“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made — and it’s even starting to happen with the little ones, which is what’s really freaking me out — decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee,” she added. “Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to fucking want to see those.”
Cheaper movies are exactly what we need. There are 5 major studios (Disney, Paramount, Universal, Sony, and Warner Bros.) and between them they release about 20 movies a year with budgets over $100mil. They need to be releasing about 5. In 2023 14 movies were released with budgets above $200mil and only one (Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 3) broke even on box office sales.
Throwing money at it doesn’t make a movie good. Some movies require big budgets to effectively tell their story but most don’t and the more money a studio throws at a movie the less control the actual film makers have. The story and a film maker with a coherent vision are the two most important elements.
To prove it here are some iconic movies made for less than a million dollars: Mad Max, Napoleon Dynamite, Clerks, Paranormal Activity, Friday the 13th, Halloween. Between 1 and 2 million we pick up movies like Rocky and Saw. My Big Fat Greek Wedding cost $5 million.
Studios need to focus on 1 big movie a year and then take lots of small budget risks. The box office profits from the $5 million Get Out would pay for 25 $10 million risks. Find a decent script with a passionate filmmaker behind it, give them just enough of a budget to get the film made and stay out of the way. The overall quality of cinema would be vastly improved.
There’s a great rant by Matt Damon about how we don’t do mid-budget films any more. We get cheap crap, we get AAA level blockbusters with 200 million marketing budgets, what we don’t get is 40 million movies.
The ones big enough to tell big stories but small enough not to attract attention from mid level execs wanting a producer credit.
To be fair, a lot of people are just going to wait for any mid tier movie to show on streaming rather than go to the theater for something that isn’t a high budget spectacle.
Cheap crap is low risk, so who cares if it flops
Yep, before the mid-tier movies came out on DVD, which gave them another boost of profit - in many cases bringing the movie from a loss to profitability.
In the streaming world this mechanism doesn’t exist.