While I'm waiting for some video to export, I thought I'd take the time to write a little follow-up to my pro-John Carter rant of Sunday, which can be found here: In Praise of "John Carter (of Mars)".
I was listening to the radio the other night, specifically the World Service's World Business Report. I was surprised to hear John Carter is on course to be what the presenter described as the biggest financial flop in film history. This surprised me as Uma Thurman film Motherhood took just £88 on its opening weekend in the UK, and £40,000 in its US run, while Polish film My Nikifor took £7 in its UK release (source: Guardian.co.uk)
John Carter has already taken a vast $180m at the box office, meaning the film has taken more in a few weeks than the entire GDP of the Cook Islands. The problem is films cost more to screen than they do just to make. The budget of John Carter is said to be in the region of $250m (yes, a quarter of a billion dollars!), add to that the print and advertising (or P&A) costs of an additional $100m or so. So John Carter is more than half-way there?
No. Of the £9 or so you spend on a ticket, 50% of that (depending on the film, and production-specific negotiations) is kept by the cinema, so John Carter will have to make in excess of $700m just to break even, nearly three times its original budget. In order to do this kind of business, John Carter would have to become one of the top-grossing films in history.
When George Lucas was working on The Phantom Menace, he observed the film would have to be one of the top-ten grossing films in history at the time to break even. By modern standards, The Phantom Menace was made for small change at $115m (less than half the budget of JCoM).
While promoting Red State, Kevin Smith expressed his dismay at what he called "the Hollywood Math" where his $4m would need to take $50m at the box office to break even, more than twelve times its budget. This was as a result of the $20m P&A budget.
Until fairly recently, even disastrous box office needn't have been a problem. So vast were DVD sales a few years ago that a theatrical release for some films could almost be called an advertising expense. However, in the last couple of years DVD sales have plummeted. I am willing to put it down to my increasing age, but I don't get the same thrill from buying DVDs as I used to.
Gone are the days when I would buy a video and watch it repeatedly. These days it is a rare thing that I watch the same film more than a few times and my DVD collection can be likened to a woman's wardrobe - I use 20% of the contents 80% of the time. Speaking for myself, I try to catch an interesting film in my local indie theatre on its second run, and leave it at that. The films I do buy on DVD, tend to be those that I want or need to watch again, and have already been out for some time constituting the "long tail" of DVD sales.
With a number of very large franchises having been and gone - The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Star Wars - and their successors not clear, it is even tempting to think this DVD collapse may have been artificially delayed. Analysts point to the increasing popularity and ease of virtual rental, where a video can be streamed to a computer, phone, tablet computers, or games console.
Speaking for myself, I still like physical discs whether DVD or BluRay, and can foresee buying them as long as they are available. I still buy my music on CD after all.
So how can a movie take half a billion dollars at the box office and still lose money? The short answer is the massive budgets of these films to begin with, and people's perception of movie budgets. When Spider-Man was rebooted, the released budget for that film was $80m. A few years ago this would have been considered a huge budget, but more than a few fanboys were complaining "you can't make a good movie for just $80m"!
First off, it depends on how you define a "good movie". The most important thing, theoretically at least, is the script, and happily a good script is no more expensive than a bad script. Second, special effects are incredibly time-consuming to produce and, ergo, expensive. Third, movies now only have a very short window in which to find their audience and turn a profit, before they are dropped.
Cleopatra, 1963
All in all, I can't help but feel we are in a similar situation to that of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Studios were throwing increasingly vast sums of money at evermore expensive films that were failing to find an audience. Then, as now, they were attempting to buy their way out of poor box office takings.
Beyond a handful of franchises such as Twilight, Transformers, various superheroes, (all adapted from existing popular series in another medium), it feels as though the studios and distributors do not know how to connect with their audience. The films that finally rescued the system in the 70s were not large-budget SFX films, in fact it was entirely the opposite - the films that brought the audiences back in droves were the personal, low-budget films of directors like Dennis Hopper and Martin Scorsese.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
They were human stories about people the audience could identify with. The problem with these modern mega-budget movies is that, by and large, their intended audience of adolescent males can get their fix elsewhere. Computer games for a few years have had photo-realistic graphic, immersive action, and half-decent stories.
Once CGI achieved photo-realism, arguably in 2003 with Gollum, it was only a matter of time before the cannibalistic race to realism run out of fuel. Once every effects film looks real, what new ground is there to conquer?
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