefer more days and less money. Some actually go for it. Not many. 2.) Marketing - The biggest cost to making a movie is marketing it. No question. I get frustrated when people argue that with social media that it's easier to get the word out about a movie because, I can assure you, it is not. (these people also just advise you to "make something go viral"). It's really tough to get people to be aware of a film and even harder to get them to be excited about a film. Awareness matters, but it doesn't drive dollars. "Oh yeah, I've heard of that movie but I don't know what it's about". Film fans are particularly hard to reach because the streaming services don't serve ads when you watch a movie, or maybe one or two pre-rolls. Most people have wised up to the fact and use that time to go get a drink from the kitchen, go to the bathroom, put a sock on the doorknob, what have you, before it starts. If you're looking for intelligent film fans you'd think you could just cater to the internet, but most of them have ad-block. How do you reach a potential audience? Their attention is splintered a million ways and so much is about looking at reduced/no ads. There is some hope in that studies are showing that people don't mind ads when watching on a streaming service, but, they're looking at a reduced amount (I know the ads on Hulu seem like they're forever and every time you load it up the number of ads seems to go up, but it's still less than broadcast). As ubiquitous as they seem, twitter and facebook reach only certain types, and those are the types that are going to seek out new movies to watch. Your casual viewer says "man they don't make movies like they used to", they still do, but nobody has any solid ideas of how to reach him. And because they don't, they won't make 'em like they used to. 3.) Box Office/Ancillaries - The last few years the total box office returns have been going up and down, yo-yoing back and forth, generally at the same general area. Not great, but fine. With inflation, even worse, but not completely terrible. That's when you look at the numbers overall. Unfortunately these gains/losses are pretty much held in the tentpoles. Last year was up, but that was because of the new Star Wars movie. It might have been responsible for the increase itself, who knows. Your movies that are mid-range and lower, have been declining. A big part of this is that theater owners have to book their movies month in advance. They want to maximize butts in seats so they go with the big blockbuster. Of course they would, you would too. The problem comes with over the last 15-20 years that a tentpole film would take up one or two screens in a theater. Now they take up 7. They push out the small ones because they can't afford to lose. Then when a tentpole underperforms, they have empty houses. They can't switch to a mid-budget, and basically everybody is unhappy. So mid-budgets are making less up front, and that used to be... well, not fine, but more acceptable. Because a good film could "find it's audience". Zoolander, Fight Club, Big Lebowski, etc. You know the type, you talk about them all the time here. The DVD market was so incredibly lucrative that these films just lived there. Really did great. Direct-to-DVD always was a condemnation of a movie's quality, but it was a viable business model. Around 07-09 this market started to decline. A couple of reasons why. There was one study that said that people only had so much shelf space in their house, and that once they filled it up, they didn't want to buy a new set of shelves, nor did they want to throw out the DVDs they already purchased, so they just stopped buying new ones. It sounds weird, but there's a lot of merit to it. I'd always see the plastic still on a movie I was excited to buy and hadn't watched two years later... didn't put me in the mood to buy new ones. People also stopped seeing them as collector's items. There's few limited runs - what am I collecting a copy of Snatch for? If I need one it's in every house on the block! So people slowed down buying DVDs, and things got really bad. But then streaming came along. Streaming was just the knock-out blow to home video. Why would I pay $20 for a movie I've seen already when I can pay $8 and watch anything? It was great for the consumer, terrible for anybody who wanted to make any money off of their product. These movies that found their audience on DVD were now finding their audience on Netflix, but their audience wasn't paying near the same amount. So, the producers, the studios, etc. don't get the rewards for their labor. Even in a "successful" film. The studio can now make 5-7 mid-budgets that will die at the box office, make them no money in success, or make another Transformers movie that nobody wants, but will pay to see opening weekend in 3D because of the CG. It's a no brainer on their end. Maxwell Lord posted:I feel like sometimes I notice the effect of these super-low-budgets on the aesthetics, though it's tied into a deliberate minimalism and austerity that's kinda the rage now. Like, Midnight Special has a small cast and very nondescript locations and basic sets- it has a Spielbergian vibe to it, but feels stripped down to the bare minimum required to tell the story. Ex Machina has the feel of a stage play at times (though the effects probably did eat up the budget pretty quickly), Morgan has the same vibe, it's like to get these kinds of movies made you have to come up with the most simple way of realizing the premise. Yeah. This is where it suffers. If you go back and watch a random 70s movie, they're going all over the place! Multiple cities, all sorts of locations - many that are not necessary, they just decided to shoot the conversation in a museum! Nowadays if you want to get a movie made your best bet is opening with "so it takes place in just one location" or if you really want to juice it "So it takes place in just one room".
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Oct 10, 2016 10:59
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Bolek posted:Effort post appreciated. Thanks. I've been in the weeds with this sort of thing a bit, so... not a big deal. Is the concept outmoded? Somewhat. Things shift around for a while. It takes a while for all the pieces to fall into place. Right now, we're dealing with the 1-2 punch of theatrical money shifting to a foreign-dominant model and the collapse of a home market. If you have a project that's going to try to make it's money heavily from theatrical distribution you're going to want something that plays overseas - so tentpoles, horror, action, etc. are in, and comedies, dramas, movies seen as typical "adult fare" are out. You'd much rather have "The Shallows" over "Everybody Wants Some!!" regardless of your taste over the movies themselves, because Shallows is going to translate cultures well, not have to live in subtitles, etc. It's also a concept that is easy to engage with people worldwide (Imagine pitching each to Japanese audiences, Brazilian audiences, etc.) The kind of mid-budget movie I think you're really alluding to is the "movie actually made for adults" genre that's dying out. The "Kramers vs Kramers", "All The Presidents Mens", "Up In The Airs" of the world. They're the ones that are lost in the shift. If you get a star you can have some success overseas, but if you're relying on a star not liked by the international community, it's an uphill struggle (tangentially, this is why pictures with more diverse leads struggle to be made as well). The hope right now for mid-budgets is that the streaming services are losing content at a really incredible rate - so they're investing in originals, often with a theatrical release, and put up the money for them. That's great for the 20 or so projects a year that will see financing that way, but for the others... Maybe if people catch onto the library shrinkage and start building up their own libraries via VOD/iTunes/etc. that could get the money flowing again? Of course... that way is lead by piracy... Should we give a poo poo? I will, of course, argue yes, but I genuinely believe it. You may get diverse sources of film, but, when you operate at the two budgets - low and high, you basically end up with two kinds of movies - those set in a house with maybe three outdoor scenes (usually the woods), or a two-and-a-half hour overly complicated and overly-dumb cgi bonanza. Both of them are really confining in terms of story! When you have no money, you have few options, but when you have $150M you have even less - you have to satisfy a ton of requirements from studios, overseas distributors, marketing, etc. The first thing compromised for money - story. It's not as important as being on time and satisfying the boxes. Most of your favorite movies are mid-range projects. It's nice to go outside, follow a character through a journey, maybe wreck a car or two along the way. Look at a movie like "Clueless". Everybody loves "Clueless". It cost $12M 20 years ago, so let's just estimate $30M, even with unknown leads. That movie cannot get made today. It's weird, but when I look at "Clueless" today (and I'm just picking all these movies at random, btw, no real reason) I see a lot of big, expensive things - just the sheer number of characters in it, driving on a Los Angeles highway, all the locations, look at how many people are at that dance! Who's going to put up $30M for a movie about a teenage girl's lovelife to shoot scenes in a real mall? What other country is going to be gung ho about watching "Clueless"? How should we look at investors This is a tough one. Investors have really changed over the years. The 80s were a loving gold mine for investing in movies because Wall Street guys just wanted to hang out with movie stars. Today... It's fragmented. On the microbudget side, that's easy - that's people wanting to buy their way into the industry. Usually a HNW (high net worth) individual, who doesn't have to work, who thinks it'd be fun to make movies. If they lose their investment it's not the end of the world, and they have a cool experience, and even in failure they'll attract attention because money is like blood in the water. On the high end? It's weird. It's an unstable, high-risk investment that returns you 30%. That's a terrible investment. You'd fire your money manager if they just returned 30%. I think a lot of investment bankers put them into clients portfolios to diversify and to tell their clients, "hey, you're in the movie biz". Investors are a wide bunch. They all have their reasons. Some are just wide-eyed dentists in the mid-west seduced with the thought of being on the ground floor of the next "Paranormal Activity". Some are sleazebags who do it to feel powerful and get close to women out of their league. Can't really reduce them down to one certain kind. Except for the biggest kind - and that's people trying to get their money out of China. When that goes bad this business is completely hosed.
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Oct 12, 2016 13:03
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Guy Mann posted:I'm always surprised that Peak TV and the increasing power of Netflix and other distribution formats isn't brought up more in these discussions. Even if there really are less mid-budget movies being made there are a shitload more serialized programs taking their place and arguably taking better advantage of the same resources; something like Stranger Things is for all intents and purposes a mid-budget movie that just happens to take place over 7.5 hours instead of 2 and is way better for it. You don't make any money from Netflix.
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Oct 15, 2016 23:56
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Hat Thoughts posted:My big theory is that NeuroticErotica wasnt talking about originals & just Netflix as a platform for rereleasing stuff that already came out somewhere else & there's actually 3 seperate convos going on Yup. I don't think there's much money for the creators of the originals as well. You lose any ongoing income streams (TV/VOD/etc) and even the payments you'd usually get from Netflix they're exempt for a year. By then they show is long irrelevant and I can't imagine it doing many streams. Snowglobe of Doom posted:It's not like Netfix is small potatoes. What you announce you intend to spend and what you actually spend are two different things. Even then I'd wager that the bulk of the money is geared towards the existing IPs they've been partnering with. Netflix has given people a really skewed and bizarre view of how movies work. When dealing with people outside the industry they just assume I can put a movie up on Netflix myself (!) and just start making money. Or that the exposure from it will somehow lead to DVD sales. Or that Netflix is financing a ton of projects. It's like... You pay $8 for something you watch a few hours of shows a day, how much do you think the people behind the movies are making from this? People notice the shrinking library and don't put two-and-two together that maybe this isn't a great long term solution for how to run an industry.
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Oct 17, 2016 04:11
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