Why Are Movies So Expensive To Make?
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- čas přidán 28. 05. 2024
- 14 movies came out in 2023 that cost $200 million or more to make! And of those 14... only 1 was profitable! Movies are getting WAY too expensive to make and are becoming riskier and risker investments each year. But why are they so expensive?
In this video, we'll be dissecting what makes movies so expensive to make and talking about the state of the industry today. From production, to distribution, to marketing, we go into it all!
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:38 - Cost of Making Movies
02:47 - Production Costs
06:42 - CGI & VFX
12:13 - Distribution Costs
13:14 - Marketing Costs
15:56 - State/Future of the Film Industry
2023 . Expensive Movies . Killers of the Flower Moon . Barbie . Fast X . Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 . Indiana Jones Dial of Destiny . Little Mermaid . Mission Impossible Dead Reckoning . The Flash . The Marvels . Elemental . Ant Man Quantumania . Transformers Rise of the Beasts . The Marvels . Oppenheimer . Super Mario Bros . Movie Production . Marketing Costs . Production Costs . Leonardo DiCaprio . Robert Deniro . Martin Scorcese . Leonardo DiCaprio Salary
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#killersoftheflowermoon #moviechannel #marvel - Krátké a kreslené filmy
At 1:05 we made a mistake when showing the 14 films with $200+ million budgets that all flopped (except for 1). Oppenheimer, Barbie, and The Super Mario Bros Movie shouldn't be there. Their budgets weren't $200 million AND they were very profitable. It should be Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom, Wish, and Napoleon. Sorry for the mistake, and thank you weltenbummler2535 for pointing it out!
👍👍👍
Well thanks for acknowledging the error but can you just make the edit and re-upload the video with the correct facts?Most people not in the know might think that those are facts and not everyone reads the comment section.
@@rmjavinesyou’re joking right
@@rmjavineswatch it again foool
@@keithrgShould have fixed it in post :)
High cost in effects usually is lack of planning. The Creator had amazing effects with a modest budget.
When you have morons like Waititi, who wanted his shots fully rendered each time, whenever he updated script drafts (4-5 times with the scene he mocked the VFX artists, for example), they absolutely will cost more.
When you have someone like Edwards who understands VFX and is respectful of the craft and the money, you get stellar work.
@@alexman378 exactly. it's my understanding that a huge part of what's making CGI so "bad" is executives constantly changing their minds about what they want, destroying almost finished projects, and forcing artists to start over from scratch on a ridiculous timeline, sometimes multiple times. I loved Across the Spiderverse, but apparently crunch and creative overhaul was a huge factor on the production of that film :(
I keep saying that movie was so much better than I expected and I’m not a huge fan of john david washington. Denzel is the goat and a legend but his son just doesn’t do it for me but The Creator was excellent to me
The creator also sucked shit.
Talk about being wrong. Films and budgets are played years in advance and this was all thanks to the production problems with Cleopatra and The Alamo.
They need to have solid scripts before production. I know there's a lot of stories about how movies had unfinished scripts in production and were successful, but I bet there are WAY more that were unsuccessful.
Those were done by competent filmmakers who understood their assignment, and they’re absolutely not the norm. By all means, movies like Gladiator should have failed miserably, but turned out phenomenal due to a massive alignment of the stars.
Filmmakers who write and direct their own features are where its at. One artist, one movie, one vision 💯
@@poindextertunes Not necessarily. It’s a skill, but it applies to very few. Take Zach Snyder for example. When he has other writers doing the writing, you get Dawn of the Dead, 300 and Watchmen (like them or not, they have a huge fanbase). When he writes his own stuff, you get Sucker Punch and Rebel Moon. Just because the Tarantino’s and the Nolan’s out there do it, doesn’t mean everyone should, or that you’re good by default if you do it.
@@alexman378Coen brothers>>>>>Tarantino
@@nobad6843 Objectively no, but even if they were the case, that’s still two people writing.
Terminator 2 was a very expensive movie, but James Cameron the director did every trick to keep costs down. He also had experience art director , while learning the trade
Terminator 2 was a pretty lavish production. I'm sure they employed some slight of hand, but they spent like crazy on new CGI tech, stunts, and practical effects.
@@JonSmith-hk1bqThose helicopter shots going through the tunnel are still amazing.
@@TheMilhouseExperienceNot as amazing as Arnold !!!
James Cameron works his crew to death
@@JonSmith-hk1bq But it also had practical solutions that cost practically nothing. For example: that re-constituting puddle of the T-1000? Moved with a simple hair dryer. The sound it was making? It was yogurt moved from one container to another.
In Empire Strikes Back, they struggled to move the broken C-3PO on Chewbacka's backpack around with a relatively expensive remote control system. The solution came in about 20 minutes: to move it around with strings.
This kind of creativity seems mostly absent in these probable money laundering projects with budgets that almost always end up being three digits. Can you believe the embarrassing dumpster fire that is Madame Web cost 80 million dollars? It's absolutely mind-boggling.
These movies go up in costs while they look increasingly more awful and, ironically, cheap. And it can't be explained with just inexperienced crew. Ridley Scott's Napoleon is like a joke in every way. The script, the acting and the cheap look due to the lack of constructed sets.
I think another main factor is simply because many producers just kind of forgot how to do cheaper movies. They don't know how to improvise when something goes wrong, and they don't give directors time enough to carefully plan things to BE cheap. They put deadlines even when the project is still being written. I mean, take Eyes Wide Shut, for instance. Kubrick made the scenes of Tom Cruise walking through the city in a studio, just projecting the image behind him and matching the lights. It's so simple!
Today, they would build a huge green set, film Tom from all types of angles, then send to the VFX artists to create the street, the buildings, the lights and everything else, and if it's a flashback they rather do a deepfake instead of a recast. Then the director or the producer looks at all that work and either scraps the entire scene or tell the VFX team to change everything. Tons and tons of money and time and hundreds of people working for something that could be done with a small crew in a tiny room.
Another example is the Spider-Man suit being CGI all time. That's literally so f*cking stupid. Tom Holland is more than capable of performing many stunts, and even if he wasn't, that's what stunt doubles are for. Just put a real suit on him and leave the CGI for what's really impossible to do on camera. Sam Raimi did that in his original trilogy, and that's why those movies still look perfect. But Raimi came from independent filmmaking, so he knows how to be cheap.
Not only are producers forgetting how to make movies on the cheap, there are now more producers per film than there used to be. The Original Star Wars had two people credited as producer/executive producer. The last one had 10, and you know at least half of them did nothing more than collect a check.
Well said. Another key example is the plane crash in Tenet. Nolan and his team did the numbers and found it was cheaper to film a real plane crashing instead of VFX the entire thing. Another filmmaker wouldn't have been allowed and what you would of got was so weak sequences with no tension as you know what your watching isn't real.
@@filmreviewer117 wrong
@@workinprogress2077 I'm need some context to know why this is wrong.
@@filmreviewer117 look for my answer in the thread. it's less complicated than most people think. The filmmakers have little to do with the total budget
Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t make 40m on Killers just because he’s a big name, it’s because streaming movies have to pay a huge cast/director premium since their backend isn’t worth a damn. If it was gonna be a straight theatrical release without streaming, just earning backend, his quote would be a lot lower. So every big streaming movie pays out as if it was a hit and is the largest single reason those kind of movies get inflated
Yup. With Apple+ there's no real box office since they don't even really do hybrid releases. So if they want Leo, they got to pay Leo based on what he would have earned if it went a traditional release way... Do I approve? No but I get it... The all you can eat distribution model of modern cinema really has changed how these actors are paid...
@@stickynorth Get rid of Leonardo DinCaripo and Robert DeNiro and it would be 100 million budget.
As a manager of a movie theatre, we do not take a big chunk of box office sales lol. We get almost nothing
Theaters "Take" so much of the Box Office because THEY ARE THE BOX OFFICE!!
They have to rent/lease the film from the studios to even show the thing.
I hope with the success of godzilla minus one it allows more moderate budget films to be made and leads to less overworked cg artists
Godzilla only got made for a moderate budget with great effects since the VFX film culture in Japan is particularly exploitive and basically work for peanuts. Done normally, it’d be several times its budget
With the success of Godzilla Minus One Hollywood decides to out source vfx to Japan.
making a profit shouldn't be the goal since it's art, but also they destroyed the dvd aftermarket with streaming so now a movie either has to have only big actors or a fully unknown cast to get its budget back, there's no room for b-movies currently and that's not good for anyone
I've cancelled all my streaming services (HBO was the last to go. there's so many great shows on there but cancelling Rap Sh!t they crossed the line) and watching movies at home can be so difficult. some you can't rent at all, some you can only rent from shit distributors like Prime which have DRM that hobbles you to 720p on non certified screens, and some are ok coz you can get them off Apple TV in HD, buuuuut running them on my gaming PC which is attached to my big monitor is a pain because it's windows and Apple obviously hates that. I find myself resorting more and more frequently to *other* methods of acquiring media, simply because these vultures have made it so goddamn challenging to watch movies through appropriate channels, which honestly does make me miss physical media a little bit.
Hollywood is hardly art. It's basically just long-form advertorial content filled with propaganda and product placement...
It baffles me that there are actors who will get 70 million dollars just to star in a movie. They aren't movie stars like we had in the past. The movie isn't guaranteed to make money because of them, but yet they'll get much more than a guy like John Wayne would get for a role (proportionally). Just take a 1 million check, Leo, you don't need any more money
ik the movie star is mostly dead but I would say Leo is one of the few modern examples that could be comparable
The death of the movie star is one of the reasons things have changed for worse so i dont think is a good idea to hurt the stars even more.
@@scoliosis9478 I'd say he was the kind of guy to bring people to see anything, but the Killers of the Flower Moon box office proves that he's past his prime as a draw (not saying he's past his prime as an actor 😂)
@angelsunemtoledocabllero5801 I mean, if those guys don't want to work for "cheap", then we should make new stars that would want. Like I said, most people are not gonna see everything that a guy like Ryan Gosling makes just because of his presence. Unfortunately, most newer potential stars are accepting making content for streaming services that no one's gonna watch (and getting paid tens of millions of dollars for it)
Why should the studio and investors make more just so that the main actors make less? And why not just cut down the shooting time or danger for the talent?
YOU MISSED THE BIGGEST REASON. Funny enough I sat right next to the guy working on Henry Cavill's mustache. He was given hours to fix it. He wasn't paid 25 million. VFX doesn't have a union and is constantly being paid nothing. Disney constantly goes for vfx workers in India who get paid pennies compared to ones in the US. The biggest factor you missed was streaming backend. There is no backend when it comes to streaming. So instead of Leonardo DiCaprio getting paid in backend points he has to take it from the reported budget. All streaming movies have insanely high budgets due to this. I'd suggest doing a little more research and re-uploading to not confuse people but maybe that's just me. Have a good one and keep making stuff!
The last portion of the video literally explains that they have lost the second bite of the apple because of streaming not having a backend the way a movie could be profitable in the dvd days even if it bombed in the theater.
The 25 million dollar number is something that has been reported, and he doesn't claim it to be a fact. It does seem strange when it cost "just" 70 million dollars for the Snydercut which makes sense considering. Even though we don't know how much VFX work was required to be done on it. Movie twice it's length, completely revamped Steppenwolf, the additional scenes being shot. The Darkseid dream sequence, Flash reverse time and the two major Cyborg scenes inside his head were probably among the scenes from the original that were mostly greenscreen maybe some tempvfx.
As for the VXF artists, if they end up starting a union and all the companies are willing to sign up. That is going to increase the budget of movies by quite a bit. Not that I am against them doing it, right now the system is flawed if you make VFX for a movie that ends up winning Oscars for best VFX. You can be forced to close the studio because you need to underbid to get the contract to begin with. And on top of that don't get paid extra when the studio demands changes they have come up with later. That is not a system that can work or should be acceptable.
@@Bacbi Lol his reasons were "production costs" "CGI & VFX" the "distro cost" section mostly mentions theaters taking a cut. The final reason is "marketing cost." Streaming taking a backend should've been 80% of this video. It's literally the main reason why budgets skyrocketed in the past few years. I am currently developing 3 films for theatrical release and one for streaming. It's a pain. 70 million for the Snyder cut makes sense. They added more cast, shot more scenes, and redid the vfx. That's an insane price point.
As far as a vfx union is concerned that would be great. I worked with the team for fast and furious. People were forced to put in 20 hour days for 2 weeks to keep their jobs and they weren't even mentioned in the credits. If a vfx company wants to speak up they will be knocked out and the studio will just choose one from India.
@@julianterry6837 Isn't it more that streaming has eradicated the backend rather than taking it for themselves? Considering every single streamer besides Netflix is operating at a loss.
That is an unsustainable work model. If they speak up alone yes, with a union however. The studios would struggle to make those kinds of demands. And if it started getting known that they would stop giving work to union workers. Giving it to indian workers who will do it for pennies on he dollar. They could end up losing the current golden goose of being able to make a movie, and if it's bad put it in a vault and get back the money in the form of tax rebaits.
@@Bacbi Listened to podcasts about VFX industries over 10 years ago it has been like that and never changed a bit. Back in the time I've heard an senior animator got offer $25/ hour by R&H, of course he turned down the job offer...
The biggest reason he missed was that you sat next to the guy who did Henry Cavill's moustache. Ego much?
One thing that helped a movie like Godzilla minus one look so good for its budget was the fact it was written and directed by someone who knows VFX and what could get the most bang for the buck.
Also RRR indian movie
Movie studios never give you the true budget, they give you the "perceived" budget. If you make a 90 million dollar movie and call it a 200 million dollar movie in marketing and promotions, your movie now has a perceived value of 200 million. Most people can't tell the difference between a 90 million movie and a 200 million movie. There are 90 million dollar movies that look better than 200 million dollar movies. It's all PR.
Most studios cannot avoid those expenditure levels. They cannot just claim a movie has double the budget.
Hollywood actors make far too much money. I'm sorry, but if 20% of your entire movie's budget is going to just one actor, you're doing something wrong. But keep telling yourself that it's all okay.
Honestly. Especially considering that there are SO many Actors who don’t get paid what they are worth
Yeah they just pretendin
15:00 - it's forgotten history today, but back in the 80s and 90s (and earlier, but that's before my time), RADIO was a big part of it, I remember hearing the audio trailers on radio for movies and getting excited for them. I only recently realized that some of the creative ads were unique to the radio campaign and seem to have been lost to history, there's nowhere you can find them like you can a/v trailers. I remember the one for the horror movie I, Madman - it ended with "spend this Christmas with the Madman!", which I thought was hilarious an awesome and pushed me over the edge to see the film. Also, Batman '89 got TONS of free promo on radio from stations blasting the Prince songs nonstop in the weeks leading up to the release.
You might be surprised to realise that 80% of Americans listen to radio and that approach would still work today. I think that 80% is just not interested in todays fantastical movies if flying robots and vampires.
10:00 It's saving money, to not film on location. Wolf of Wallstreet has relatively simple VFX. It's much cheaper to pay a few artists to do it, then to fly the whole crew to Italy to get 10 Shots.
But here is the thing. You don't need to fly the whole crew to Italy to get 10 shots. The scenes in The Dark Knight Rises with Joey King climbing out of the pit had a crew of four or five people
Yeah it’s much cheaper to do VFX instead of location. Permits, insurance, travel for cast and crew, etc all adds up so much people don’t realize it
@@reptongeek While occasionally a second unit might be 4-5 people, that certainly isn't the norm, especially when there are actors involved. 4-5 people, thats just the camera department in most instances.
Part of it also comes down to planning. Christopher Nolan made Oppenheimer for $100 million and that was with a massive cast and it was a period piece which required a lot for costumes and sets and they did all practical effects as well. But because they planned so well they stayed in budget the whole time. Another example is Dune. Dune Part 2 is reported to have a smaller budget than Part 1 at $122 million compared to $165 million for Part 1 and both are very VFX heavy, but Villeneuve is a great director who planned ahead for everything. It can be done but you have studios who just throw money at the problems thinking it will solve everything. We need filmmakers who are passionate about what they’re making and who take the time to plan it out.
Part one probably had a budget of about 100 million and Part Two has a similar budget. That’s what we get with good planning and good creators.
@@Art-is-craftPart Two is just second half of book 1 you have watch both to say Dune was good or bad film it's not fair to judge on one part.
How much did Oppenheimer make back?
@@MASTEROFEVIL Oppenheimer made $960 million globally. After the $100 million budget and $100 million marketing spend the gross profit for the studio would be about $280 million after splitting the box office receipts with the theaters. Nolan also got 20% of the returns off the top so both he and the studio won financially on this one.
“Practical effects” it’s mostly CGI, some of it is practical
It's amazing that you use least music effects in your videos and yet your videos are breath of fresh air to watch and study movie concepts.
When everyone’s goal is a mansion and a super car/ ultra luxury motor vehicle then nothing can be affordable
Until movies are exclusive to theatres and only appear in a cinema the industry is doomed.
Hollywood math. The company that makes (production) a movie is seperate from the one that distributes it and often times the production company sells the movie at a loss to the distributor for tax reasons. Thats also why the actors demand huge pay because of what Lucasfilm dod to David Prowse
There’s a lot of CGI that doesn’t need to be cgi in my opinion.
I recently watched a video where even if they use practical props, they often end up using cgi to replace them and use the original as a reference only. So now people use both cgi and practical!
@@FilmStack I don’t mind using cgi for spectacular otherworldly stuff but a lot of the time they’ll cgi in something that you could just capture with a normal camera.
CGI artists are paid like sh*t
💯 truth, audience spoiled with the heavy budget films, studios pay so much to keep up with expectations; it’s also the studios fault to a degree
And the viewers still have access to all the older films decades ago at the swipe of a finger.
As a kid growing up. Not having all that access, I was thrilled to see the latest, because at the time I only had 12 channels with basic tv. I had a dvd player, but buying a dvd could be $20-$30, and renting sometimes means movies were out. So going to the theaters made more sense.
they are expensive, because they don't invest in the only thing that would really make a movie great.
they wouldn't need to overpay actors, CGI, marketing and streaming, if they would just write better scripts.
Writers haven't been mentioned in a 18 mins video.
Studios need to recondition people towards smaller budget films, yes they’ll have a few years of flops but eventually it will pay off in the long run in a world that isn’t dominated by franchise films and this will benefit the few blockbuster films that do get released as their wouldn’t be too many of them
The public does not care they just want a good movie and the general public is sick of flying robots and monsters.
I keep coming back to older films, like the noir classics from the 1940s and 50s. All that is needed is good directing, great acting, powerful story, and that's it. Editing (cut and paste) serves the directing vision and voilà. It's almost impossible to beat _The Maltese Falcon_ or _Casablanca_ you know?
People will always want movies. There is no art form to replace it. The medium will survive and thrive.
Yes there is, Tiktok. And I'm not saying that in support of it, I despise it
@@JaceDanielFilms Nonsense
Films don’t have to be expensive - our new feature film Warhol has just won Best Picture at The Paris International film Festival, and Best Picture at The 35th Girona Film Festival, Nominated for Best UK Feature Film at The 34th Raindance Film Festival, and is a Finalist for Best Narrative Feature at The South London Film Festival, and we just got into Cinequest. We worked with a hugely diverse cast and crew - in part by working with the Deaf Talent Collecitve. Yet, including everything, all costs, even flights to the festivals, our film has come in at under 200K and we have a global distribution deal on the table. It can be DONE, and you can make a living as a filmmaker! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Back in the mid 00's before smartphones I worked with a company that advertised on city buses. The amount of dumb movies we put on buses back then was crazy. These days, I rarely see movie ads on buses.
I see film and TV ads on buses in NYC, but not in suburbs.
Edit: now that I think about it, there is NO advertising at all in suburbs. All the cash for ads is put online and in cities.
Nice work, dude. Thanks.
I have always thought that it is ridiculous to pay movie stars the amount they do.
Very informative and insightful. Thanks.
Interesting and well made. Thank you for your work.
Great video! There is a 15th movie in 2023 that was over $200M, Napoleon.
I do not actually think it cost that much money.
Thorough explanation. Superb presentation.
This page should have a million+ subs. You doing amazing work man keep going!
Wow, thanks! 😊
Agreed. This is my favourite movie related channel. So much better than channels like looper or watch mojo
Informative thanks
This is a wonderful breakdown!
This is the first video I've seen from you. Very well spoken, and intellectually inclined. It wouldn't be a bad idea to make a series of "why do movies **** **** now?" I hope to see you again.
In early 2000s a massive blockbuster film would be max around 150mil and we could get still get small budget films but now all you hear is 150 million or more. Smaller budget films don’t even come to theatres or even being made in the first place and when they do - they’re in streaming and they’re forgettable films
The studios have lost their creativity and they have no stars.
Nice video!
Great vid - I recommend putting your script the same height as your camera so it looks less like you're reading and more like you're talking at us. Looking forward to the next one!
First time using a prompter and I think it was a little too low. I'll definitely keep it in mind for next time! Thank you 😊
Overpaid actors is draining the budget. When each actor wants 20-30 millions...
Movies don’t need to be this expensive, we just need better writers, and directors that can work with lower budgets like $40M-$80M and not just $200M or more million dollars, be more creative with filmmaking, that’s what fun about being a filmmaking, it’s the creativity of filming and scriptwriting
8:40 I know you didn't mean "the sequels" when referring to the Star Wars films made by Lucas himself, but Disney Lucasfilm did this a LOT as well.
It’s the fucking actors they coast 20 percent of the budget and the 50% goes to advertising
There have in recent time been suspicions from a lot of corners that the studios are inflating the movies with money laundering and tax write-offs.
But if we take that aside, I will make a simple point-out if the insane High Costs, and they are:
1. Bad/poor planning and budgeting for modern movies. Despite all bean-counters, there are a lot of wasted time and resources that eat up more money then needed.
2. Despite movies today having fewer more awesome practical effects = saved money on CGI, the amount of skillful CGI animators seem to not be enough as AAA movies in recent couple of years have had worse end-products then CGI from the early 90s like The Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, The Abyss etc. that makes the work time take a lot longer time for making it due to re-make work and go back to drawing boards etc.
3. The salaries have ballooned up to ridicules levels and the actors are not better actors than the past. It is not reasonable to pay an entertainer quality like The Rock
$50 million + expenses for a mediocre level movie. Many movies have 1,5/3rd of its entire budget on salaries alone.
4. The distribution costs have jumped up to very ridicules levels. Movies back in the 80s 90s and 00s did not have the internet advantage but somehow movies of AAA to B movies could go a long way on low distribution budget, but now demands sums that was total movie budgets in the past (!)
5. A lot of movies gained susses thanks to new mediums introduced in the 1980s that was home computers and video games. Movies like Rococo, Batman 89 etc reached all ages thanks to lower license fees but when the studios saw the profits the much smaller game developers & publishers did on the IP's they fast raised all license fees and demanded more of the cake..... that is greed instead of using the opportunity to make more interest in the movie/show the games are based on.
I hear you, and trying to end on an optimistic note. I truely believe hollywood has a terminal illness that cannot be cured. The ideology that has permeated the industry is only one symptom. The business model is insane, streaming makes no sense what so ever. What hollywood did in their pursuit of streaming was castrate themselves in the hopes they could piss quicker. The movie industry prior to streaming revolved around incorperating new technologies into their revenue streams. TV was a competitor at first, then they license movies to broadcasters. VHS was compitition, they worried that people would tape broadcast and not go to see movies, but a robust home video market emerged instead. So what Hollywood did until the height of its profitablity was grow the various markets it could sell a single product in. Why, oh, why did they decide to collapse all of it down to streaming I will never, ever understand. Take a movie, any movie, and you have a chance to sell it 4 or 5 times. You can sell tickets to movies, sell the rights to broadcasters, sell it on physical media. This is obviously better than burying it in a libary of content that is highly disposable.
Hollywood was put to shame by Godzilla Minus One, which was made for only about $15 million and won Best Visual Effects at the Academy Awards.
They should have paused Justice League movie because we should had seen each of the characters have their solo movie before having them team up.Thats what MCU did before doing the Avengers and it turned out beautiful.
"the average viewer now expects massive spectacles, bigger explotions and more action with each film in the series."
And who's fault is that? The gaming industry went through the same thing but quicker. The AAA production companies got greedy, wanted to pump out a new hit game EACH year and each time with improvements. Do you think we expected a new mindblowing and improved Call of Duty game every single year before COD4? No. Did we expect one even after CoD4? NO. THEY expected us to pay for one each year. They expected themselves to be able to create one each year. Naturally we started to expect not to pay more money for the same thing, so they had to try and improve each time. People started to expect more and better. Even though we could all see we weren't getting it. People started associating good graphics with good games and in the end nobody cared about the rest of the game. And well, good quality games or movies just don't get made that way. Anyway, people started to flock to games like Minecraft and Fortnite because of their simplicity and how cheap they were. Because they were fun games with fun and fresh concepts. People got sick of AAA production companies releasing and demanding huge fees for unfinished games (the price of a game hasn't gone up that much tbh) and just the sheer amount of disappointing sequels.
Why the big increase in costs? Sit through the often very, very long end credits of a big movie and see the hundreds of names listed. All those people are paid on top of all the other costs of production - studio and equipment rental, materials for sets and costumes, travel and expenses, insurance etc. It's got ridiculous with current model unsustainable seeing how costs are so high and box office returns mostly flat or declining (with the usual occasional exceptions like a Barbie or Oppenheimer). For a long time Hollywood were banking on the huge China market which looked to be a cash cow saviour but that has pretty much ceased now. I honestly wonder how most movie studios manage to stay in business nowadays.
The reason why movies have become so expensive to make is because money-laundering is at the center. The costs are deliberately inflated to deflate profits so they can mark it as a tax write-off on their books. That is my guess anyway.😅
dope vid..
VFX houses have a hard time staying open so they can't be commanding that much.
Yeah. Actors salaries don't deserve to be that high. Ridiculous
Union crap really makes american productions highly in efficient and more expensive. You have a bloody single person for everything on Unionised productions.
As a Dutch guy I was like: "This is so inefficient and everything goes soooo slow in the US!" But that's not the main reason,
Effects always are a big part of the cost but it wasn't like that before and so that does contribute to the rising costs because majority of film is now created in post instead of in camera. But the main cost is marketing. And previously marketing was done mainly focussed in US market, Europe (where we are) just got a trailer in a theatre and not bus stops and buidings plastered with the new Marvels crap.
Movies have become so expensive, in part, is their decision to limit their acting talent to established people. In the early days of Hollywood talent scouts combed the nation to find talent, and when those they found were established, the talent scouts returned to the search to find replacements for the established ones. Look at the stereotype known as the Blonde Bombshell, as an example of this. Start with superstars like Mae West, and Jean Harlow, then as they either died or aged out of the sexy role, new women were brought in. Lana Turner, Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren, right through the decades to more recent actresses like Farrah Fawcett and (perhaps the last one) Kathleen Turner (Body Heat in 1981). The same can be said for directors. By limiting themselves to those who have been established you end up with failed films like 'Ancient Harrison Ford on a Quest to recapture his Indiana Jones character', Black Panther 2 (did not want to risk recasting the role at all) and even Marvel is now reaching back to bring back old Tony Stark, and Capt. America. Why not just read a few novels, short stories and then talk to the authors to see who it was they envisioned in the role as they wrote the story?
1. They’re lying about budget
2. The powers that be are taking a large cut for themselves
Can you please do a video on making period movies and the expense of making them in Hollywood? And please talk about in detail the point system in film?
Nice vid
Aye it's fairbairn
Yo what Fairbairn doing here
I am glad that the names of these heavily marketed films are new to me. I am generally of the view that money spent on advertisement is money stolen on building good quality product. So, if a company is aggressive in marketing, it's almost certain that their product is crap.
what a depressing idea that studios will now forever be endowed to franchises because they can't risk losing one cent, at what point is entertainment just not worth it anymore
Then entered SORA...
Very cool analysis overall.
Meanwhile Godzilla Minus One killed it with a 15 million dollar cost, easily the best movie of last year
As much as I adored my Master System growing up, the 3D glasses are something I never got to mess with.
One thing to note is this is why it’s very important to have a good story with good writers, especially when doing fan favorite franchises. You can’t just have superheroes and assume people will show up due to fandom. Case in point, madame web and it’s 15% on rotten tomatoes. People actually check online to see if a movie is worth spending money on these days.
As a kid, I wanted so much to see my favorite comics and cartoons become live-action movies. I had no idea that they'd turn right back into animated movies.
left out HW is reckless. Saving your vid on how i can controls costs.
You really managed to miss one of the most egregious reasons, and to elaborate I will relate this quote by John Cleese, who asked a producer friend why nobody was making mid-budget movies anymore. To which the producer replied, "Because it's easier to steal $10million dollars off a $100mil film than a $30mil one.
There's a reason studios fought so hard to not have to open their books during the strike.
Maybe if studios didn’t feel compelled to release 10,000 movies a year more People would go to the movies because it would be more of an event.
7:40 Most credit sequences are about 9-10 minutes per Major release.
That’s insane. That’s just how many people are working on these things
No actor today is worth 40 million dollars, or twenty for that matter. The day of the "movie star" is long over and no one I know goes to a movie just because a certain actor is in it, be it DiCaprio or Tom Cruise or anyone else. If every movie studio agreed to cut these absurd actor salaries to something even approaching reason actors wouldn't be able to do anything about it. If they want to work they accept what the studios are willing to pay them. Does anyone think the box office numbers would change at all??
The biggest problem Hollywood has is the fact that the studios never really pay to make their movies..... even the red carpet events are pay for by some billionaire greek living in the Hollywood hills. He puts up the money on a 15% take back - it's great if you have it.
Since the mid 2000s Hollywood has had to sell its soul to even make movies and this is where the real problems start. You see Hollywood producers are mostly one trick pony's from a script they purchased years ago.... No one is writing great scripts anymore due to talent costs the studios don't want to pay and the ones that are writing, have limited experience.... producing poor scripts full of plot holes and poor character development - A.I. is just as bad. But we still haven't arrived at the real issue; Financing these massive projects costing hundreds of millions - so who has that type of money - Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street - these are the largest financial corporations on the planet - loaning their money - full of creative fish-hooks - like, manipulation of the finished script, casting and even the type of actors they want the public to relate too..... LBGTQ+ and women rule the New woke Hollywood - loads of women to be used in the lead roles. This is all good and there's little space to argue this point - if the script demands these requirements. But many do not and yet we see producers taking a knee to agree to keep hold of the financing. Disney is promoting trans men playing women in their theme parks and now their films reflect more woman power with not a male actor in sight with an IQ above 11. Audiences are saying these movies don't reflect real American family values and are so wrong. This is why Hollywood is drowning in a toxic soup of zero returns - as the public turns its back on movies designed around delivering a social propaganda narrative.
to me almost like money laundrying, like inflate budgets of films saying need all of it make it but really don't but money just gets pocketed, by anybody who skim it and slip into pockets and then just act like necessary for the budget.
The 2.5X rule is outdated and no longer useful. This is due to the demise of the home video market, which is non-existent anymore. For a movie to be profitable it needs to be 1.7x total expenditures, including advertising and distribution costs. So for a film that costs 200 in production, plus 150 for advertising + distribution, the movie must make $630 in box office, but that still doesn't bring into the black. It must wait for the home video and worldwide tv rights to see a profit. Unfortunately, many movies nowadays cost $250 million or more, which means they must bring nearly 800 to break even
I mean inflation is a big reason sure and also as other people say script, technical, actors huge salaries or whatever. Actually actors salaries I don’t think is an issue at least for me. If someone offers you more money for your job, you are not going to say no. Also when you have been getting stead pay checks for months or years and suddenly companies are going to pay you less than usual because they aren’t making a profit, you are going to be pissed you don’t make the same anymore. So the actors getting huge salary is not a problem in my opinion as stars are still a reason why people go to the movies nowadays. you just mentioned 14 movies with over 200 million which I don’t think is a problem. You need a couple of big once in a while. Everyone keeps talking about like 20 or so big budget movies that come out every year and talk about why they are expensive so and so but forget the 200 or so movies with less budget than that. People just need to focus on those movies
1:14 Elemental was also a box office hit
You have really cool hair - I'm jealous 😅
7:40 I think of VFX & CGI like old task based computers before the Apple computer.
8:15 Sweet mustache lady!
michelangelo was commissioned a lot of money from the cardinal to paint the sistine chapel. no intentions of profits, but just to have high art in their possession. that’s how i see what apple tv did with scorsese and while i don’t see that happening all the time i don’t mind it.
They pay for the artist's reputation.
But the church was a rich, powerful organisation, and art was a form of advertising. They hired the best artists, composers to market Christianity.
Have you sat through the credits and seen that 10,000 people are working on a film? Every single one of those people make their living from these films. It has to be worth their time away from life. Just as an example from 1997 money. $1 million for camera pulling away from earth turning into marbles in the hands of aliens in Men In Black. 10 seconds. And it tied the movie together in a way that made people wanna come back and see it again. Leo gets $30 mill. Nolan costs $18 mill. Cost of doing business. The real question is why people watch the horrible $175 million content on Netflix & encourage them to crank out more horrible product.
I found this video overall very informative but one part I would have issue with was saying that the take from theaters is a factor. If you look at the rental agreements that movie theaters have to be under you'll find that the percentage for the first week is very small compared to the distributor's share. It gradually increases each week but the point where it becomes profitable for the theaters from ticket sales alone is several weeks in and most movies don't stay in theatrical release long enough for that to happen. Usually by that time profits from ticket sales are being cannibalized by the movie appearing other ways (streaming, Blu-Ray/DVD sales, etc.). The shortage has to be made up in other ways and this is through higher concession prices. The combination of high ticket prices and high concession prices makes movies unaffordable for routine attendance thus when people do go to the theaters it is only for the big spectacles where the perception is that they are getting their money's worth.
Bloated lead actor salaries are not the only factor involved in movies being expensive. High executive pay makes an impact too. And the cost of CGI is a factor also partially because of laziness by the current hot shot directors who don't plan well or consider respecting budgets. Any crisis from dwindling attendance is fully deserved by the mainstream industry.
There are some ways that people might return more to the theaters. Making mid-budget films, instead of exclusively high budget spectacles might help. Having tiered pricing based on the budget of the movie might help too (lower ticket prices for lower budget movies - ticket prices reflecting the cost of the movie). Fairer deals for theaters so that concession prices can be made more reasonable. Paying attention to whether the hot shot actor or director actually adds that amount of value to the production instead of shelling out the millions they demand. It might be a very good time for many of them to retire. God knows they have enough money already to do so.
They've been able to get away with this house of cards for a long time and Covid helped put a few cracks into the foundation.
Is there a correlation between the fewer films being made and the cost of the ones that got greenlight. Are blockbusters becoming more expensive to make and distribute based on money they take from other potential films that never got made. Simply put - are we getting fewer but more expensive films?
I think there are more films now, but the main ones get more of a budget, the cheaper ones are often straight to streaming service.
If you look at number of films each year it kept rising until 2019. The pandemic caused a dip but it's going up again.
@@FilmStack Thanks. I guess as more of these films under-perform, a correction in budget is coming.
LOL, I often think about when I was a kid. Around 1960 a local L.A. tv station once a week played what they called MILLION DOLLOR MOVIE. Movies that cost a million dollar to produce. It was a big deal to watch each week, as the belief was a movie that cost $1,000,000 had to be really good. Google placed a million dollars in 1960 to be $10.4 million in todays world. So, 200 million dollar budget and people wonder why movies often can't make a profit
hollywood needs to stop paying actors tens of millions of dollars so they they can afford to make the movie 10-20 mill should be fine. anymore than that is too much
„I,Robot“ aged very well in my opinion!
Blackberry cost $5m to produce and was one of 2023's best films.
So here is another question if they are that expensive and less profitable why do people keep making big budget movies at all ? At some point they are going to run out of money.
I don't know what "Tovid" is but, this Hollywood drama they have seems to be a clever way to condition the general public to prefer CGI over humans. Which leads to higher profit margins and lower expenses.
*My success as a producer was using physics and neuroscience to reduce prices significantly. Example, a $50,000.00 scene reduced to $500-1000.
Theatres don't always always take a huge cut of ticket sales, at least in my country. I used to work at a cinema and it was the distributor who made the most of the revenue from a ticket. That's why cinema snacks are pricey, because that candy bar is where the theatre makes its money back.
Even when the The Interview budget leaked back in 2014 along with the film or before that on The Smoking Gun when the budget M. Night's The Village was released the costs are almost entirely due to Above the Line expenses i.e. the director, the top cast and the producers. They eat up art least half the budget of any given film's reported budget... Everything else was shoehorned into the other half of the cash... Seth ended up clearing like $11M of the $40M budget alone from acting and producing fees... And now you know where the real money is... Being a film producer which is why all the biggies tend to have their own shingle (production company) these days... From Ben Affleck to Margot Robbie... That's how they got super rich...
The question should be... How can they spend so much to produce dire unforgettable films, that you watch once then never want to watch again
I miss movie ticket prices being reasonable. I used to go to the movies at least twice a month, usually more. We had a large groupd of us too, we'd just hang out, watch movies chill. Now it's just too expensive.
The major issue is there’s a lot of films being made today and studios lock in release dates before they even have a script, director or cast.
Also, now filmmakers have on average 40-60 days to shoot out principal photography(way down from shoot lengths even 10 years ago) so there’s less style and more just shooting for coverage and solving everything in post.
Plus these big budget movies seem to have zero oversight for post expenses, and the studio doesn’t care if the next Fast or Transformer is ‘good’. They care if it’s ready for the assigned release date. Filmmaking has always been a battle between art and commerce, it’s just commerce has been winning and the drivers behind that don’t understand why audiences won’t pay top dollar for shit that even they don’t care about.
@FilmStack DONT FORGET that movie productions shop around for government incentives. They also target good exchange rates for cheaper labour (but has to be skilled). You dont hear about movies in Australia anymore. Canada lost its advantage also.
Governments have wised up and arent as willing to subsidise a frivolous movie anymore after the detroit car companies bled them dry.
One thing not mentioned here are people who rent or buy digital movies off places like apple or amazon. Given the streaming services, minus Netflix are reporting losses, I now wonder if folks like myself are starting to cut streaming services because once in awhile, Amazon discounts movies to buy and it remains with your prime account forever.
I, Robot CGI actually holds up better than most films from the 2000's. It helps that it mostly deals with robots, far easier to get right than CGI humans/creatures. Agreed on The Mummy Returns😄