COUNTING THE COST
As 2015 gears up to (block)bust records with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avengers: Age Of Ultron and SPECTRE, among other, Total Film asks what skyrocketing budgets really mean for the future of cinema.
Words Simon Kinnear
With such riches heading into cinemas, it might appear that movie-making is in rude health, crossing borders and accruing box-office dollars like never before. As The Guardian box office expert Charles Gant explains, “If you go through the calendar, film for film, 2015 looks significantly bigger than 2014,” stocked with films that “reach a very large audience that hardly ever go to the cinema, but can be motivated to come out for a major event picture.”
Yet, according to some, going large is an attempt to hide an industry in crisis, beset by challenges from TV, streaming and videogames. In this scenario, the better the megabusters perform, the worse it is for those working on lower budgets, whose films become harder to fund and distribute. Is this a case of ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall?’ Or can blockbuster success actually fuel further innovation throughout the film world?
Hollywood’s growth spurt hasn’t come overnight. Trade bible Variety reported in 2013 that “studios routinely spend north of $400m to produce, market and distribute their big-event films around the world.” A glance at the 2014 chart-toppers bears that out; nearly all benefited from a ballpark budget of $160-210m for production, roughly doubled for marketing.
The goal, increasingly, is to earn one billion dollars worldwide, joining a once elite group now on the verge of 20 members. Still, achieving the jackpot is hit or miss, with studios burnt by high-profile flops like John Carter and The Lone
Ranger – even if ‘flop’ means they only earned around a quarter of a billion dollars.
Fear of failure hangs heavy over the industry, especially after blockbuster legend Steven Spielberg’s warning in 2013 that, “there’s going to be an implosion where three, four or maybe even a half-dozen mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”
What’s noticeable about 2015, though, is the familiarity of the blockbuster slate, as if Hollywood has compacted its history into one super-sized, fail-safe package. There are new chapters from (among others) Star Wars, The Terminator, Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, The Hunger Games and The Avengers – a real-life case of live, die, repeat. Gant cites Disney’s acquisition of Marvel and Lucasfilm as a turning point, cueing a frantic arms race in Hollywood. “Studios are absolutely chasing ‘franchisable’ blockbusters, and everyone is looking with envy at Disney,” he attests.
In a mature domestic market, global audiences offer a significant boost, especially for franchises,
as The Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson explains. “The first year, enthusiasm was directly proportionate in each market to the level of popularity of the book. By the second movie, the first movie had started to reach people.”
Catching Fire only outperformed its predecessor by $16m Stateside, but doubled its overseas gross.
Viewed like that, the possibilities seem endless, but nobody believes that Hollywood product is untouchable. “You’re never too big to fail!” claims Jacobson. “Audiences decide what makes a hit. And until they’ve decided, then the jury’s out.” Quality still matters, and the credentials of 2015’s blockbusters should insulate against disaster. “Films such as Avengers: Age Of Ultron and
Star Wars: The Force Awakens would have to be significant creative failures to miss the audience that is hugely anticipating them,” reckons Gant. But what of the smaller films beneath the blockbusters’ shadow? In 1989, Steven Soderbergh’s debut sex, lies and videotape shattered the box-office ceiling for indie films; yet by 2013, Behind The
Candelabra was deemed too risky for a Stateside cinema release. HBO funded a TV premiere, hastening Soderbergh’s retirement from movies to concentrate on small-screen work.
The exasperated filmmaker explained the economics to Deadline: “You have to gross $65-75m just to get out,” he said, pointing out that a movie without such a forecast was not
‘You ’ re ne ver too big to fail. Au diences decide a hit , unti l then the jury’s out ’.
nin a jaco bson
deemed financially viable. He added that “five years earlier... we probably would have gotten [ the
money], but the pressure has gotten so extreme.” “Certainly, the number of movies most studios are making and how eclectic and diverse those slates are, that has changed,” believes Jacobson. “It’s harder to get a movie green-lit now than it used to be.” One alternative is to harness the recognition factor of a hit novel. Gone Girl and
The Fault In Our Stars outperformed many blockbusters in 2014, while fellow “book-buster”
Fifty Shades Of Grey arrives in February. Even so, nothing is certain. When The Hunger Games was green-lit, Jacobson says, “the book had sold 100,000 copies. Nobody could have anticipated that it would blow up into this.”
For original screenplays, meanwhile, it seems that the route to screen is either go very expensive ( Gravity, Interstellar) or very cheap. In the latter category, one notable success is Blumhouse Productions, who hit upon a microbudget model with
Paranormal Activity that continues with the Sinister
and Insidious movies. All three franchises return in 2015. Measured by profitability, Blumhouse effortlessly outstrips the cost-to-profit ratios of even the most successful blockbuster. Are the majors doing it wrong? Boss Jason Blum recently told Den Of Geek: “Hollywood’s a lot about ego and money and, ‘My movie cost $200m!’, you know? And more, more, more.” His brutal conclusion: “Movies would be better if they were made for less money.” He might be right. While developing
Bad Neighbours, Seth Rogen and Nicholas Stoller, sick of budget negotiations, issued an ultimatum to the studio: “‘What is the amount of money we can make this for where we stop having these conversations?’” The price of creative freedom was to halve the original budget to $18m. Note: this wasn’t an art-house obscurity but, as Stoller pointed out, “a hyper-marketable idea.” Bad Neighbours made $267m worldwide.
For production companies in the middle like New Regency – makers of Gone Girl, 12 Years
A Slave and the forthcoming Birdman – to do well, “you need to be bold or you need to be big,” reckons CEO Brad Weston. New Regency consciously positions itself in the “intersection between bold and commercial,” citing the philosophy of company owner and producer Arnon Milchan that, “if you do something with quality, it will work.”
Another unsung hero is Fox 2000 ( The Fault In Our
Stars, The Devil Wears Prada) who, says Gant, “specialises in those mid-budget films that studios are allegedly not making.” President Elizabeth Gabler explains its remit: “We pretty much handpick our movies. We have a very small development slate. Our ratio from development to production is very high. The one criteria we have is that our films have to sustain a wide release at the onset.” In other words, the films must stand up against the blockbusters, which is one reason behind Fox 2000’s deliberate – and successful – counter-programming of ‘female-oriented’ material. For independent producers, too, the key is to provide audiences with alternatives to the blockbuster model. Film4 Commissioning Executive Sam Lavender believes that, “If anything, the studio system – by concentrating so much on the tentpoles – has vacated more of that space.”
Co-productions help to mitigate the risk. “Almost every film in the independent sector is from a combination of financiers,” confirms Lavender. The issue is certainly helped by the arrival of independent financiers like Megan Ellison of Annapurna Pictures ( Zero
Dark Thirty, American Hustle, Her) – “the hero of the hour,” Gant reckons. For everyone else, from first-timers to Veronica Mars, there’s Kickstarter.
One area affecting all filmmakers is the sheer level of competition from other media. “There are so many options for what people can do with their time that you need to measure up or exceed in order to succeed,” stresses Jacobson.
Weston concurs – to a point. “We are competing for consumers’ attention without question… but people still show up if you give them something they want to see. The theatrical experience, like a great video game or like watching something on Netflix or HBO, is all different.”
Instead, he believes the biggest threat is closer to home. “It’s crowded for all sorts of movies for almost every weekend of every month. The most challenging part about our business is finding a good weekend to release a picture that is not cannibalised immediately.”
For Fox 2000’s Gabler, modern technology offers fresh ways of generating buzz, essential without a huge marketing budget. “Now we
have social media. You can do so much for such a modest cost that you end up having a whole platform to reach people that never existed for us before.” On The Fault In Our Stars, Fox 2000 worked with author John Green to mobilise his 3.4m Twitter followers, helping to spur punters to the cinema and catapult the movie to a $304m worldwide haul.
Competition is so fierce nowadays that a movie’s direct rival might not even be a movie. Recordings of live performances, tagged ‘event cinema’, is impacting significantly on box office takings. As Gant points out, “Billy Elliot: The Musical topped the UK box office in September, beating the opening weekend of The Equalizer. Tom Hiddleston in Coriolanus at the Donmar outgrossed in UK cinemas Ralph Fiennes’ expensively made
Coriolanus film.” In this environment, regardless of budget, the onus is on material that, as Jacobson puts it, “would demand communal viewing, that people would want to get a babysitter, pay for parking and go sit down in a dark room with strangers to watch.”
So what does the future hold? One intriguing debate centres on the notion of dynamic pricing. Odeon has reportedly instigated a surcharge on blockbusters: a premium on popularity. Conversely, Lionsgate UK CEO Zygi Kamasa has suggested the opposite should apply: homegrown movies should be cheaper to watch. “In most other industries, retail price is related to the cost of production,” yet “a blockbuster can cost $250m and a UK independent film can cost $4m but it’s £10 or more to see both.”
Another possible future was heralded by Film4’s ambitious multi-platform launch of
A Field In England. The rationale, according to Lavender, was simple: “By making something at a lower budget and completely underwriting the cost, we could have complete freedom on how and when we make it available to audiences, to learn things and fold those into commissioning decisions in the future.” The key lesson, he believes, is that, “In a world where people want things quickly, and on their choice of platform... a simultaneous theatrical release can feed a TV premiere and can feed a DVD release in a kind of virtuous circle, rather than everyone thinking it’s always a zero sum game.”
In 2015, that strategy will be super-sized by Netflix’s first big-screen production, Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend, premiering simultaneously online and in IMAX cinemas. It feels like a perfect storm of contemporary cinema. As the sequel to a critical and commercial hit, it has franchise appeal. Its action, enhanced by IMAX, ticks the ‘event cinema’ box. Its Chinese setting directly taps into the world’s fastest-growing market. And, as Netflix’s Ted Sarandos observes, “fans will have unprecedented choice in how they enjoy” the film. With so many options, the onus isn’t on size but on quality. “Just because you’ve heard of something doesn’t mean you want to see it. You want to see it because you want to see it,” believes Jacobson. Even on a megabuster like Mockingjay – Part 1/2, “we just try to focus on adapting those books well”; anything else is “just a lot of crazy confetti falling around the main mission.”
Ultimately, it’s the size of cinema’s ambition that matters most, and the potential for growth in that area shows no sign of stalling. “Cinema is an extraordinarily adaptive thing, and people’s desire for it is adaptive too,” concludes Lavender. “It’s one of those times where the kaleidoscope has been shaken. We’re all making the future together.”