George Lucas Predicts Death of Big Budget Movies 561
H_Fisher writes "Before the red carpet had cooled at last night's Academy Awards, George Lucas told the New York Daily News that big-budget movies will soon be history. From the article: "'The market forces that exist today make it unrealistic to spend $200 million on a movie,' said Lucas, a near-billionaire from his feverishly franchised outer-space epics. 'Those movies can't make their money back anymore. Look at what happened with King Kong.'" Lucas' prediction: "In the future, almost everything that gets shown in theaters will be indie movies ... I predict that by 2025 the average movie will cost only $15 million.""
2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as we like to criticize him (Score:1, Insightful)
Star Wars rules... but Lucas is a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at what happened with 'King Kong.'
The problem isn't the budget, its the lack of creativity. 'King Kong' is not a new movie, it is a remake of the 1933 RKO classic. Other big budget films: The Fog, The Nutty Professor, The Exorcist, Charlie's Angels, The Incredible Hulk, X-Men, Spiderman, Day of the Dead, Night of the Living Dead, The Shaggy Dog, The Pink Panther, etc, etc, etc... And lets not even get started on sequels that should've never been made! (Anything that makes over 200m these days is just about guaranteed a sequel, whether is should have one or not)I took a History of Film class in college, and I remember learning about how "lulls" are often preceded by an abundance of recycled plot lines. The mainstream has run out of creative writers. Just about everything is a remake of something that's already been made. That's why independent, low budget films have become more popular. They are more likely to substitute a lack of special effects and big-name, no-talent casts with well developed plot-lines, creative stories, and some damn good acting.
This isn't even that big of an issue in all honesty. The big budget industries are complaining because they're only making an average of $250 million instead of $350 per crappy-remake-of-an-old-tv-show movies. They will go on spoon-feeding shit to the masses and having them eat it with a big grin on their face.
Well, yeah.. (Score:5, Insightful)
He has no business making movies any more, and less making predictions.
Re:2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
If so, only because he killed them. (Score:2, Insightful)
Movie budgets aren't going to come down any time soon. These independent films Lucas thinks will be the wave of the future will merely be blueprints to be copied by the major studios. Small movie sells and big movie copies. It's that simple.
Besides, I though we got the doom and gloom about the plight of big production movies after the Blair With Project didn't destroy Hollywood after all.
The Difference (Score:2, Insightful)
Bring back good writing and yes the cost per film will drop.
Keep throwing flash and glam into pics like many of the recent Hollywood money-black-holes and the price will only keep going up.
Flash and glam do not (always) a good movie make.
Re:2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
in 20 years, if almost everyone has a decent home theatre and a lot of internet bandwidth, these guys will have become irrelevant.
20 years of Moores Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that people just want to have much more stuff than they did before. 20 years ago, very few people had Computers, nobody had cell phones, thed had 1 phone for the entire house. They didn't have cable tv, and they had small 13 inch tv's. Now people have cable, and giant 60 inch TVs. You can't expect that to cost the same amount. Cars have also come a long way. A car 20 years ago is much less than what most cars are now. Entertainment is the same. Movies now are much more than what they were 20 years ago. You aren't getting the same product. You're really comparing apples to oranges in this case. Would the average american want to watch a black and white movie, where you can see the strings, and there's only 6 actors, and the director/producer/editor/cameraman/lighting tech/lead actor is all the same person?
It's a Cyclical, Copycat Industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
While a succinct and true response, your reply is more important than many might realize.
Copyright has given monopoly cartel power to a group of people who are now ready to fight to keep it. In 20 years there is a bigger chance of the Internet being controlled by DRM and the cartels than the chance of true freedom. I can only hope that the geeks and hackers find new ways to work around any regulations that we will likely see in the coming years.
My big fear in the BBS days was copy controls, but they were always worked around. Now I still have those fears, and when the hardware supports the controls, we have to work extra hard to make sure we have work arounds. It's funny how many pro-government geeks are on slashdot who support the work arounds that give us power over the cartel monopolies who get their power from the government.
Kong Made Money (Score:2, Insightful)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0360717/business [imdb.com]
Kong cost $207m and made (US Box alone) $216m so it made money, toss in worldwide revenue and while it didn't blow the roof off anything it still made money. Now toss in the video game licence, other merchandising and future DVD and TV rights sales and you've got a film that will still make a good truck of money depsite being nothing more than a warmed over remake. What that film teaches us, i think, is that no matter how lame the concept, if it is hyped well enough and sold big enough anything can make a buck no matter how grotesque its budget is.
Re:2025 is a long way off... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're are one of the owners of the companies that take huge chunks from the 90 million dollars, it's obviously which is better. Doh.
You get USD90 million from someone else/investors. Pump that into your companies or companies owned by your cronies (marketing, distribution, merchandising, effects, consultants, legal, etc). Who cares if the movie loses money, or makes very little?
Naturally you try to adjust stuff so that the investors grumble but still make enough money on _average_ to keep coming back.
From time to time if stuff don't go quite as planned, you can just blame piracy, P2P etc.
It's not the money (Score:2, Insightful)
First, economies of scale and evolving technology will make the big budget movie of today a cheapo film of the future. Lucas spent more money on Star Wars A New Hope than he did on Revenge O' The Sith (adjusted for inflation, of course). Still, I think both paid off for him.
Next, this year's crop of movies that the Academy considered sucked IMHO. If I want to see social issues, I'll move the San Francisco or Berkeley. I go to the movies to escape all the PC BS I see every day. I want to enter a world where right is still right and wrong is still wrong. I don't care to understand why the bad guy is a bad guy except in the case of an Austin Powers movie. I really don't want to spend my hard earned money so someone can tell me that terrorists are simply misunderstood, McCarthy is bad, and gays and minorities are still being persecuted. I can get that from NPR for free. I don't think I'm alone in that opinion.
If Hollywood can no longer afford big budget movies, it's not because they cost too much, it's because they are made for and by Hollywood types (or they are sequels or remakes). You're simply not going to make your big budget back while concentrating on such a limited audience.
Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
And that's what a great deal of movies have been lately. Barely tolerable, stupid plots, that are not good stories and certainly would not stand on their own merit independant of medium, where infusions of cash, breasts, and CG try to make up for this. But in the end, all you get is a really expensive, bad movie, with a few tit shots. Putting the female lead on a trampoline, or just saying fuck it and turning it into a porno would probably be better at that point.
Indie movies don't necessarily have good plots, either. I've seen some pretty bad indie movies lately. Open Water, and the stupid one about the "death" tunnel or whatever were both distinctly worse than porn. In the end, it's all about the story, moreso than anything else. Film techniques and dynamics such as acting, direction etc are important as well, but second to the story.
Want my money? Tell me a good story. Then we'll worry about the CG and breasts. If I just want the latter without a story, I'll get a video game or porn.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the 3 important rules of the Austrian economist "time preference" theories -- we all want more rather than less.
The great thing about what we have is that the free market has provided growth every step of the way. The bad thing about what we have is that it is mostly owned by foreigners that have loaned us the dollars we needed over the past 10 years.
Americans have much less real money now than any time in US history. Our ability to keep buying and overspending will likely be greatly reduced in coming years, much to the surprise of the average citizen who never realized they really own nothing but debt.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Depends what kind of movies you watch. Usually the people making comments like this are the ones who like to watch big special effecty movies
If you just want to see movies with good, solid acting and engaging plots, then there are plenty to choose from. But they're not going to be extravagant affairs like Star Wars and King Kong.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
How, exactly, is union chicanery and thugishenss "Copyright at its finest"? Unions are horrible vestiges of socialism, and while they may have served a purpose in the past, they exist only to further their own power nowadays. Though there are plenty of ways copyrights are problematic, what you describe above is a good reason to union-bust, not copyright-bust.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
Think back to around 1991- dialup access was absurdly slow and ridiculously expensive, a decent computer would cost ya more than 3 grand. Cars were about the same price, but had fewer gizmos and creature comforts. If you wanted a cd of music, you had to fork over the $10 or $15 (No cd burners or emusic or piracy). If people have less real money now then then, it isn't for stuff getting more expensive, it is for their own stupidity, unwillingness to live within their means, and appetite for massive amounts of debt.
Hollywood wants to give you what you want, not lie (Score:5, Insightful)
It saddens us when this is something we personally like (Firefly, Arrested Development, Furturama, etc), but the average consumer is showing Hollywood that the current crap story, ton of CG, big-budget approach isn't profitable. Thus it will not be funded unless it is profitable.
No one can predict with perfect certainty whether or not something will be well-done and a success. Lucas's recent works were shit, but the original SW trilogy were very successful and critically acclaimed; Hollywood funded Lucas's new efforts because they want to give people what they want and what sells! Not because they want to force crap on you.
Movies in theaters are indeed gouging in a way, but the costs of showing a movie in a theater have also increased dramatically. Carmike Cinemas has struggled financially for a very long time, believe it or not but owning large buildings in an urban area, licensing the content, and upgrading to the newest AV technologies over and over again is quite expensive. Movie theaters are expensive but it is not a high-profit ripoff scam business, the costs are expensive as well. I hope this will diminish in favor of the home theater and other distrubution methods. The economics here are failing.
In the future Hollywood will continue to try to give you what you want. Pay money for movies you think are excellent and you want to see more of, and support them. Don't support crap. Hollywood is very responsive to economics.
There will always be crap, because not even the people funding the movies can predict how they're going to turn out; they can only read the proposals and evaluate the past performance of the people making them. But they have a larger stake than you or I do in wanting to make sure they succeed. Sometimes this is underhanded, such as not showing a screening for critics with the recent "Ultraviolet" as they realized how much the end product sucked. But the movie industry never wanted it to get to that point, they want to make things that are epic and successful-- after all, that's the most profitable.
Big budget movies will never die, because of this. The investors and production companies will put their resources into maximizing their profits, and most of them really do love film and want to do make great movies. They gamble with the knowledge and dreams they have, they will always lose and win. Avoid the losers and support the winners, and this helps things evolve in the future.
And hey, I don't think Hollywood is abusing their power either. DVDs are great; a high quality version of a movie that even has a great viewing experience on a $20 player. Most of them cost less than music CDs and have a lot of bonus content. Sure, DVDs use CSS, but there's nothing wrong with wanting to protect your content and livelihood either.
Entertainment costs are down, down, down. Electronics are cheaper than ever, and getting the content legally-- via DVD, or new services like NetFlix make movie watching a better experience than in the VHS days, and a more economical one. TVs have dropped in price by almost half since the 80s due to improvements in cost production, and a DVD player costs maybe 20% of what a VCR once did. DVDs cost barely more than VHS tapes used to-- they go up less than inflation. And you can buy older DVDs for less than $5!
Hollywood has stolen nothing. They lose more than you do when a movie sucks. I don't ask you support bad content, but I ask that you do consider supporting things you want to see more of. I recently paid ~$80 for Seasons 1 and 2.0 of Battlestar Galactica, not because I hadn't already downloaded the bittorrents, but because I want to support good content and share it with others.
Finally remember that film is one medium for content alone. There are many ways to tell a story, and if film is not meeting your needs, you can always indulge another.
Re:No even need to buy, just borrow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but CGI is hear and now... (Score:4, Insightful)
But could you even do Spider Man or X-Men in 1985 with 10 times their budget? The only reason those films worked under their current budgets was CGI.
CGI still costs an arm and a leg, but its not as costly as it was with Terminator 2.
Frankly, CGI will continue to improve until we can't tell a difference between it and real life (I think we have reached that point in some aspects) but will simply drop in price over time.
Eventually, machina-esque movie making will come out of a the box much like Sims Movie Maker program. The price in CGI will go down since all props will have already been rendered and with faster and more powerful cpus the rendering time will be pretty nihl to what you need to do a full length movie now.
Heck, an indie film maker might be able to pull off a movie without a 3d effects or 3d modeler artist if he can buy a "pre-canned" package. After all... Once the human mind can't tell the difference between a live actor and a computer generated one, you don't have to re-create that model over and over again from scratch. Just sell the model and let the indie director style it with a gui interface out of box.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:If so, only because he killed them. (Score:4, Insightful)
But if we look at the all time money maker, Titanic, it didn't reach $200 million until it's fifth week. True, Titanic had a smaller number of screens but six weeks to $200 for King Kong, a remake of limited appeal, shouldn't be considered a disaster. It's this "I must have the biggest opening weekend" mentality that Hollywood pushes that's killing movies. Lets make a flashy film, push it really hard for the opening. Who cares if it sucks, by the time the people realize it we will have made our money back.
A good movie should be able to draw people in over time. It shouldn't require a massive advertising blitz and a huge opening weekend to be successful. Unfortunately the way the distribution channels have become structured these days I don't see Hollywood changing their game plan anytime soon.
I'm an indie filmmaker (Score:3, Insightful)
I think what George is trying to say is that with modern technology being so inexpensive, there's no need for spending $200M per film. Just renter it on his (or anyone else's) computers. Okay, this does make some sense.
I've seen zero-budget high-FX films come from people's home computers. Some of these are damn good.
I can see what Georges is trying to say, but I honestly believe him wrong. Big budget movies are here to stay. Sometimes I want to be wowed at the theatre too. LOTR was well worth the $300M budget.
Will theatres be runover with indie flicks? No. But I'd like to see a better balance in the theatres. I'm tired of going to the megaplex and seeing 4 screen showing Gigli.
Re: 20 years of Moores Law (Score:4, Insightful)
Sadly, Sturgeon's Law will trump both.
Huh? Were you even born then? (Score:2, Insightful)
Most people didn't have computers, true - but I did. Others I knew did as well. Many folks I know now still don't have computers, and not all of them are geezers.
Cars were't that much cheaper back then either; maybe 15k for a low end model. And today's cars last longer and need less maintenance.
Nobody had cell phones, true, but today I have no land line. My landline cost about fifty bucks back then, and didn't include long distance. Most folks had at least two phones, many a phone in every room. After all, the only cost was the phone itself. My cell phone is about $47, with "free" long distance.
Movies now are much more than what they were 20 years ago. You aren't getting the same product.
With few exceptions (Lord of the Rings) movies today aren't anywhere near as good as they were twenty years ago (The Terminator vs I, Robot.)
Perhaps your math is wrong, as the world as you describe it is more like 1960 than 1985. And in 1960, our black and white TV was 19 inches, the neighbors had a 25 inch color set.
Peanut Gallery (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone likes to turn to the classic bit on the lack of imagination in Hollywood when there is little evidence that the movie-going masses would have preference for "more imaginative" movies.
First, everyone likes to point at how Hollywood likes remakes. Well this isn't a recent phenomenon. King Kong wasn't just remade in 2005 but in 1976. You could've rented the DVDs for both previous versions and watched them before seeing PJ's version. You can go all the way back to Cecile B DeMille remaking the Ten Commandments and continue on as Hollywood repeated the standard film plots, from sword and sandal standards to Dragnet to... Lord of the Rings. And that brings up the real point:
People don't mind remakes, they just don't want "bad" remakes.
The funny thing is what constitutes "bad". Consider the original King Kong. Everyone will call it a classic. Heck probably more people would call it a classic than have actually seen it. And I bet most of them have no real drive to do so even though its just a Netflix order away. It's because what most people consider "bad" are opinions on effects and film production: less believable special effects, stage-derived pre-Method acting, pre-New Wave static cinematography, etc.
Basically they want special effects. And not just any special effects, modern special effects.
And that isn't even due to the plausability of the effects, just expectation. Compare the movies Cache and Saw: the second is clearly gorier and more violent. It is wall to wall violence and bodycount. The former has only one on-screen death (two, if you count a decapitated rooster). Now what are the reactions to the two? I've been in theaters for both and the little Hitchcockian thriller Cache shocked the audiences more than Saw did. Why? Because it's violence didn't fit into the expecations of the audience. People seeing Saw know what they're going to see; they can put on the mask of fake bravery and laugh at the misfortune of shallow unsympathetic characters. Cache engages the viewer in a completely different way: by that nefarious "character-driven plot".
Of course Saw made hundreds of millions of dollars while Cache showed to small art houses. Saw also spawned a sequel.
And that leads to the emergent behavior of movie goers: they expect repetition. Repetition in effects, in plot, in characters. This is why sequels have been and are so popular. People tire of watching the same movie over again. But they wanted repeated experience. So you take a movie, conceive of a similar plot, rehire the same actors, set designers and let them go. Most sequels are really more serials with the idea of an over-arching plot pretty tenuous. Franchises like Bad Boys, Big Momma's House, American Pie. Disney has made a cottage industry of this, crapping out straight to video releases and cartoons based upon their best received product. Its a fine line of just different enough to make it stand on its own while not so different as to fall outside of expectation.
That last one is the killer, something like only 5% of non-franchise movies recoup the costs of the other 95%. And these are rarely anything special. These are the My Big Fat Greek Weddings of the world. And you can bet the masterminds have sat down and tried to figure out how to franchise those too.
Folks aren't looking for plot-driven, nonstandard movies. Look at the Best Picture nominees this year: Capote, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, Munich. Their nominations were out over a month ago and only Brokeback has gone over 75 million. Crash has made 55 after a full year in theaters. Spielberg's Munich has only recouped 45 of the 75 m
He may be right, but for all the wrong reasons... (Score:3, Insightful)
The theater experience used to be something that you couldn't get at home. Going to the movies was a sense of occasion. It was a gathering place.
Take away the comfort and the sensory deprivation and the immersion to the point where a person can, for a few thousand dollars investment in a low-end theater rig, get a better general experience at home watching a DVD, and you start to see theatrical release itself become a thing of the past.
I, for one, won't mourn the death of the BBM, since most of the movies I've seen over the past decade and a half having such crazy budgets didn't impress me nearly as much as the indie films I've seen, anyway.
Re:How many movies have you actually seen? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why does it have to be one extreme or the other? What's wrong with a reasonable middle ground - you know, like real women?
Re:Yes, look at King Kong (Score:5, Insightful)
I would imagine (or, it wouldn't surprise me to learn...) that there's a 'floating' percentage that the distributor takes to make sure that there is never ANY producer's net (monkey points.. that's funny) and the producer's gross is inline with an average to pay the 20% for the actors. [dammit, where's my tinfoil hat!?]
The corporate structure simply has nifty ways of hiding the money so that the tax take is small (and the ACTUAL profits, paid as owner distributions, wages, and executive loans, are high) and most of the money stays in "hollywood."
I'm no expert, as I mentioned, but I realize when GM reports 'net losses' of $X billion that it's not really LOSSES, but they are able to claim a LOT of exemptions and expenses (some real-- some not).
For your next film, you should forfeit half of your *worthless* 'monkey points' for audit rights... I bet they'd balk.
As evidence of the distributor's collusion, Lionsgate dist. (who doesn't really have a competitor) is basically sucking up all the films that are too risky for mainstream corp. hollywood to finance outright. Then they take the profits (as above) and distribute them to the colluding accounts of the oligopoly. They only buy the rights to the ones that create 'buzz.' This is a 'legit.' mafia... I don't think it's a secret, either.
By the way, thanks for being a writer. I've had fantasies about becoming a writer, but the risk/reward is too low. I'm glad it's working out for you....
Re:Haven't bought a movie in years. (Score:3, Insightful)
I LIKE popcorn movies. I think it's FINE to go be entertained for two hours and munch on popcorn.
Yes, I appreciate a Good Film, but I also like plain ol' movies.
Re:George Lucas is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Sounds like Clerks... It was the best thing to hit the big screen in a long time, for a lot of reasons. With the advances in CG animation and home production software, there is no reason a small studio or group of individuals couldn't put together a movie that challenges the big guys on either the storyline or effects fronts - unless you assume that quantity will always outweigh quality.
Re:Yes, look at King Kong (Score:3, Insightful)
I worked for a company that made (specialty) consumer electronics hardware. The economics of that business aren't that different from movies. Just because our gross revenue exceeded our engineering design and manufacturing costs doesn't make the product profitable. You have to factor in all of the costs and all of the money that gets spent on producing your product, and make sure to subtract overhead. For our company overhead included things like our HR department and keeping our cafeteria open.
In most industries, you would not report the number brought in by a retail chain as the "gross revenue" for a company. For example, let's take a simple consumer electronics company like BenQ. You can go to Fry's and buy a BenQ display or a BenQ projector. Only a small fraction of the total amount of money spend at retail outlets like Fry's and BenQ goes back to BenQ as gross revenue. For a Hollywood movie, you get the equivalent of reporting the money spent at retail outlets and report it as if it were gross revenue to the studio which it is not.
To claim that this fact is "shady hollywood accounting" is absurd.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yeah, but CGI is hear and now... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How many movies have you actually seen? (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem 1: They shouldn't ALL be portrayed the same way.
Problem 2: Why do you insist on one extreme or the other? It's not like you really have to chose between completely helpless, and invincible super-hero.
Here's a few ideas:
1. How about NOT casting a 90lbs. underwear model in the role of the super-strong female lead?
2. How about NOT having her always fight men that are 5Xs larger and obviously stronger than she is?
3. How about giving her some OTHER advantage that makes sense, rather than pretending she is just vastly stronger?
4. How about NOT making it necessary for her to do all the fighting? Plenty of movies have wimpy/nerdy characters that are still heros.
Re:Hollywood wants to give you what you want, not (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of the problem is that the law of supply and demand also comes into effect in a different way when you have piracy.
With lots of piracy, demand goes way down, that is, demand to buy the product from the owner.
So what happens if at the same time, you see a drop in demand due to the crappiness of the product, and also due to a change in viewing habits? It is empirically nearly impossible to determine what the real cause of the drop in demand is.
This is basically the combination of factors we see now. In order to determine the real effect of piracy, we'd have to keep the other factors constant, and that's impossible.
Another less obvious problem is that the easy availability of the option to pirate alters the consumer's cost-benefit analysis. Before it was easy to pirate movies, people would look at the price, think about the value of having the movie versus not having it, and often decide to get the movie because they'd rather have it than not have it, even if they thought it wasn't quite worth the price.
Now, they often consider the value of having the legitimate movie versus the value of having a pirated version, versus having none and maintaining their sense of personal integrity. The last costs the most. The second costs the least, and the first is probably in the middle somewhere. In this calculus, piracy often wins out, but as I noted at the beginning, the reasons are going to be unclear....
Re:Hollywood wants to give you what you want, not (Score:3, Insightful)
So if it's not profitable for them, why do they continue to do it? Even worse, why do they tell people publicly that they should continue to patronize theaters instead of installing home theaters? Seems like they should be happy that home theaters and other distro methods are taking away their business, because then they can do something else more productive.
After all, that's what we're told about outsourcing; if someone else wants to do it cheaper, you should welcome that, because it frees you to do something else.