According to a post at the Long Tail, it would seem that Hollywood is doing its best to hide the fact that blockbusters are few and far in between.
I first posted about Hollywood’s plans to produce fewer movies last year. Now it seems they’ll also be massaging the numbers as well.
According to post (a reader who requested anonymity said):
I happened to be riding to work with an exec from one of the major studios this morning, and he mentioned that the studios are increasingly making deals with theaters to inflate opening numbers. In particular, they will give the theaters very high revenue share for the first X days of the movie (he mentioned 100% for the first 3 days), incentivizing the theater to maximize the number of screens the movie’s shown on, inflating opening numbers.
The particular example of Superman and Pirates were actually the ones he brought up - that Superman’s decline was partially due to the theathers’ incentive period running out.
I have no idea how true or prevalent this is, but something you might want to look into. This would be done for movies which the studio considers potential “hits”, increasing discrepancy between them and normal movies.
Funny, I don’t think I heard Bryan Singer mention it in his Superman interview.
I’m still hopeful that the explosion of user-generated content will severely erode the blockbuster’s share of the pie. Remains to be seen if Google Video will finally launch their marketplace for indie producers.
With DVD sales flattening, Variety re-examines the big studios. Most of the executives interviewed requested to remain anonymous, a clear sign it’s time to face some unpleasant realities.
DVD sales have been the engine for studio growth in the last 5 years but in the last 12 months the DVD market is flattening. There’s some new distribution channels on the horizon: like Sony’s Blu-Ray DVD (or Toshiba’s alternative HD-DVD) and even the new video iPod (limited to tv series or ipod torrents). These new markets are not mature enough however to compensate the overall decrease in revenues.
Although the major studios are facing different problems, the majority of studio executives agreed on several points:
- Limit movies in the $35 million to $70 million range
- Financial partners are no longer an option — they’re required
- Trim marketing budgets
- Make fewer movies
In terms of the mid-budget movies, Variety quotes a COO at a major studio:
If you look at the $40 million to $70 million budget film, they are so difficult. They rarely have top box office stars, and they’re such risky territory because you have to spend $25 million on P&A, so it’s a huge investment. It’s really hard to get that back.
It’s still debatable if this spells GOOD news for indie producers. If the market continues to contract in the next year, studios might need to find ways to market smaller and cheaper movies. They could plagiarize the NASA motto: faster, better, cheaper.
A few examples that Hollywood could take to heart: Russian-made The Return (Возвращение) was produced for under $500,000 and made over ten times that. Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation also resulted in 1:10 ratio: a budget of just $4M resulted in revenues in excess of $40M internationally. Of course, a profit of a few million can’t plug in the holes made by a disaster like Zathura…
Published by Administrator October 25th, 2005
in Digital Technology and News bits.
I still haven’t tried podcasting and the latest fad walks right in. VODcasting is a term coined recently to describe a video-on-demand (broad)cast. In essence, you start posting videos instead of posts consisting mainly of words and photos.
So how is this helping filmmakers? Let’s look at Peter Jackson’s production diary for King Kong. Instead of HTML pages linking to videos, he could’ve uploaded the videos to a server, saved an XML file, and asked you to sign-up for his vodcasts. Once you’re subscribed to his production diary vodcast, iTunes will start downloading videos as they become available.
Most vodcasts will probably be low-rez, mainly for bandwidth reasons. You should be able to view them just fine on your new video iPod while driving to work… Wait a minute! I meant while riding the Tube to work.
There’s a simplistic, yet useful step-by-step guide to vodcasting published at Playlist’s site.
Update: You can read my tips on producing video for iPod.
Published by Administrator October 15th, 2005
in Digital Technology and Software.
Looking at the new iPod, I start wondering why Apple claims it plays everything… but movies. Apparently, Apple made Hollywood a proposal they couldn’t resist, yet somehow Hollywood did resist it. I wonder why.
For starters, let’s look at the tech specs: it sports a 2.5-inch LCD display (320 x 240 pixels) that supports 260,000 colors. That’s good enough for downloadable porn but I don’t think it cuts it for movies. It’s not widescreen (being 4:3 instead of 16:9) and there’s limit on the resolution of the movies that can be imported (480×480).
Just consider that Sidney Pollack brought a lawsuit against a Danish TV station for the use of its pan-and-scan (4:3) showing of his film “Three days of the Condor”. The court ruled that the pan-and-scan was a “mutilation” of his work and a violation of Pollacks ‘Driot Moral’, his legal right as an artist to maintain his reputation by protecting the integrity of his work.
As an even more extreme example, imagine you somehow get “Lawrence of Arabia” on your new iPod. How long would you wait until you see the black speck that Omar Sharif is in the famous scene? It takes a while to spot it even on the DVD edition.
Despite its shortcomings, the new iPod sets a trend that might eventually lead to an alternative means for distributing “pocket” movies. This could enable indie producers to distribute their movies cheaply and easily. Even now you can find plenty of sites that have torrents for iPod.
The Zen Vision from Creative Labs already sports a 640×480 LCD. I’m hopeful SONY will have the last word on this one. I love the LCD on my SONY VX2000, I’m sure I’ll be able to find Omar Sharif in under a minute if I manage to play it there.
Update: You can read my tips on producing video for iPod. A must-see for your video iPod is Steve Ballmer’s Developers video.
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