Jay G.

That's true of big-budget pictures, but there's still risky movies getting made, just at a smaller budget.

Some are indies that are bought up by studios after they're made, like Paranormal Activity or Little Miss Sunshine. Some of these are huge hits, but sometimes a studio buys an indie that flops, like Hamlet 2, but since it cost so little, it's not a terrible loss that keeps the studio from functioning, or stops them from buying other indies in the future.

Then there's the "arthouse" divisions of major studios, that cultivate smaller films with riskier subject matter, like Brokeback Mountain. Sometimes these are referred to as "Oscar bait," since they're more likely to win awards at the end of the year, but studios are also producing them with the hope that a few of them will become outsized hits.

Then there's stars with enough clout to get films they want made. People like Steven Soderbergh, who alternates between projects intended to be box-office hits, and more personal projects. Studios will often fund these riskier personal projects to keep in business with the actor/director in question, but finance at a much lower budget than what they would give an intended blockbuster.

Matthew Chmiel

Paranormal Activity is a "risk" that has paid off and given Paramount a nice seat of cash to be safe on. DreamWorks paid $250,000 for the film with the intent of remaking it. Due to the DreamWorks/Paramount fall-out, the film was sitting on a shelf for nearly two years. Paramount was able to pick the film up in turn around early in 2009 and the rest is history. Paramount spent only $10 million on prints and advertising and pulled in $100 million plus in profit alone from the theatrical release. Paramount only spent $17 million on the sequel (including P&A) and it's already grossed $80 million.

Brokeback Mountain is one of the rare successes Focus Features (Universal's art house arm) has had. Most of Focus Features, especially those that are done in house, are box office bombs. Example: Taking Woodstock cost $30 million to make in-house and made $10 million. With most studios have been dumping their art house arms as of late, I'm surprised Focus is still standing. Fuck, I'm surprised Universal is still standing after the past few years. However, in the art house realm:

Miramax? On life support.
New Line? On life support. [Honestly, as it stands, New Line is now Warner's "genre" arm.]
Paramount Vantage? Dead.
Picturehouse? Dead.
Warner Independent Pictures? Dead.

Fox Searchlight still stands as they're the smartest ones out of the bunch. Unlike Miramax (when under the regime of Weinsteins), Fox Searchlight has always stood by its filmmakers and releases regardless of what hits or what fails. Only other I can think of is Sony Pictures Classics, which rarely develops anything in-house as most of their output is done via acquisitions.

gmanca

While the article was a bit weak, his long-running series on various flops that you can read on the Onion is great.

Numanoid

I've never understood why a film's success is related to its profit. Seems to me that it should depend more on how many people see it.

Let's say that a small independent flick that cost $1M to make is seen by 20 million people, grossing $200 million. It's a tremendous success, right? But if another film that cost $225M to make is seen by the same 20 million people, it's a bomb. Why? Twenty million people saw each picture, how can one be a success and one be a bomb? If all you care about is dollar signs, I guess that makes sense, but is that all that movies are about? There should be a new term for success based on eyes that see it...to separate it from the financial side.

islandclaws

Well, without those dollar signs movies wouldn't be getting made at all. So, yes, they have to count.

People judge a film's success by how good it is, studios judge is by one thing and one thing only: $.

gmanca

But it's also the studio's responsibility to accurately market their products. Take Pennies from Heaven for example: it was first marketed using the funny bits from the film, which was bad considering it was Steve Martin's first ever serious role. Once the film was out, MGM started to market it as "Steve Martin's dramatic performance."

Same thing with Hulk; that Super Bowl ad did not do the film any favors as it made it look like an action-packed extravaganza whereas it was more of a dramatic film. How many more people would have gone to see it if they thought it wasn't another light comic book movie?

You end up asking for the wrong people to come to your movie if you don't market it correctly.

Dr. DVD

I love how people only like to point to domestic grosses when judging a film's financial success. Let's look at some movies that didn't mop up in the U.S., but really did well once the whole world was taken into consideration.
(These numbers are from Box-office Mojo)

5th Element
Domestic: $63,820,180 24.2%
+ Foreign: $200,100,000 75.8%
= Worldwide: $263,920,180


Troy
Domestic: $133,378,256 26.8%
+ Foreign: $364,031,596 73.2%
= Worldwide: $497,409,852

* A lot of entertainment mags still refer to this as a "flop."

Waterworld
Domestic: $88,246,220 33.4%
+ Foreign: $175,972,000 66.6%
= Worldwide: $264,218,220

I'm not defending the above's quality, though I still find it an entertaining action flick.

I also use Matrix Revolutions as an example, but that's already been done. All of the above had big budgets, and they all made them back. For some reason the Hollywood pundits act like only the opinions of US audiences matter when it comes to movies, and if it's not their dollars buying tickets, they could care less how much money the movie makes.

Dr. DVD

Sad, but true. It also seems that opinions regarding a movies quality (as in actual content) can change if a film doesn't perform well. I've seen cases where critics like the movie, audiences in NY and LA like it, it's generating buzz for awards, then once it tries to go nationwide it lands with a thud. Next thing you know the movie that was once a Best Picture contender is up for original script and/or supporting actor/actress . Then in retrospect, nobody seems to remember liking it at all.

Jay G.

I really don't want to nitpick about specific movies. I already said that both Matrix sequels were successful financially (at least when combined). My initial comment was about their quality as films, not their success.

Do you know this as a fact? Is there a quote from them saying as such? Have they said they'd never make another sequel?


The film still has a solid 31% critical average on rottentomatoes:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/speed_racer/

As for it being "ahead of it's time," like Scott Pilgrim, there needs to be more time since its released before that statement has any sort of historical validity.

I think Benigni's actually a good example because it's so extreme. He followed one massive risk with another massive risk. One was a hit, one was a flop. The point of the article isn't about why one failed and one succeeded (you can read this article for that), but to point out that you can't have risky successes without risky failures.

Of course, again, I think this is an argument for risk as a necessary component of filmmaking, with flops being an inevitable byproduct of risk, instead of an argument for flops being necessary in and of themselves.

I wouldn't say it's "easy" to recoup costs. DVD/Blu-ray sales provided another avenue of revenue to studios, but the DVD market is dwindling, and Blu-ray isn't recovering all of it. Online video streams and downloads is a growing market, but may not be as profitable as the DVD/Blu-ray market.

Plus, success on home video is almost always directly proportional to theatrical success. There's a reason why Transformers 2 was one of the biggest selling DVDs and Blu-rays, and it's because it was a hit at theaters.

While it might be nice to think that every film makes money eventually, it's simply not true. Even if it was true, studio's don't want movies that make money "eventually," they want movies that make money now. If they don't get films that are hits right out the gate, they don't get the money back in time to make more movies next year, and the year after that. It's why MGM's plummeted into bankruptcy, despite having the Bond franchise and partial rights to the Hobbit. They don't have the cash at hand to finance even sure-fire hits (or as sure-fire as anything in Hollywood can be). It's been of little solace to them that something like The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 may make money eventually, they need money now.

That said, initial flops that turn into slow-burn successes can have an effect on the industry. Both The Thing and Tron were flops on first release, but their cult success has caused studios to bank on furthering each film series, with a prequel and sequel, respectively. But of course, those film's eventual success would disqualify them as being "flops" according to Rabin's definition.

Jay G.

It's not so much ethnocentricity as it has to do with doing rough calculations to determine a film's success.


This article explains it well:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/movies/faq/current-films/
Here's some notable excepts:
Keep in mind that production budgets are almost always estimates, and box office take is only the gross (meaning there's no way to know for sure how much a studio got from a film it distributed itself, and even harder for films that were distributed by someone else, as often happens in foreign markets).

Also, the examples of Troy and Waterworld are well-known examples of exceptions that prove the rule. For most films, the ratio of domestic to foreign is closer (maybe 40/60 on average), while some films do far better domestically than in foreign markets. For example, The Blind Side made 82% of it's BO domestically, while Star Trek made 67% domestically.

Dr. DVD

Interesting point and well noted. I've noticed that epics can make a good chunk of change from overseas, but comedies and dramas almost never play well abroad.