Movies 2010 Hollywood

[Mariu Carlton]

WhenI speak of moviegoers, I mean people who get out of the house and into a theater as often as they can; or people with kids, who back up rare trips to the movies with lots of recent DVDs and films ordered on demand. I do not mean the cinephiles, the solitary and obsessed, who have given up on movie houses and on movies as our national theater (as Pauline Kael called it) and plant themselves at home in front of flat screens and computers, where they look at old films or small new films from the four corners of the globe, blogging and exchanging disks with their friends. They are extraordinary, some of them, and their blogs and websites generate an exfoliating mass of knowledge and opinion, a thickening density of inquiries and claims, outraged and dulcet tweets. Yet it is unlikely that they can do much to build a theatrical audience for the movies they love. And directors still need a sizable audience if they are to make their next picture about something more than a few people talking on the street.

People who know how these movies are made told me that the film-makers could not have held those shots any longer, because audiences would have noticed that they were digital fakes. That point (if true) should tell you that something is seriously wrong. If you cannot sustain shots at the dramatic crux of your movie, why make violent spectacle at all? It turns out that fake-looking digital film-making can actually disable spectacle when it is supposed to be set in the real world. Increasingly, the solution has been to create more and more digitized cities, houses, castles, planets. Big films have lost touch with the photographed physical reality that provided so much greater enchantment than fantasy.

The glory of modernism was that it yoked together candor and spiritual yearning with radical experiments in form. But in making such changes, filmmakers were hardly abandoning the audience. Reassurance may have ended, but emotion did not. The many alterations in the old stable syntax still honored the contract with us. The ignorant, suffering, morally vacant Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull was as great a protagonist as Julie Marsden. The morose Nashville was as trenchant a group portrait and national snapshot as the hopeful Stagecoach. However elliptical or harsh or astringent, emotion in modernist movies was a strong presence, not an absence.

The results are there to see. At the risk of obviousness: techniques that hold your eye in a commercial or video are not suited to telling stories or building dramatic tension. In a full-length movie, images conceived that way begin to cancel each other out or just slip off the screen; the characters are just types or blurred spots of movement. The links with fiction and theater and classical film technique have been broken. The center no longer holds; mere anarchy is loosed upon the screen; the movie winds up a mess.

Yes! The PG-13 rated Risen delivers at multiple levels and I am excited to share the good news with you this Easter season. Boasting actors like Tom Felton as Lucius (you will know him as Draco Malfoy form the Harry Potter movies) and starring Joseph Fiennes (American Horror Story, Enemy at the Gates, and Shakespeare in Love) as Clavius, this film is well acted. (Watch the trailer here).

Lastly, Risen signals what I hope will be the beginning of a positive trend in Hollywood making movies that are closer to the biblical accounts but that are also good movies. People will go see them and spend money. But more importantly, Risen also leaves the viewer emotionally moved and with a positive view of the evidence for the most important event in human history. As a Christ-follower I was moved on several occasions as I thought the film accurately captured important emotional moments often missed in other films about the resurrection (e.g., the disciples breaking bread together on the run and the interaction with the risen Jesus on the shores of the Sea of Galilee). This adds to the earthiness and humanness of this event as well.

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TV looms large over this new movie lineup. How could it not? TV is everything. TV is how people see movies; TV is where people want to watch movies, on demand and on their own terms; TV is what Twitter wants to talk about. Most of all, TV knows how to keep people coming back, which is its job, every day and every week, and is a quality that, above all others, the people who finance movies would dearly love to poach.

Hollywood Palms Cinema is the latest of our full-service, fully integrated Restaurant, Bar and Movie Theater to open in the greater Chicagoland area. We seat you in high-backed recliners in our beautifully decorated auditoriums, each one featuring state-of-the-art digital picture and sound. We bring you movies the way they were really meant to be seen, big, bright, bold, and beautiful; with terrific sound and the style, comfort, and ease of your very own luxury recliner... you don't even have to share an arm rest! We will bring right to your table everything to eat and drink that your little heart could desire. Our goal is to provide every guest with an unforgettable experience through unmatched hospitality, the highest quality food & beverages, and flawless presentation.

Lewis said pre-production is roughly four weeks, production is three weeks, and post-production can range anywhere between six and 12 weeks. But he added that if the air date for the movie is early on in the Christmas movie season, he and his team can speed up post-production, bringing the turnaround time close to only three and a half months.

Misty Talley, a producer and editor who has worked on both Hallmark and Lifetime movies and has worked with Lewis as a producing partner, said that Hallmark was able to shoot a lot of movies before the strikes started. (Lewis noted that he typically films between May and September).

The studios found themselves in an ever-increasing spiral whereby blockbusters were getting more expensive to make, meaning that they needed to spend more on marketing to offset the risk, which meant they needed to ensure their films are the biggest of the season, which inflated the budgets and the circle continues to turn.

The studios often try to hide the true cost of a movie, in order to make themselves seem thriftier, smarter or more in control than they actually are. I performed a quick check for the 29 blockbusters I have inside data on compared with their budgets listed on Wikipedia. 90% of the films cost more than their Wikipedia budget with only three costing less than is declared on Wikipedia.

In 2005, Dreamworks overestimated the number of Shrek 2 DVDs they would sell in the US by 5 million units. This caused the studio to missing their quarterly earnings target by 25% and their shares fell as a result.

If instead of playing with Hollywood you invested that same money in a standard high street bank paying 3% annually, over ten years your $115 million would become $156 million (an increase of 35%). And I am sure this is a fairly low return for that kind of cash.

Yes, but only by a very small margin. The average Metacritic score (i.e. average of film critics out of 100) for profitable films was 55 and for unprofitable movies it was 49. Similarly, IMDb audiences rated the profitable films an average of 6.5 out of ten and the loss-making films an average of 6.1.

As you can see, the majority of the money collected at the box office does indeed come from countries outside of the US and Canada. However, studios spend a higher proportion of their marketing money in North America. This could be for a number of reasons including the higher cost of advertising in America, the temptation to spend more in the country which studio execs actually live in and because the US is often the first place a movie is released and the media enjoy reporting on huge opening weekends (and decrying massive flops).

I am completely confident that the information in this article is a true representation of how these Hollywood blockbusters make money. The reason I am being a bit cagey about exactly where the data is from is partly to protect sources/ friends but also to avoid inviting lawsuits. The purpose of this site is educational and my sole intention is to help explain how our industry works. In the past, I have been contacted by lawyers for various companies, trying to prevent the sharing of key data points relating to their business. So far, I have managed to avoid lawsuits and also to avoid having to take any articles down, but if I were to offer the full figures as a download (or details of how to do the same piecing together I have) then I suspect I would get the wrong kind of attention.

Thank you Steve for your informative article. The research that went into it must have been enormous as it covered so much of the movie business including distribution. I am currently involved with the production of the GHOST RIG and we are waiting for the new SAG rates, before we finish it. It is less than 10m but it is a great story that resembles PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN. I was really interested in the DVD sales figures and the overseas theatrical markets as the advertising would be less. Thank you for your info!!!

Michael L Edwards

Secondly, the UK tax credit (which is effectively 20%, not 25%) is often counted as a deduction on the production budget rather than as first income. It can be counted as either (there is much debate) but often the quoted budget figure has already taken this into account.

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