Producer Gill Holland forwarded me a link to this
provocative interview by Eric Garland, whose company
Big Champagne reports on filesharing activity for its customers — the major studios and broadcast networks. A lot of people talk about the relationship between what's happened to the music business and what's happening to the film business, but Garland effectively points out not only the similarities but also, promisingly, the differences. That said, he is not predicting that the mainstream film business will be able to maintain its revenue figures in a time of migrating audiences and technological change.
An excerpt from the CNET article:
CNET: But it doesn't appear that Hulu is making the kind of money that will satisfy content owners, at least those News Corp. and NBC Universal (Hulu's backers).
Garland: The cute answer, which is probably the truest answer, is that growing a sector is a privilege and not a right. There is no right size. There is no correct or God-given size for any sector. Why do we get to make movies that cost $300 million to make? Because we have found venues where people will spend more than $300 million on the result. If people spend only $50 million then the price of a movie must be $49 million or less.
I think in today's dollars no one could make "Gone With The Wind" because at the time this movie was made when everyone went to the movies. It was something like 79 percent of the population. The cute answer is that movies will get smaller.
I know people are tearing out hair and spinning in graves, but maybe "Transformers" has to be made for $75 million next time.
Oh my God, what am I saying? Put the words back in your mouth. That is just a pretty plain faced observation. One outcome might mean that in the Digital Age the return on investment on a major International tent-pole franchise is not a billion dollars. It's a quarter of that or a third. Therefore we have to get our costs in line with the market value.
When we talk about this in 3 or 5 or 7 years, one thing we will all have to concede is costs have to come down. We don't have the total control over the distribution chain that we exploited so well as industries for so long. Without that you can't take advantage of the consumer in the same way.
Comments (1)
A good read. Garland had some pretty insightful points, but most glaring is the one from the excerpt you posted, and one that has been brought up time and time again; costs.
Indies have the advantage for cost negotiation. The nature of our beast thankfully allows flexibility. On my current feature we are trading post services as part of an investment and we have also gotten very creative with our equipment. Because the budgets are smaller and the community is more pliable, the Indie world can come out ahead here. A studio trying to do that would have to break one or two union ties and bi-pass their "safe" pre-existing models in some pretty dodgy ways, which would mean a much smaller overhead for them. Its a major overhaul. Could they do it? Yes. Will they do it?
I guess part of the question comes down to a fundamental part human nature: ambition. How much is enough? How much money does someone really need? Over other men? Maybe that's a topic for something else, but again, we see it comes down to passion. If you really want to make a living doing this, you have to have it and be able to live off of it.
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posted by Raz Cunningham @ 10/30/2009 1:04 AM
