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George Lucas Predicts Death of Big Budget Movies
H_Fisher writes "Before the red carpet had cooled at last night's Academy Awards, George Lucas told the New York Daily News that big-budget movies will soon be history. From the article: "'The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,' said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. 'Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with King Kong.'" Lucas' prediction: "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies ... I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.""
The problems I have with today's movies are:
1. More effects than plot/storyline
2. Hollywood unions controlling costs
3. Acting unions keeping the status quo too long
4. Economic pressures keeping people in their homes
5. New distribution mechanisms breaking down the cartels
In terms of plot, the average Hollywood movie is regurgitated from previous stories -- they even keep the title nowadays! I've seen great low budget movies with new twists and turns, but with lower production quality. My recent trip to Asia and Europe for the past 3 weeks showed me 3 foreign flick that were surprisingly good -- I even suspended disbelief for 2 of them.
The unions in Hollywood are notorious for continuing their blacklist and favoritism controls -- keeping costs high and quality low. In order to distribute a movie in the States, you have to be part of the union's preferred cartels. If you attempt to make a movie outside of their control, you'll generally not see wide distribution. Copyright at its finest, here.
For those who are familiar with my typical rants and raves on Slashdot, this post isn't much different. I'm the sole anti-copyright activist in most threads, and it doesn't hurt me to see copyright failing Hollywood after decades of them abusing their power. The Internet will slowly (or quickly) bring the distribution cartels down, and I can't wait to see what powers come to the artists willing to give up control of their work once it leaves their hands. Money is still there to be made, we just need to find new ways to sell our art without using the force of government to back our profits up.
On the economic pressure side, the usual enemy to movie theatres is gas pricing. I disagree -- gas prices in my home are not up much once you factor in inflation over the past 15 years. Greenspan did this country a huge disservice with his inflationary system -- making the cost of living go up much faster than our wages did. I believe the average home is poorer today than it was 10 and 20 years ago -- when you look at the cost of entertainment versus the available disposable income, you can see why entertainment is failing. Pile on huge consumer debt levels, and most families can't just Charge It! any longer.
In the long run, I see great benefit in the Internet is bringing the average consumer a new level of selection. The victor in this is the consumer -- and those who find new ways to bring art from the artist to the purveyor. I'm looking at all the options myself, as I don't really see much reason to support those (ie, Hollywood) who stole from me over the decades I've lived. I'd rather go see a local theatre production (where the actors and support staff get paid through real ongoing work) than make a millionaire out of someone who acted once and believes they have the right to continue to make an income without making actual repeated work.
George Lucas might be right that Big Budget Movies are dying -- but I think he needs to check his premises. It isn't the consumer that doesn't want to spend money, it is those who have controlled and manipulated the market that have lost the ability to continue their deceit and their monopoly. Information doesn't want to be free, the law of supply and demand just dictates that it will eventually be free in a digital world. There are still billions of people on this planet who will pay for good content, and I'd love to be one of the guys who finds a way to connect the supply with the demand in a profitable way.
Last one I saw in a theater was Lord of the Rings trilogy. I find myself buying older films, classics.
Hollywood just doesn't make content for me anymore, so I will gleefully watch its demise.
Being a major book geek, movies tend to be weak sauce compared to a good novel anyway.
But it's more fun to watch a movie drunk than to read a book.
Blar.
Ok...according to Box Office Mojo: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=kingkong05 .htm/
King Kong cost $217 million to make. And it's made, worldwide, $544 million. Now, only about half of that goes back to the studio, and there were certainly huge marketing costs, but we've still got DVD and Pay Cable and Basic Cable and Broadcast rights and Video Game Licenses and Merchandised Crappola.
Maybe they're not Titanic-happy, but it's hard to see them crying.
And the theater environment is rapidly losing it's appeal for me -- I'd MUCH rather watch a movie at home on my projector than in a theater with people who can't keep quiet during a movie, can't keep their cellphones off inspite of all the warnings and can't control their bladders for 90 mins. So, for me, the incentive to find a version of a movie that I can watch at home has little to do with $$$ and much to do with convenience. And (imho) that's going to be true for everyone as home entertainment centers become cheaper and better. It used to be that there was something to going to the theater for the big screen experience. With that going away, I can't see people really interested in the cinema much at all. Someone let me know if they think people will still be "going" to the movies in 25 years in Japan or the US.
So with the Cinema viewers prefering to watch at home, home distribution is the wave of the future -- and I agree with you again, that will lead to inevitable copyright infringement. So, there's really a window of opportunity for the creators of a film to make money. In the first weeks of a movie's life -- they'll have the best version of it, and that's their chance to make money on it -- as you said, supply and demand. It will eventually be cracked though, and then they'll have to compete against the crack -- agani supply and demand. Certainly the studios will find ways to monetize their product -- that's what they do best -- but if the end sum figure is going to be what a movie can make in a competetive market -- people will not be willing to invest big $$$. These movies have these huge budgets because they have a hope of return on nivestment. Without that hope, the investments will go away, and with them the big budgets.
Fortunately for Hollywood, there are easy places to trim costs. Salaries are crazy, as you mentioned. The entertainment unions are going to be broken because the studios will have to break them. And there will be no more $30M paydays for an actor for one movie. Which is fine by me -- once again, it's supply and demand.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
On the day after Crash deservedly took the oscar for best film, hollywood needs to consider how many movies like Crash, Sideways, Munich, Serenity, Sin City, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Open Water, and Sean of the Dead are out there waiting to be made, and which could be made for much less money and make a much better return on their investment than utter piss like Mr and Mrs Smith or the latest Pink Panther.
Not all of the above are cheap films, but none of them had a couple of hundred million thrown at them, and every single one of them made a decent return. Hollywood is run by suits who dole out money to what they belive to be the safest option- a small selection of dead horses which the shamelessly flog (market) into turning a profit.
Someone please, please hand Michel Gondry, Charlie Kaufman, Darren Aronofsky, Guy Richie, and Christopher Nolan ( could go on, but am pressed for time) 100 million dollars each (that's $500m - less than the cost of cost two summer blockbusters) and sit back and watch about 15 great movies happen.
What a summer movie that'd be.
When the posters fear their moderators, there is tyranny; when the moderators fears the posters, there is liberty.
How many movies came out last year with King Kong's budget? Just one.
The "average" cost of a movie is already far, far below $200 million... I would say that the "average" cost of movies is already in the $15-20 million range.
One of the biggest expenses of the movies is actors' salaries. Do anybody here actually believe that the studio execs LIKE paying $20 million to an actor for one film? Of course not, but they are paying the market rate for that actor. Actors draw audiences, so how does Lucas propose that the studios force the big name stars to take a lower salary?
This is what plagues the RIAA and MPAA. This is what plagues movie screens and radio. Piracy is a problem, yes, but it's not the reason these big corporate types are losing money is because of the big corporate types. Putting out new colors of the same thing will drag sales out only so much.
I think one of the bigger reasons that Mr. Lucas is right is the ability for novice movie makers to do their own CGI. While it may not be as flashy as the big-budget movies, it's enough to get across the idea, as long as a good story compliments it. For instance, while using StumbleUpon, I found a video for a fan-made parody of Power Rangers called "Emo Rangers". The initial episode (which was all I could find) ran about 18 minutes or so, and had some pretty good effects (certainly better than we saw in the original Power Rangers). Considering that all the group that made it had was a YouTube entry and a domain that forwarded to their MySpace account, I highly doubt they had a large budget.
People are waking up and realizing that they've already seen this plot thrice, and oh now we can predict the plot twist. Shiny objects will entrance people for only so long. Good stories are taking precedence, and this will allow more indie directors to get their turn in the spotlight.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that the studios want to give movie stars millions of dollars and just can't wait to shower their largesse on them.
I also have to wonder if you understand capitalism.
The movie studios, if they could have their way, would charge the movie stars to appear in their movies. They pay them millions of dollars because the top-name actors think they are worth it... and they are right. Tom Hanks will pull a lot of people into the theatres, enough to recoup the costs. The expert accounts wouldn't be approving the payouts if they hadn't run the numbers, come to this conclusion, and been proven correct numerous times.
You really can't say this is a sign of some sort of global stupidity or anything, either. There are ~300 million people in this country, and the Hollywood market is much larger than that. It only takes a very slight average preference to have amazing box-office consequences. I don't love Tom Hanks and I won't go to see something just because he's in it, but I do think he is a well-above-average actor*. Take that opinion and multiply it by 300million+ and you've got something.
(*: My personal standard for acting is the ability of an actor to play a character and have the actor themselves disappear. Tom Hanks is extremely good; the difference between Forrest Gump and Jim Lovell (Apollo 13) is pretty big, but I still think I see some Tom Hanks-ness in the similarity. A worse actor is Jennifer Aniston, who seems to play Rachel Greene over and over again. Some of the better actors include Patrick Stewart (who does have a certain force of personality, but the distance between Professor Xavier and one of his Shakespearean roles is quite large), and sometimes the smaller players in sci-fi series are suprisingly capable; I've been extremely impressed by Michael Shanks playing Daniel Jackson in SG-1. Daniel Jackson himself is an almost dead-on impression of the original in the movie (I initially didn't realize they changed actors, because it had been a while since the movie), and he does the traditional character-body transfers extremely well, as opposed to Richard Dean Anderson, who does the understated humor thing well but always seems to be Richard Dean Anderson.
Obviously, this is not most people's standards, who I think want the actor to leak through and then pay for the actor. Thus, the cream-of-the-crop tend to be semi-good actors that people really like. Tom Hanks is, IMHO, a minor anomaly in that I think he's pretty good (although not the best) and he's also pretty popular.)
The exhibitor (eg Cineplex Odeon) take 50% $5 and pass the rest up the chain.
Unless the chains somehow got more power, this isn't the case.
When I worked for General Cinema in the late 80's, there was a sliding scale for the amount of profit the theater kept. It started out at about 10%, and increased each week the movie ran, and I believe it capped out at 50%. So, a movie had to run 5 weeks to get 50% of the box office ticket.
That's why concession prices are so high...they only made (then) about $0.75 a person for an opening showing. Most movies never stayed running for 5 weeks, so the only place they could recoup costs was to charge a bazillion percent markup on popcorn and soda.