Hey, just a question for you industry types, i just read the new Judge Dredd only has to ‘bank’ 50 million before they decide to make sequels. The budget is 45 mill apparently, which is low for a comic book film, and i’m guessing it won’t be heavily promoted either. I’m assuming they mean 50 mill at the box office because they will making a killing on the ancillary end?
There is a book out there that could enlighten you all about the inner workings of Hollywood, Peter Bart’s The Gross: The Hits, the Flops…the Summer That Ate Hollywood. It’s all about the summer of 98 and goes into some depth about a number of big films from the year, Armageddon, Godzilla, Saving Private Ryan, Lethal Weapon 4, etc.
If you want a good idea about what Hollywood thinks of adults and even thinks of films, give it a read.
one day they needed to produce a quick movie for a tax write-off (no seriously, this shit happens all the time)
How exactly does that work? Do they get tax write-offs for certain types of movies, or do they just need to produce one more, or what?
@Blue
Most of the people I know, some of whom are incredibly intelligent, prefer blockbuster films, because they only watch films for entertainment. Seriously, give me a rational argument why we should think there’s anything inherently wrong with that.
Didn’t they make a fourth Bourne film, which is based on a book that isn’t by the original author, and by a director who didn’t make any of the first three films?
So it’s one of those things like Terminator 3 that you have to really ask if it’s really part of the same canon as the original films, because it has zero creatively in common.
Just because studio execs don’t care about the quality of the film doesn’t mean none of the people who actually create them are emotionally invested in the quality of their product. To make a very profitable franchise you need both. You need the marketing to get people into the theater, and the quality to make them walk out wanting more movies and more merchandise.
give me a rational argument why we should think there’s anything inherently wrong with that.
Uh oh…….
@Jirin -
“Didn’t they make a fourth Bourne film, which is based on a book that isn’t by the original author, and by a director who didn’t make any of the first three films?”
“So it’s one of those things like Terminator 3 that you have to really ask if it’s really part of the same canon as the original films, because it has zero creatively in common.”
What do you mean, Jirin? I feel like I missed something in what you were saying. This comment seemed to come out of nowhere? How does this relate to what you were talking about? I’m confused. lol
Btw – Tony Gilroy, who wrote and is directing the new Bourne movie, wrote the first three Bourne movies so there is some connection, right? In terms of it not being based on a book by Ludlum, doesn’t that mean it’s just like Bond?
@Jirin
Most Hollywood blockbusters are terrible, but my attitude is, let them be terrible…
I really oppose this attitude—not because I think people are stupid for enjoying these films; rather, I want to love good Hollywood blockbusters (or Hollywood films, period)! And I hate the fact that the majority of them are crappy. If Hollywood can make films like Jaws, Star Wars, Die Hard, Alien or even something like North by Northwest or Gone With the Wind, then they have the capacity to make good-to-great blockbuster-style films—and I’d like to make more of these.
I think when a lot of people talk about films as ‘adult’, they really mean ‘dark, unhappy, political’.
That’s not what I mean. I think films for adults can mean this, but not exclusively. I think it means dealing with issues that grown-ups find interesting in an intelligent and thoughtful way.
Most people watch films for entertainment and don’t like films that bum them out or remind them of the problems of their real life, so of course those kinds of films are inherently less lucrative than a film about exceptional human beings benevolently fighting evil.
OK, but this doesn’t mean that lighthearted and escapist fare needs to be dumb and poorly made, right? Singin’ in the Rain (which I plan to see tonight on the big screen!) is an escapist film, but it is a well-made film—and, yes, I’d say it’s made with intelligence. Ditto Die Hard or The Matrix.
@Matt
You mean there are concepts that are more or less inherently entertaining, then ?
Sorry, I know I’m not explaining myself well (but I’m having a hard time with this). Here’s what I mean. Do you ever watch a film and feel incredulous that anyone could have read the script and felt like making a movie from it was a good idea? That’s sort of what I’m getting at when I talk about an idea (or script) having merit. (I don’t know if I would refer to this as artistic merit, though—as that makes it sound like we’re talking about serious Art films.)
@Santino
Jazz, this is definitely the case. The only way you can work in animation is if you’re developing something years in advance.
What I find hard to believe is that one can’t get the story right in two or three years! My feeling is that if you can’t get the story right in two or three years, then the general concept is significantly flawed and no good.
@DiB
They do. This has already been covered — the for-the-arts-sake stuff.
You mean for only arthouse/independent movies? I don’t know why it has to be that way. I don’t see why the writing has to be rushed for Hollywood movies (except in a few cases). If I’m an executive, couldn’t I just fish around for a good script? Say I find one and maybe the script isn’t perfect, but there’s some good ideas in it. Couldn’t I schedule making the film sometime in the future—after the script is refined and improved? Why can’t they wait until this process occurs and then make the movie?
Actually, your anecdotes suggest that what I’m suggesting actually does happen, but it also suggests that deadlines aren’t ruining the film—it’s some other process, that seems to involve with messing up the script.
Jazz has spoken my thoughts exactly!
“I really oppose this attitude—not because I think people are stupid for enjoying these films; rather, I want to love good Hollywood blockbusters (or Hollywood films, period)! And I hate the fact that the majority of them are crappy. If Hollywood can make films like Jaws, Star Wars, Die Hard, Alien or even something like North by Northwest or Gone With the Wind, then they have the capacity to make good-to-great blockbuster-style films—and I’d like to make more of these.”
“OK, but this doesn’t mean that lighthearted and escapist fare needs to be dumb and poorly made, right? Singin’ in the Rain (which I plan to see tonight on the big screen!) is an escapist film, but it is a well-made film—and, yes, I’d say it’s made with intelligence. Ditto Die Hard or The Matrix”
“My feeling is that if you can’t get the story right in two or three years, then the general concept is significantly flawed and no good.”
I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. Some projects take years to develop (let me introduce you to my friend Mr. Kubrick) and some artists just have difficulty cracking the material (this is getting into more deep discussion about writing that I’d rather not get into but the point here is that sometimes time is helpful – conversely sometimes it’s not helpful).
But I know what you’re saying and you’re right, sometimes you’re just beating a dead horse. But I don’t necessarily buy into the idea that Pixar is rushing through their story department to crank out the next movie. However I’m not that well versed into the specifics of Pixar’s processes or individual films to know for sure.
“Say I find one and maybe the script isn’t perfect, but there’s some good ideas in it. Couldn’t I schedule making the film sometime in the future—after the script is refined and improved? Why can’t they wait until this process occurs and then make the movie?”
This is usually what happens. A lot of screenplays go through development and this development process can be quite beneficial to the end product. Of course there are cases where a studio/production company hires a writer to adapt a book into a screenplay or commission an original screenplay based off an idea or pitch. There’s a million different ways a script gets written and a million different ways a movie gets ultimately made.
If we’re talking about “how does the script get messed up”, I would surmise deadlines have less to do with that than other factors (the director changes the intent of the script to fit his vision, talent, studio, producers, etc). With so many hands that touch the script after it leaves the writer’s hands, the possibilities are endless.
“i just read the new Judge Dredd only has to ‘bank’ 50 million before they decide to make sequels…. I’m assuming they mean 50 mill at the box office because they will making a killing on the ancillary end?”
I’m not sure. A lot of box office discussion gets confusing because they play a lot of semantics games with them. “Opening weekend” box office, “domestic” box office, and “overall” box office are all completely different things. Bank could mean they need to make $50million in profit, which would mean Dredd would have to make $95million box office overall (which to be fair, is quite easy considering the circumstances, so I guess we can assume we’ll see sequels).
Myself, I don’t know if I’ll see it. I’m not enthusiastic about the idea but, meh, action or something. The trailers look really good but not exceptional.
“one day they needed to produce a quick movie for a tax write-off (no seriously, this shit happens all the time)
How exactly does that work? Do they get tax write-offs for certain types of movies, or do they just need to produce one more, or what?"
Dude, who the fuck knows… this was back in the 80s so whatever rules they were exploiting are probably gone or become something completely different. One thing that comes to mind is that oftentimes the government allows a business to write off losses from taxes, and so of course with Hollywood accounting they could fluff the books back a bit to gain a little more than they spent. Consider the satire The Producers.
I could open up a whole can of worms here, but for your consideration, Uwe Boll’s career started because German tax incentives were offered to cover any losses on movies made in Germany. The point of doing something like that is to create jobs — movies employ a lot of people (not just crew, but also many local services) and have a very high economic multiplier (a guy in town told me that he determines it to be x4, but I don’t know his methodology and economic multipliers are one of those voodoo economics thing where real numbers don’t stand in for real numbers but theory), so that theoretically the tax losses would be covered by the taxes people with jobs would pay back to the state.
New Mexico was the first of the United States to open up a tax incentive program to bring film industry work to the state. Several mainland states followed to varying degrees of success. (New Mexico’s has been mostly successful but this stuff comes and goes as each state adjusts their incentives, right now twice as many productions are going on in Louisiana for instance.) The incentive program is rather controversial, anywhere from just random people that don’t want them Hollywood lib’rals running ‘round town mucking things up to questions about how ultimately profitable to the state these incentives are (depends on the accounting. One irony of the film incentive program is that it was based off of a surplus from gas tax revenues, which means when gas prices go down, New Mexico has less money to give in incentives and may create a deficit, but when gas goes up, New Mexico has a bunch of angry ’Mericans all bitchy that gas costs money). What doesn’t help is clear moments when productions predictably exploited the incentives to gain back more than they were giving in work. For instance, it was regular practice for productions to only hire extras locally instead of actual production workers because all they had to do was account nominally for the percentage of New Mexicans hired, not for the quality of work they got. The absolute biggest example of this, once again, is that dragon of a person to talk about, Michael Bay. Transformers actually went and shot several scenes they had absolutely no intention of including in the final product merely to get the nominal extras they needed to get their 30% tax return. So for the cost of maybe a few thousand dollars, they got ~$75million back. Or there was one specific case people got all grumpy about where an actor for another production (I still don’t know who this is or what production, because apparently there’s some key relationships between the state film office and the producers involved that nobody wants to sever) spent $20million on a private flight and the production got that money back from the incentives, even though the flight itself was not a New Mexico business. Recently New Mexico has capped its incentives and provided further limits to them, which is why Louisiana is getting so much more work. It’s complicated and even as a state film worker, I don’t necessarily take the side of the people who say the state should just leave the incentives alone — if they’re there at all, they have to work.
But that’s a very localized discussion that is not nearly as interesting to everyone else as it is to me. My purpose in bringing it up is to illustrate that as a business, a lot of monetary exchange that occurs in the film industry doesn’t necessarily relate to the end-goal product of a movie at all. Sadly.
I have no idea what the deal with Night of the Comet was but it wasn’t a big studio production. Many small houses exist for, for instance, dtdvd releases et al, and they all too have their little ways of hedging their bets, and so it goes.
@Jazz: “they have the capacity to make good-to-great blockbuster-style films—and I’d like to make more of these.”
Everyone wants Hollywood to make better movies, even Hollywood. As discussed, Hollywood has a better distribution pattern to shill their shit when things don’t work out. The best bet is to not go see them. To bring up another popular topic on this forum, isn’t that what mainstream critics are for? “Did the movie turn out good?” “Why yes, yes it did.” or “Nope, PASS!”
“My feeling is that if you can’t get the story right in two or three years, then the general concept is significantly flawed and no good.”
Well, yes and no. I mean, there are a lot of different ways of taking this. Ever seen Wonder Boys ? Writers sometimes spend years on something mammoth, only to one day discover it’s all for naught and has to be discarded. I’ve already covered much of what I know about the production pipeline for Pixar and what that meant for Brave. Whatever we got wasn’t necessarily what they intended, and that loss isn’t necessarily all their fault, but comes down to workflow and deadlines, and we cannot actually say for sure that what was lost was better or worse. So if the story ended up conventional, which is much of your arguments, at least it’s conventional —> it hits the beats it needs and for someone not familiar with the Disney Princess narrative (younger kids), introduces it skillfully, n’est pas? YOU say it doesn’t work but all in all it fits craft-level narrative requirements and the general concept (observation and adaptation of tradition) is still a benevolent theme.
“You mean for only arthouse/independent movies? I don’t know why it has to be that way. I don’t see why the writing has to be rushed for Hollywood movies (except in a few cases). If I’m an executive, couldn’t I just fish around for a good script? Say I find one and maybe the script isn’t perfect, but there’s some good ideas in it. Couldn’t I schedule making the film sometime in the future—after the script is refined and improved? Why can’t they wait until this process occurs and then make the movie?”
They do, all the time. And no, not only for arthouse/independent movies. The Hollywood studios’ art-for-art’s-sake movies come out in December for Academy Awards season. Summer is where they make their bofo cash, and the rest of the time (when people don’t go to see movies) they throw out their little Mid-Sizers and Little Guys and see if maybe a few new concepts will catch.
In other words, if you’re looking for ‘good’ Hollywood movies that privilege concept over commerce, you’re best bet is to go when the kiddies are in school.
“Actually, your anecdotes suggest that what I’m suggesting actually does happen, but it also suggests that deadlines aren’t ruining the film—it’s some other process, that seems to involve with messing up the script.”
It’s not ‘some other process’ but too many other possible processes to fully account for as a generalization. Remember: Murphy’s Law. Each and every movie is in fact different, in how it’s handled, produced, what happens during its production, and so on. The needs of the production ultimately end up informing the results, and it does not always work out. If a generalization is needed, in most cases the people working on it do care and have a vision, the studio has funded it with the expectation of making money, and every single movie has the underlying hope that it will be a new beloved classic like the one’s you’ve mentioned. That’s impossible though because classics are by definition exceptional, cream-of-the-crop stuff and even if the bar was raised (i.e., every movie was as good as The Avengers or better), it would only make the memorable classics that much rarer.
—PolarisDiB
Jazz, did you like Hugo? I wasn’t as big on it as some others but it is an example of a big budget film made well although it kind of flopped unfortunately.
“The incentive program is rather controversial, anywhere from just random people that don’t want them Hollywood lib’rals running ‘round town mucking things up to questions about how ultimately profitable to the state these incentives are”
Just as an aside, shuffling productions to other states/countries is also controversial to people in Southern California because this outsourcing effectively puts below the line craftsmen who make their living working gig to gig out of a job.
Does anyone know much about pre-production/develomental costs for Hollywood films? do budgets include the pre costs or just the filming costs as well as post? Because it seems to me that incredible wastes must be occuring when projects remain in development for too long then get dropped.
“Just as an aside, shuffling productions to other states/countries is also controversial to people in Southern California because this outsourcing effectively puts below the line craftsmen who make their living working gig to gig out of a job.”
I’m quite aware of this, and believe if I’m not mistaken that California eventually, very recently, responded with their own incentive program.
The good thing is that it has increased interest in media production nation wide along with the increase of Internet technologies and so on, so that a wider cabin industry of media producers has been created.
“Does anyone know much about pre-production/develomental costs for Hollywood films? do budgets include the pre costs or just the filming costs as well as post? Because it seems to me that incredible wastes must be occuring when projects remain in development for too long then get dropped.”
More or less. Development is the stage of production where they determine the budget and the deadlines and hire the department keys, so it essentially becomes pre-production once expenses start flowing and they start putting together the logistics of how the movie will be made. If it never really hits that point where the logistics are decided, the movie is officially in development hell Oftentimes a studio will pay for a script and then sit on it for a very long time, or even pay for one that never gets produced. There are screenwriters who’ve made a lot of money selling scripts and have yet to have had one produced!
—PolarisDiB
“There are screenwriters who’ve made a lot of money selling scripts and have yet to have had one produced!”
It’s a good way to make a living. lol
“did you like Hugo? I wasn’t as big on it as some others but it is an example of a big budget film made well although it kind of flopped unfortunately.”
I thought (in the U.S. at least) that the studio did an absolutely horrible job of marketing this film.
I would find it difficult to market a bore like Hugo, thought they went the Harry Potter route which seemed wise. Once kids got a whiff tho, they turned away.
I really oppose this attitude—not because I think people are stupid for enjoying these films; rather, I want to love good Hollywood blockbusters (or Hollywood films, period)! And I hate the fact that the majority of them are crappy. If Hollywood can make films like Jaws, Star Wars, Die Hard, Alien or even something like North by Northwest or Gone With the Wind, then they have the capacity to make good-to-great blockbuster-style films—and I’d like to make more of these.
Those masterpieces are spread out over several decades. How many terrible films came out alongside North By Northwest?
It’d be nice if every film that came out were a great film, but how does the quantity of bad ones impact the quality of the good ones? Ten great films, ten terrible films is exactly the same to me as ten great films, two thousand terrible ones. Because I only have to watch the great ones.
@Santino
The comment about Bourne Legacy is more a continuation of the discussion of the profit mentality of Hollywood.
How they’ll bring back a franchise, which received a conclusive ending, with a completely different creative staff, even if it means retroactively changing the ending of the previous films, just for a profit calculation.
@Jirin -
I know what you’re saying and of course rebooting any franchise is going to have profit considerations. But why does it just have to be “for profit calculations”? I’m very glad WB rebooted the Batman franchise because I think Nolan met, if not exceeded, the previous Batman films. And I feel like he (along with Aronofsky, who also had a different take on Batman from the previous versions) was motivated by artistic reasons, not solely money.
I have no issue with franchises getting rebooted if they are done successfully and bring something new to the material. I’m not sure how anyone is going to top Nolan’s Batman trilogy but I’m certainly open to seeing what WB does next with the franchise. Obviously it’ll be disappointing if it devolves into Schumacher crap but maybe they’ll get a fresh young filmmaker who will go even darker than Nolan did and it will be even better than anything we’ve ever seen.
As for Bourne, I like the franchise and am excited to see where Gilroy goes with it. I think he’s made some very effective films and he obviously knows the world of Bourne. My hope is that it’s even better than the Matt Damon films. But maybe they won’t be, who knows. I understand that owners of successful properties want to keep that chicken laying golden eggs and as long as they do, I’m ok with that and think artistry has the potential to be included in the conversation (the Bond franchise is probably the most obvious since it’s been going on for almost 50 years).
Yeah i Nolan clearly puts a lot of thought and effort into his films. if anything you could accuse him of being meticulous to the point of sterile.
“I would find it difficult to market a bore like Hugo”
They didn’t have much trouble marketing the book it was based on. It sold over a million copies and won a Caldecott medal.
@ Jazz~
If Hollywood can make films like Jaws, Star Wars, Die Hard, Alien or even something like North by Northwest or Gone With the Wind, then they have the capacity to make good-to-great blockbuster-style films—and I’d like to make more of these.
You’re talking about 3 distinctly different Hollywoods here. Classic, New, and Big Business (my name for it as it stands now). And of the films you listed, only Die Hard represents Big Business Hollywood. It’s a rather rare example of a really good film made under this business model.
Jaws, Star Wars and Alien were all made in the heady days of New Hollywood, when directors briefly became auteurs in the European sense and were given creative control amid the crumbling ruins of the old Studio System, which was still being run in the late 60’s by the same old codgers who started Hollywood in the 20’s, and who were totally at odds with what America had become in the turbulent youth-oriented 60’s. Perhaps unfortunately, the outrageous success of these new hippy directors propped the studios back up and allowed them (with the new marketing strategies developed for Godfather, Exorcist, Jaws and Star Wars) to regroup and regain control over these upstart directors. Ance once again the producers assumed control, only now they weren’t cigar chomping tycoons but business-savvy bean counters hungry for the mega-bucks.
I think it’s a lot harder to make really good movies in this kind of environment, but it does occasionally happen.
Here’s a segment of the film made from Easy Riders, Raging Bulls – an amazing book that details the rise and fall of the New Hollywood. If you can find the whole movie or read the book, it really helps to understand what happened and why Hollywood is the way it is today. (Even just this extract makes the differences between New Hollywood and Classic Hollywood as it had become in the 60’s pretty clear)
I get annoyed when a movie is considered an ‘adaptation’ or ‘sequel’ of some property whilst only having only a superficial at most relationship to that property. It is yet another of the reason why sequels and adaptations are made in the first place, because it targets a pre-established audience demographic. Because I, Robot was so titled, people compared it to Asimov and it came up the loser of the comparison (because it’s a pretty bad movie, all considering). Not that not having it titled differently would have made a better movie, but the original script wasn’t called I, Robot …. They threw in the Asimov title to milk the Asimov demographic and it was, after all, about self-aware robots. In otherwords, they could have called it Blade Runner 2, with the exact same result and the exact same reaction: what the fuck is this shit? The key is that if it was called something new, not as many Asimov fans would have gone.
I do think serial storytelling ‘world of’ stuff is coming back, like how at this point all they need is Jack Sparrow and they’ve got Pirates of the Carribbean, regardless of continuity to the other films. And in a way that’s not a bad thing, since it is comic book like: stories get revamped, characters are explored from entirely different angles, heroes from similar ‘universes’ meet and then go their separate ways ( Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs Predator ), etc. Not every James Bond has to be Sean Connery. The problem is that the audience does in fact crave NEW characters and NEW franchises for one, and also that it’s frustrating sitting through an X-men film not knowing if this is going to be ‘one of the good ones’ or not. Again, critics help, but only so much. I care about the X-men universe but no amount of critical acclaim for First Class, which I did in fact read a lot of good reviews of, can get me past how bad X-men 3 was and how bad Origins: Wolverine sounded and was reviewed.
My general policy on this matter is to follow a “Until the one that sucked” rule whereby I’ll follow a franchise I actually enjoy until I hit a movie I don’t, and then I’m finished with the franchise until I hear of a substantial revamp. I have not gotten indication that The Amazing Spider-Man is significantly different enough from the Raimi trilogy to have the revamp overcome how bad Spiderman 3 was. I watched one Saw movie and that was enough. But I am still eager to see Iron Man 3.
—DiB
But Polaris – I, Robot was the perfect title! Or actually iRobot would have been even better, considering it was essentially about Steve Jobs and the robots were iPods and iPhones and iMacs projected into the future. Oh yeah, and it also brought in the Asimov crowd lol!
@Polaris -
“I care about the X-men universe but no amount of critical acclaim for First Class, which I did in fact read a lot of good reviews of, can get me past how bad X-men 3 was and how bad Origins: Wolverine sounded and was reviewed.”
Wait, are you saying you didn’t see X-Men: First Class? Did you skip Batman Begins as well? I would think given how bad the last two X-Men movies were, you would be clamoring to wash out that bad taste in your mouth when word got out that First Class was decent. In my opinion, it’s the best X-Men film (yes, even better than X2).
And what makes Iron Man the exception? Is it because Iron Man 2 wasn’t such an abomination as X3 Last Stand? I mean, I’ll see Iron Man 3 but I’m not terribly excited for it and really am only giving it the benefit of the doubt because I’m hoping Shane Black instills some new blood into the franchise. But skipping X-Men: First Class seems unfortunate – I think Matthew Vaughn has really reinvigorated the franchise and I’m looking forward to where it goes next.
“Oh yeah, and it also brought in the Asimov crowd lol!”
lol. Yeah, that giant contingent of Asimov sycophants that give Twilighters a run for their money.
lol. Yeah, that giant contingent of Asimov sycophants that give Twilighters a run for their money.
Hey, believe it or not, they’re out there, and while not as vociferous as the Twilighters, they are legion.
(See what I did thar?)
“Yeah i Nolan clearly puts a lot of thought and effort into his films. if anything you could accuse him of being meticulous to the point of sterile.”
Interesting, I’d definitely argue that he is sterile, and he certainly gives the impression of meticulousness, but a great deal of his sequences are often shockingly sloppy, given this icy, professional sheen he covers his films with.
“the original script wasn’t called I, Robot …. They threw in the Asimov title to milk the Asimov demographic”
. . . although, technically, the Asimov collection I, Robot was guilt of pretty much the same thing. Asimov intended it to be titled Mind and Steel, but his publisher lifted the title it was published under from a story published by Eando Binder in 1939.
Joks
““Some artists work better when they are under constraints and limitations and some prefer to move quickly (see Soderbergh, Eastwood, THE BEATLES!). I don’t necessarily think more time (or more anything) will mean better.”
There is no direct relationship perhaps, but i’d say that, in general, the directors that spend more time on their shots tend to produce better looking movies. Eastwood’s movies are not that great looking, at least not compared to the great auteurs of Europe or Asia, or even Kubrick, and the same goes for Soderbergh. This doesn’t make them bad film makers, but i think if you are a mise-en-scène style artist—and no, i’m not going to entertain another boring argument about how all film directors are interested in the visual component because that is obvious and dull and essentially a dodge—you probably aren’t making films that are all that aesthetically captivating.
Soderbergh puts more effort into his shots than Eastwood though, and his films can be interested to look at occcasionally but nothing mind blowing.