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Variety.com - H'wood belt tightening

Variety writes about how studios are thinking that cost cutting is the answer to their financial woes. Or staying leery of "mid priced" movies that cost $30 to $70 million dollars to make. Or shifting advertising from TV and print to the web.

Each studio has its own mandate, its own needs to fulfill, but they are all talking about cutting back the number and/or cost of their movies in order to react to the dwindling market, chiefly due to the ever improving home alternatives - DVDs, HDTV, cable, sattelite, Amazon, Netflix, etc. The theory is that fewer movies produced will allow staffs to spend more time and focus on putting out better quality movies. Budget cutting is just being, well, cheap. My opinion: entrenched power structures and players don't scale back well. In much the same way that you'll never get a 30% raise but will have to quit and find a new job that pays 30% more, the nature of business is to NOT change internally very much. Cultural inertia in large companies, where there are egos and entrenched players with positions and budgets to defend, is an amazingly powerful force for...not much to happen.

I haven't made fun of it in a while so here goes - the writing style of Variety is hilarious - it is so self important with all of its contractions and shorthand - auds, prexy, perfs, etc. I misuse its vs it's with reckless abandon and have more craggy, consonant laden acronyms than an Eastern European governmental committee, but I don't call audiences auds.

CinemaTech, as usual, has excellent coverage/commentary on all of this, summed up by the headline Wrong Answer: Make Fewer Movies, which is how I found this article. His closing line posits the question well:

Studios already know how to make and market expensive, big-budget projects. But what about the $10 million feature film - or the $100,000 video series for cell phones?


If Wedding Crashers can be made for $30 to $40 million (plus a huuuuuuuge long running advertising budget - it feels like I must have been seeing those first ads in high school) - why can't entirely entertaining movies be made with those kinds of budgets consistently? They had some decent name brand actors in there, plenty of locations, some good gags, no need for tons of VFX work. It was simple, it was FUNNY AS HELL as was The 40 Year Old Virgin. For each demographic, what is to stop more movies from being made in that budget range - comedy is clearly doable, how about drama? Action obviously demands a higher budget, as do period pieces, but come on - how hard does it HAVE to be? I keep hearing stories about poor planning and rushed prepro (woops, see, I'm doing shorthand, I mean pre-production) costing TONS more later. The focus of the movie matters, too - Wedding Crashers/40 Yr Old Virgin obviously aren't winning any awards for set design, costume design, lighting, cinematography, etc., which all take time/skill/money more than a competent/professional/non-outstanding job, but look at the high dollar, total busts that the article points out - Stealth and The Island. Stealth was dumb and stillborn from the get-go, but The Island COULD have been good - good cast, good concept, but just stuuuuupid execution.

Perhaps the industry as a whole needs to just change its ways? I don't know, I'm not privvy to enough inside action on all of that to say with any certitude. It just seems ridiculous at times, but then again, I'm not making big feature movies....

-mike