6 ms·

How do you think Hollywood works, if not by taking a group of actors and directors and producers that previously made a successful film and giving them a bunch

How do you think Hollywood works, if not by taking a group of actors and directors and producers that previously made a successful film and giving them a bunch of money to do it again? Content absolutely does scale with budget--you can make 10,000 films that cost $10,000 to produce but they will never match the box office of a film that you spent $100M on. This should be obvious: you can't even afford to pay an actor with $10,000.

Parmenidea 4y ago
Completely agree. I think the prevalence of sequels in Hollywood underscores the point; successful content begets popular content at a higher rate than a complete unknown.
- majormajor 4y ago
  "Sequels" are the opposite of "just spend ten times as much money to make ten times more" - in that exponential-growth VC-model type strategy, you'd need to be spawning new franchises in parallel so you could have sequels to ALL of them at the same time, not just wait one by one. Sequels are "do the same thing again" not "be able to do more of them at once." For every MCU there's a Fantastic Four standalone or a Universal Monsters Universe or a Percy Jackson or a Golden Compass or Narnia or other never-to-be-finished would-be franchises... or even just a Star Wars: Solo on the "hmm this isn't paying off after all actually even if it's not a bomb" front. And those were all existing IP, even!
majormajor 4y ago
When's the last time Hollywood film studios 10x'd their revenue? Even looking at global box office, it increased from 23.1B in 2005 to 42.3B in 2019 pre-Covid. That's not a growth rate that would attract a VC. Not a lot of new VC-founded studios, as a result. Would you count Quibi? Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon, cable networks, and movies are all competing for a finite set of attention, and there are more other things competing for that attention than ever before too. Netflix has aggressively expanded to compete globally in a way US cable never did, but that still has a ceiling. If you ten-x'd the amount of 200-million-budget films made in a year you'd similarly hit a wall. At a certain point all you're doing is raising the bar necessary to attract consumer attention, vs attracting new attention and dollars.
- tomcam 4y ago
  > When's the last time Hollywood film studios 10x'd their revenue? We actually don’t know. They veil the real numbers for each movie in complicated shell and subsidiary corporations and private arrangements that can’t be audited by the public.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    Your claim now is that not just the internal PnL for films is obfuscated but both global box office numbers + public company reporting top-line revenue is as well? If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio because of that, good luck to you, but... doesn't seem like you'll get a lot of bites.
    - tomcam 4y ago
      > Your claim now is that not just the internal PnL for films is obfuscated but both global box office numbers + public company reporting top-line revenue is as well? Where did I make a claim about the top line numbers? > If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio Wut? At this point I’m not sure you’re actually responding to my comment but cheers
      - majormajor 4y ago
        >Where did I make a claim about the top line numbers? The claim I made was about "their revenue" - that's the top-line number. You disputed that by saying we don't know.
        ipaddr 4y ago
        Their revenue is hidden in shell and related companies. What revenue are you looking at the public profits of Disney?
        tomcam 4y ago
        I should’ve been clearer. I meant the 10x part. Apologies.
greggman3 4y ago
I don't think the holds. When Sony bought Columbia there's an apocryphal story of the USA executives explaining the business to the new Japanese owners and saying "We make 20 movies and only 1 is profitable". The Japanese executives talked to each other in Japanese and then replied "Please only make the 1 profitable movie". In other words, the mis-understood that the USA executives were trying to tell them they don't know which of the 20 movies is going to be a hit. Going back to 2019 (so taking COVID out of the consideration), "Dark Phoenix" tanked, cost $200 million. "Gemini Man" tanked, cost $172 million. Plenty of 30-70 million dollar movies that didn't do well. This page list 680 movies that came out, no list of budget but only around 1/6th made 10 million and I'm sure there's a long list of the ~500 that made less than 10 million that cost more than 10 million to make. https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2019/top-grossing-movies https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2019/top-grossing-movies
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  > apocryphal story I kinda love the “it’s definitely wrong or taken out of context, but once I’ll have finished telling the story we’ll have forgotten about that caveat” vibe that comes with this disclaimer. Sony is no stranger to throwing spaghetti at the whole to see which stick, I mean they have are a movie studio in Japan too, and no they’re not throwing homeruns after homeruns all year long. Also that’s a pretty good joke reply I think.
makeitdouble 4y ago
Hollywood has a near infinite supply of original writers and source material to take from and adapt to film. It could be argued that it’s less about creating content than transforming content (craft mastery and artistry is still required, but the concept is pretty different). That’s also where I think Netflix isn’t that much in trouble based only on its business model. But it doesn’t work with game creation. You can’t just transform source material (original or not), it needs completely different innovative elements. To note, game franchises also exist, but while they are wildly profitable I’d see that as a well guarded niche.
- blevin 4y ago
  I know you just meant “very many” here, but the phrase “near infinite” sent me off for a bit of a think. Thanks, brain.
  - makeitdouble 4y ago
    I meant that Hollywood has many many original scenario writers that will come up with original ideas, but if they were to magically all disappear tomorrow: - it could still take any best seller book from the past 5 centuries and make it a script - it could take any ancient story / non controversial religion gods / legend and turn into a script - it could autogenerate stories from an AI until something that makes sense comes out and adapt that into a movie I really think the input part is a solved problem, as long as there is enough talent to make it into a decent movie, and this part is move forgiving of "deja vu" and repeating the same techniques (nobody's gonna throw a fit because the director reused a shooting angle from a previous movie, at most it will be a meh moment)
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
AlbertCory 4y ago
> Content absolutely does scale with budget Wrong, unless you measure "content" by "minutes of screen time." If you measure it by box office, then we can easily prove you wrong. Many of the other commenters have already done that.
jmyeet 4y ago
Here's a good example of the problem. Marvel vs DC. Both of these companies have significant (ie decades) of original material to draw upon. For the last 20 years, superhero movies have absolutely dominated the theaters. But no one would look at this situation and draw any conclusion other than Marvel has trounced DC. Is the Marvel source material just that much better? IMHO it isn't to a significant enough degree. What is different is execution. Marvel IP has just been better managed and they've had and built a better organization around it. It's drawn on Disney's extensive pedigree in this business. Producing original content is difficult. It requires a culture of putting up with the 10 flops for that 1 breakout hit. There is no formula for that 1 breakout hit. A million factors go into why that hit became a hit and it's not a formula that can be copied and reproduced as the VC funding model demands.
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  And Marvel went bankrupt in the 1990s, which to your point, is all about IP management. Disney I would argue has absolutely done VC-enviable returns on its Marvel acquisition. It spent $4 billion on the company in 2009. They’ve easily made $100b off of the films, TV shows, comics, merchandise, theme park rides, etc. I wholly agree with your point re: content that it has the culture of 10 flops for every hit. But that studio model, which has always existed in Hollywood, is the same model and a VC fund. Instead of going public, you get sequels or branch into other IP. Are the returns the same? Generally no. But a good acquisition, like Marvel and Star Wars for Disney and Harry Potter (and to a lesser but historically significant degree, DC Comics) for Warner Bros, can pay dividends the exact same way as investing in a future tech titan.

Parmenidea 4y ago

Completely agree. I think the prevalence of sequels in Hollywood underscores the point; successful content begets popular content at a higher rate than a complete unknown.

majormajor 4y ago
"Sequels" are the opposite of "just spend ten times as much money to make ten times more" - in that exponential-growth VC-model type strategy, you'd need to be spawning new franchises in parallel so you could have sequels to ALL of them at the same time, not just wait one by one. Sequels are "do the same thing again" not "be able to do more of them at once." For every MCU there's a Fantastic Four standalone or a Universal Monsters Universe or a Percy Jackson or a Golden Compass or Narnia or other never-to-be-finished would-be franchises... or even just a Star Wars: Solo on the "hmm this isn't paying off after all actually even if it's not a bomb" front. And those were all existing IP, even!

majormajor 4y ago

When's the last time Hollywood film studios 10x'd their revenue? Even looking at global box office, it increased from 23.1B in 2005 to 42.3B in 2019 pre-Covid. That's not a growth rate that would attract a VC. Not a lot of new VC-founded studios, as a result. Would you count Quibi? Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon, cable networks, and movies are all competing for a finite set of attention, and there are more other things competing for that attention than ever before too. Netflix has aggressively expanded to compete globally in a way US cable never did, but that still has a ceiling. If you ten-x'd the amount of 200-million-budget films made in a year you'd similarly hit a wall. At a certain point all you're doing is raising the bar necessary to attract consumer attention, vs attracting new attention and dollars.

tomcam 4y ago
> When's the last time Hollywood film studios 10x'd their revenue? We actually don’t know. They veil the real numbers for each movie in complicated shell and subsidiary corporations and private arrangements that can’t be audited by the public.
- majormajor 4y ago
  Your claim now is that not just the internal PnL for films is obfuscated but both global box office numbers + public company reporting top-line revenue is as well? If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio because of that, good luck to you, but... doesn't seem like you'll get a lot of bites.
  - tomcam 4y ago
    > Your claim now is that not just the internal PnL for films is obfuscated but both global box office numbers + public company reporting top-line revenue is as well? Where did I make a claim about the top line numbers? > If you want to raise a bunch of VC money to open a movie studio Wut? At this point I’m not sure you’re actually responding to my comment but cheers
    - majormajor 4y ago
      >Where did I make a claim about the top line numbers? The claim I made was about "their revenue" - that's the top-line number. You disputed that by saying we don't know.
      - ipaddr 4y ago
        Their revenue is hidden in shell and related companies. What revenue are you looking at the public profits of Disney?
      - tomcam 4y ago
        I should’ve been clearer. I meant the 10x part. Apologies.

greggman3 4y ago

I don't think the holds. When Sony bought Columbia there's an apocryphal story of the USA executives explaining the business to the new Japanese owners and saying "We make 20 movies and only 1 is profitable". The Japanese executives talked to each other in Japanese and then replied "Please only make the 1 profitable movie". In other words, the mis-understood that the USA executives were trying to tell them they don't know which of the 20 movies is going to be a hit. Going back to 2019 (so taking COVID out of the consideration), "Dark Phoenix" tanked, cost $200 million. "Gemini Man" tanked, cost $172 million. Plenty of 30-70 million dollar movies that didn't do well. This page list 680 movies that came out, no list of budget but only around 1/6th made 10 million and I'm sure there's a long list of the ~500 that made less than 10 million that cost more than 10 million to make. https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2019/top-grossing-movies https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2019/top-grossing-movies

makeitdouble 4y ago
> apocryphal story I kinda love the “it’s definitely wrong or taken out of context, but once I’ll have finished telling the story we’ll have forgotten about that caveat” vibe that comes with this disclaimer. Sony is no stranger to throwing spaghetti at the whole to see which stick, I mean they have are a movie studio in Japan too, and no they’re not throwing homeruns after homeruns all year long. Also that’s a pretty good joke reply I think.

makeitdouble 4y ago

Hollywood has a near infinite supply of original writers and source material to take from and adapt to film. It could be argued that it’s less about creating content than transforming content (craft mastery and artistry is still required, but the concept is pretty different). That’s also where I think Netflix isn’t that much in trouble based only on its business model. But it doesn’t work with game creation. You can’t just transform source material (original or not), it needs completely different innovative elements. To note, game franchises also exist, but while they are wildly profitable I’d see that as a well guarded niche.

blevin 4y ago
I know you just meant “very many” here, but the phrase “near infinite” sent me off for a bit of a think. Thanks, brain.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  I meant that Hollywood has many many original scenario writers that will come up with original ideas, but if they were to magically all disappear tomorrow: - it could still take any best seller book from the past 5 centuries and make it a script - it could take any ancient story / non controversial religion gods / legend and turn into a script - it could autogenerate stories from an AI until something that makes sense comes out and adapt that into a movie I really think the input part is a solved problem, as long as there is enough talent to make it into a decent movie, and this part is move forgiving of "deja vu" and repeating the same techniques (nobody's gonna throw a fit because the director reused a shooting angle from a previous movie, at most it will be a meh moment)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

AlbertCory 4y ago

> Content absolutely does scale with budget Wrong, unless you measure "content" by "minutes of screen time." If you measure it by box office, then we can easily prove you wrong. Many of the other commenters have already done that.

jmyeet 4y ago

Here's a good example of the problem. Marvel vs DC. Both of these companies have significant (ie decades) of original material to draw upon. For the last 20 years, superhero movies have absolutely dominated the theaters. But no one would look at this situation and draw any conclusion other than Marvel has trounced DC. Is the Marvel source material just that much better? IMHO it isn't to a significant enough degree. What is different is execution. Marvel IP has just been better managed and they've had and built a better organization around it. It's drawn on Disney's extensive pedigree in this business. Producing original content is difficult. It requires a culture of putting up with the 10 flops for that 1 breakout hit. There is no formula for that 1 breakout hit. A million factors go into why that hit became a hit and it's not a formula that can be copied and reproduced as the VC funding model demands.

filmgirlcw 4y ago
And Marvel went bankrupt in the 1990s, which to your point, is all about IP management. Disney I would argue has absolutely done VC-enviable returns on its Marvel acquisition. It spent $4 billion on the company in 2009. They’ve easily made $100b off of the films, TV shows, comics, merchandise, theme park rides, etc. I wholly agree with your point re: content that it has the culture of 10 flops for every hit. But that studio model, which has always existed in Hollywood, is the same model and a VC fund. Instead of going public, you get sequels or branch into other IP. Are the returns the same? Generally no. But a good acquisition, like Marvel and Star Wars for Disney and Harry Potter (and to a lesser but historically significant degree, DC Comics) for Warner Bros, can pay dividends the exact same way as investing in a future tech titan.