> And here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
- 2001 and Star Wars: 10 million each
- Independence Day: 75 million
- Transformers: 150 million
- Kill Bill 1+2: 50 million
- Jurassic Park: 65 million
- King Kong: 200 million
- Blues Brothers: 30 million
- Fast & Furious: 90 million
- The Fellowship of the Ring: 100 million
- Harry Potter: ~150 million each
- Full Metal Jacket: 15 million
- Jarhead: 72 million
- Apocalypse Now: 30 million
- Black Hawk Down: 90 million
- Terminator: 6 million
- The Matrix: 60 million
- Terminator 2: 100 million
- Casino Royale: 100 million
- Quantum of Solace: 230 million
- Sherlock Holmes: 125 million
- The Godfather: 6.5 million
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.
Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
The biggest real cost of a film is film; the stock, its processing and the prints to be distributed to the theaters.
This makes the distribution channel narrow and the market is such that spending more money almost always mean breaking even or earning tens of millions. The financials and agreements are so convoluted and unfair, that most actors and producers want to get paid upfront because they know the system is rigged against them.
Shooting big expensive grandiose scenes is useful when your business model is based on excessive production expenses.
However, we are at that point where technology for pre-visualization and digital blueprinting could radically change how a film is made. A famous effects artists and inventor is going back to 70s style sets and models but using modern high frame rate cameras etc. He is building a giant digital-virtual studio. And he's the type of person with the background, skill and clout to change how this technology is viewed and used in the industry.
The future is fair productions where major participants can defer compensation for backend, digital filmmaking, digital film distribution to theaters, end the studio's cartel of exorbitant rates, use pre-viz, blueprinting, CG, mix of modern and classic technology.
Hmm. I went to the theatre (first time since a long time as the experience feels antiquated and overpriced) with friends to see Sherlock Holmes, and the opening scene perfectly exemplifies the point: for about ten second you see a shot of the cathedral of Strasbourg. Half of it consists of a CGI explosion. I live there, and to produce this shot, they locked this part of the city for one week.
Ten seconds. One week. A whole team plus equipment. To the other side of the world. Seriously.
When seeing the scene I found that downright shocking, especially given the 10€ hole burning my pocket.
By comparison it takes Turn10 Studios three days[0] locally to gather enough information on a track to subsequently work on for one year. That's a full-length, five kilometer track.
I know this is not the same, and various other things come into play, but I just can't help but have an alarm bell ringing when I see movie production costs. See for yourself (budget in $):
I know those $ do not mean the same across time, but still, you can see going from simple to double produces crap (CS vs QoS), or produces twice the length at arguably the same 'quality' (whatever that means) for a significantly smaller cost (LotR vs HP). I don't see either why F&F costs thrice as much as BB, and almost twice as much as KB.Bottom line: MAFIAA, please produce non-crap and control your costs instead of blaming piracy.
[0] http://forzamotorsport.net/en-us/underthehood4/