We hear all the time about the economics of filmmaking--that this movie cost this much, that it made that much. But a lot of the talk strikes me as far, far removed from even the best known realities of the business.
Movies cost far more than their production budgets--and their backers make less than their grosses at the box office. On the one hand, marketing and promotion budgets are much less often announced than production budgets, but are often as large. The result is that the producers of a $150 million movie may be thought to have spent twice that much when the distribution costs are taken into account.
Meanwhile, studios get maybe forty to fifty percent of the gross of a film.
This means that instead of a $150 million movie earning $200 million making a solid $50 million profit, it may have actually left the backers $200 million in the red--because they spent $300 million, and only got back $100 million, or even less.
Yet, it is worth remembering that film production and other costs are often offset from other sources--like product placement, and even government subsidy. (The makers of Thor 2 got a tax rebate worth some $30 million from the British government.) It is worth remembering, too, that domestic and foreign box office are not always clearly distinguished by commentators, and the foreign markets ever more important, particularly as key large markets (e.g. China) have become more affluent. (Warcraft made $47 million in the U.S., almost ten times as much globally--with about half the total gross earned in China alone.) At the same time, the box office is not the only source of revenue--there being video and TV rights, and merchandising, which can add mightily to the total, and so turn a flop into a moneymaker much more often than might be imagined, especially if one thinks in longer than "this-quarter, next-quarter" terms. (Hudson Hawk, the most notorious flop of the summer of '91, managed a profit five years after its release--but the point is that it did manage it.)
And all that is without getting into the creative bookkeeping in which studios have been known to engage regarding the costs, which remind all involved to take their cut of the gross, not the net, if they can. (Paramount's claims about the profitability of Forrest Gump were quite the story at the time.)
All this is a reminder that like many another industry, for all that we hear about, filmmaking is less transparent than it appears. It is also a reminder not to expect a streak of underperforming films--of sequels nobody asked for and which it turned out the public really didn't want--like 2016's rather long streak of them after the hit-packed spring (X-Men, Alice, the Turtles, Independence Day, etc.)--to have too much effect on how Hollywood does things. The sheer variety of ways of fraying costs, and of revenue streams to tap, as well as the lack of any other business model Hollywood might find remotely attractive given its bottom-line priorities and the reality of a film business that makes the high-concept blockbuster more than just an exercise in business cynicism, are likely to keep it at the present game for a long time to come.
Sunday, February 5, 2017
Monday, January 9, 2017
On The Word "Deserve"
Like "lifestyle" the word "deserve" has come to be grossly misused, overused and abused, replacing many another word and concept in the process – and consequently, diminishing the average person's already vanishingly small ability to think.
The word "deserve" properly refers to those things that have actually been earned (like an award recognizing particular accomplishments). To say one deserves something is to make an indisputable moral claim on their behalf. However, the term is being used with mind-numbing regularity in place of words like "want," and "need," and "right" (as in "have a right to"). Certainly we all have wants. (You might want a private jet.) We all have needs. (You need food and oxygen to live.) We all have rights of varying kinds. (Free speech is an inalienable human right, while someone might have a right to the inheritance of a particular property or the award of damages following some injury, given the laws prevailing at a particular time and place.)
The upshot of this is that one may want, need or have a right to the things they deserve – but they do not necessarily deserve the things they want, need or claim as a right. Yet, there seems an increasing insistence on dressing up want, need and right in the moralistic language of deserts. Take, for instance, the immediate cause of this post, which was my hearing an anchor on The Weather Channel say last winter that ski resorts in a particular region were finally getting the snow they "deserve." The owners of ski resorts want and need snow because it enables them to operate their establishments, and a particular resort owner may have done the things ordinarily seen as meriting business success, but it is nothing short of bizarre to say instead that resorts "deserve" snow.
I suppose this particular butchery of the English language contains something of the tendency to view every outcome in a person's life as a matter of their own, personal morality – an idea very much in line with the self-help/religious ideas that have long enjoyed wide currency in the United States. There is, too, what Thorstein Veblen in his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class called the "habit of invidious distinction," because where there are the deserving there are also the undeserving.
It would seem that at the bottom of such things is a deeply conservative impulse to justify – and sanctify – everything as it is, not least the inequalities of wealth and the callousness toward the poor and disenfranchised that increasingly characterize American life. The CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are assumed to "deserve" their seven and eight figure compensation packages (even as they make disastrous decisions), while many vehemently deny that the people who perform the work without which their companies could not possibly remain going concerns "deserve" a living wage. Some people "deserve" megayachts, while others do not "deserve" health care – or even food and shelter.
In other words, the mind-boggling greed of some is not merely excused but justified, celebrated, exalted on the grounds of what they "deserve," while the claims of others to having their most basic physical needs met (and many would say, their most basic rights as human beings recognized) are dismissed on the very same grounds, which happens to be not the content of one's character, but the content of one's bank account, personal worth equated with "net worth." One person is "worth" fifty billion dollars and another "worth" nothing – in effect, worthless.
All of this is a revolting tissue of absurdities which only confuses and cheapens the idea of morality itself. But I don't think it's going away any time soon. If anything, the way the political winds are blowing, it seems likely the tendency will only get stronger.
The word "deserve" properly refers to those things that have actually been earned (like an award recognizing particular accomplishments). To say one deserves something is to make an indisputable moral claim on their behalf. However, the term is being used with mind-numbing regularity in place of words like "want," and "need," and "right" (as in "have a right to"). Certainly we all have wants. (You might want a private jet.) We all have needs. (You need food and oxygen to live.) We all have rights of varying kinds. (Free speech is an inalienable human right, while someone might have a right to the inheritance of a particular property or the award of damages following some injury, given the laws prevailing at a particular time and place.)
The upshot of this is that one may want, need or have a right to the things they deserve – but they do not necessarily deserve the things they want, need or claim as a right. Yet, there seems an increasing insistence on dressing up want, need and right in the moralistic language of deserts. Take, for instance, the immediate cause of this post, which was my hearing an anchor on The Weather Channel say last winter that ski resorts in a particular region were finally getting the snow they "deserve." The owners of ski resorts want and need snow because it enables them to operate their establishments, and a particular resort owner may have done the things ordinarily seen as meriting business success, but it is nothing short of bizarre to say instead that resorts "deserve" snow.
I suppose this particular butchery of the English language contains something of the tendency to view every outcome in a person's life as a matter of their own, personal morality – an idea very much in line with the self-help/religious ideas that have long enjoyed wide currency in the United States. There is, too, what Thorstein Veblen in his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class called the "habit of invidious distinction," because where there are the deserving there are also the undeserving.
It would seem that at the bottom of such things is a deeply conservative impulse to justify – and sanctify – everything as it is, not least the inequalities of wealth and the callousness toward the poor and disenfranchised that increasingly characterize American life. The CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are assumed to "deserve" their seven and eight figure compensation packages (even as they make disastrous decisions), while many vehemently deny that the people who perform the work without which their companies could not possibly remain going concerns "deserve" a living wage. Some people "deserve" megayachts, while others do not "deserve" health care – or even food and shelter.
In other words, the mind-boggling greed of some is not merely excused but justified, celebrated, exalted on the grounds of what they "deserve," while the claims of others to having their most basic physical needs met (and many would say, their most basic rights as human beings recognized) are dismissed on the very same grounds, which happens to be not the content of one's character, but the content of one's bank account, personal worth equated with "net worth." One person is "worth" fifty billion dollars and another "worth" nothing – in effect, worthless.
All of this is a revolting tissue of absurdities which only confuses and cheapens the idea of morality itself. But I don't think it's going away any time soon. If anything, the way the political winds are blowing, it seems likely the tendency will only get stronger.
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Slow Burner and '50s Britain
The plot of William Haggard's Slow Burner (reviewed here) centers on a British program to develop civil nuclear power in the hopes of scoring a major economic coup.
While nuclear energy has never stopped being topical, this idea was especially so at the time because in the '50s the British government really did bet heavily on its scientists achieving a breakthrough in civil nuclear power, both for the sake of cheap domestic power, and as a source of export income with which to achieve a healthy balance of payments (as a country dependent on massive food and energy imports, while its manufacturing and financial position slipped).1 The object of those hopes was the Magnox reactor, which never justified such a confidence (the world generally preferred the American pressurized water reactor, today still the mainstay of civil nuclear power), but the expectations do come to pass in Slow Burner, specifically in the titular, very different technology. A nuclear power source compact enough to be installed in a suburban attic and packed up and driven about in the boot of a car, it put Britain twenty years ahead of the rest of the world in that field--the only way, the book says, that the British economy was not twenty years behind it.
Moreover, the implications of this for Britain's economic life are repeatedly underlined within the story, so much so that the characters worry that the thief might be running West as much as East, and seem more concerned about the implications of losing perhaps their only prospect for a healthy balance of payments than they are about the Soviets upsetting the Cold War balance of power. Indeed, it is Britain's economic predicament that Sir Jeremy Bates has in mind ("Fifty or sixty million . . . and food, at the level of subsistence, for perhaps forty"; manufacturing plant "a generation out of date") when he thinks to himself that a "man who could consider going abroad, selling his knowledge, was worse than a danger, worse than an apostate" (114).
The point comes up in smaller ways, too--a burglar enlisted by Colonel Russell's people for an illegal black bag job told that if things go badly he could be resettled where he likes in the Sterling Area.
Sterling Area? he wonders, surprised by the qualification.
Yes, he's told, because just now dollars are hard to come by.
Next to this any menace from the Soviets in the book appears vague, shadowy.
Unsurprisingly, a good part of the book's interest for me was in its quality of being a time capsule from '50s Britain, capable of surprising in such ways.
1. While it doesn't say much about the government's specifically nuclear ambitions, David Edgerton's Warfare State nonetheless has a good deal to say about British policy regarding R & D in these years, and the view of some of its critics that it was too devoted to big-ticket prestige projects (of which the Concorde supersonic transport was another example).
While nuclear energy has never stopped being topical, this idea was especially so at the time because in the '50s the British government really did bet heavily on its scientists achieving a breakthrough in civil nuclear power, both for the sake of cheap domestic power, and as a source of export income with which to achieve a healthy balance of payments (as a country dependent on massive food and energy imports, while its manufacturing and financial position slipped).1 The object of those hopes was the Magnox reactor, which never justified such a confidence (the world generally preferred the American pressurized water reactor, today still the mainstay of civil nuclear power), but the expectations do come to pass in Slow Burner, specifically in the titular, very different technology. A nuclear power source compact enough to be installed in a suburban attic and packed up and driven about in the boot of a car, it put Britain twenty years ahead of the rest of the world in that field--the only way, the book says, that the British economy was not twenty years behind it.
Moreover, the implications of this for Britain's economic life are repeatedly underlined within the story, so much so that the characters worry that the thief might be running West as much as East, and seem more concerned about the implications of losing perhaps their only prospect for a healthy balance of payments than they are about the Soviets upsetting the Cold War balance of power. Indeed, it is Britain's economic predicament that Sir Jeremy Bates has in mind ("Fifty or sixty million . . . and food, at the level of subsistence, for perhaps forty"; manufacturing plant "a generation out of date") when he thinks to himself that a "man who could consider going abroad, selling his knowledge, was worse than a danger, worse than an apostate" (114).
The point comes up in smaller ways, too--a burglar enlisted by Colonel Russell's people for an illegal black bag job told that if things go badly he could be resettled where he likes in the Sterling Area.
Sterling Area? he wonders, surprised by the qualification.
Yes, he's told, because just now dollars are hard to come by.
Next to this any menace from the Soviets in the book appears vague, shadowy.
Unsurprisingly, a good part of the book's interest for me was in its quality of being a time capsule from '50s Britain, capable of surprising in such ways.
1. While it doesn't say much about the government's specifically nuclear ambitions, David Edgerton's Warfare State nonetheless has a good deal to say about British policy regarding R & D in these years, and the view of some of its critics that it was too devoted to big-ticket prestige projects (of which the Concorde supersonic transport was another example).
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