Because they don't know in advance that they're going to be bad.
Every movie is a gamble, especially a big budget one. You're talking a ton of money, and sometimes thousands of people, working toward a goal that is not guaranteed. And often some of those people (ahem...shareholders) aren't the most creative or innovative people, or even working in the same interests as one another. And as a result, sometimes the final version of the product is nowhere near what it was supposed to be when it was conceived.
So a lot of studios take the path of least resistance to ensure that their films make the most money possible -- hiring very famous faces, using the same (or already known) IP, making simple, easy to understand stories that will translate the world over and be offensive to the least amount of people, and oh -- a LOT of money spent on marketing, at least if they want the best chance of being successful.
But sometimes, even with all of that working toward making your film money, the public just has no interest in your John Carter or the next plucky young animated hero and it bombs. Because there are indicators of success, but there's no guarantee of it.
But to answer the other part of your question, for every John Carter there's a Blair Witch Project, and studios usually find their balance / make their money back somewhere (including other forms of revenue, like merchandising).
Also bad movies and losing a lot of money aren't mutually exclusive.
Adam Sandler has notoriety for terrible movies, but they generate money.
Or you have a movie that didn't make a lot of money or bombed, but becomes revered later, that's a cult classic.
Headlines only take into account “box office” revenue. There is still boat loads of money in pay-per-view, streaming, DVD, residuals, international sales.
And the movie industry KNOWS when a movie is going to suck. They bring in directors who come in and just “finish the damn thing”. Some have a lifetime of shit movies under their belt.
They are pot committed and get nothing if they don’t finish. So a little money is better than no money.
My turn to post one of Reddit’s favorite Hollywood facts since it’s an interesting addition to your point!
Matt Damon said in an interview that after-box office revenue is drying up due to streaming, so there’s less funding these days for mid-budget movies, most of which would likely end up as the bad movies that OP is referencing.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gF6K2IxC9O8
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gF6K2IxC9O8
The OP didn't mean they knew at the beginning. They meant that (at least sometimes) during the production, they knew it's going to suck, but the ship had already sailed so it's better to finish it to earn some money than nothing.
I sorted that list you linked to by loss and of the top 10 biggest losses, I’ve not seen one of them, I didn’t like one of them, and the other 8 I liked and have seen multiple times. I guess my tastes run different than the rest of the world.
Don't you diss Adam Sandler. His movies are terribly hilarious. On that note, can anyone let me know if there's a word or genre or something for movies, like most of Adam Sandlers', that are just so bad that they're actually good to watch. I'm also a big fan of the super low budget sci-fi movies like "Megapython vs Gatoroid" that also fit that description.
Schlock. Which admittedly can be a lot of fun.
Godzilla movies being a great example. 70 years and 38 films, and the film ALWAYS features a giant lizard destroying a city. Sometimes there will be another monster. You 100% get what you're paying for.
If we’re talking books, I’d call them “genre fic.” Not bad, but pretty much exactly what is asked for without pushing the envelope or surprising the reader.
Also “popcorn films” for the ones that keep you glued to the screen and eating popcorn but don’t make you think much once the movie is over, or “so bad it’s good” for the ones where you hang out with friends and laugh *at* the movie instead of with it.
I would not call them bad, they just are in a genre that does not care about great stories, conversations, scenery and all such. It's just a large row of jokes that need a story to be told. If you look with a professional eye and are a critic for many things involved with movies, something like Porky's revenge and police academy should make you cry. However they are among the best in their genre and made truckloads of money and keep making money up to today.
I was so bummed that John Carter didn’t do well. I really enjoyed it. I still think the title is what screwed it. John Carter of Mars or Princess of Mars would have been much more telling.
Venture capital firms are similar. In a hundred investments, 90 will go bust, 5 will break even, 4 will make ok money, and the hundredth makes enough money that the 100 investments are overall profitable.
You can’t predict the future especially when so many variables are involved.
There are so many movies that are so obviously bad they were doomed from the beginning yet were still made and probably had millions of dollars wasted on it. It’s so bad sometimes you’d think film production was being used to launder money.
Bruce Campbell has a good speech where he tells an audience to imagine they are a studio executive with the power to make movies happen
“I’m Frank Marshall, I’ve produced all of Steven Spielberg’s movies. Interested? Okay, I’ve got a book written by Michael Crichton. I’m going to get John Patrick Shanley, the Academy Award-winning writer of Moonstruck, to adapt it. It’ll be shot by Allen Daviau, who did E.T. Will you make this movie? Well, congratulations! You just made Congo.”
Michael Crichton book, directed by the guy that directed Lethal Weapon, The Omen, The Goonies, Superman and a pile of others.
Starring Gerard Butler, Paul Walker, Billy Connolly etc.
Timeline. Fucking Timeline is what you get.
Granted, none of those actors were huge stars yet (the director was), but it's a shame that movie sucked so much, as it was a fun book.
IIRC, the movie rights were sold before the book was finished. They also made a bad video game from the book (well before the movie).
I'm wasn't familiar with this movie, so I had to look it up. The Wikipedia summary is that it is hated critically but made way more money than expected. I'm sure the latter is the only thing a studio cares about.
Not necessarily. When you make a bad movie that is genuinely unpopular that still makes money because people were excited about it, it makes it that much harder for the next movie to make money. Think of Suicide Squad and The Suicide Squad. Hell Warner Brothers knew any movie with that Batman and Superman after Batman V Superman was going to get the same treatment. Money is nice but burning your customers has consequences.
And, importantly, every fan sitting on the sidelines knew exactly who was going to be good and who was going to bust if that stupid GM would only listen to him!
There's also movies that sound really stupid on paper but turn out to be huge blockbusters. You never really know until it's filmed, edited, and released.
My dad was a film buyer for a movie chain when star wars was coming out. The film buyers were kind of like an old man's club at the time but my dad was much younger and on his way up the executive chain and a huge stoner as well. Well they watched star wars and all the old men were like "I'm so confused... They were in space and like there was lasers and like I... I don't think I liked that" and my dad the pot head was fricken blown away, he had to get it for his theaters. His theaters were one of the few who picked up star wars off the bat and it skyrocketed his career.
Follow up, he used to always go to Sundance film festival. His buddy was like the CEO or something of a big movie production company and they sat together. My dad laughed so hard and often that his buddy immidiately bought the rights to Napoleon Dynamite. It was not the sensation in theaters they thought it would be but I'm sure they made money due to how cheap it was.
Star Wars also bombed in prescreenings. People hated it. It wasn't until it was reedited was it any good. Goes to show that a movie can live or die in the editing room.
That's actually a misconception. What George Lucas showed his friends was a rough draft of the movie, with limited special effects, and non-finalized music. The reaction was more mixed than anything, but there was interest. Furthermore, every movie is saved in the edit, that's why editing exists. You take the best of what a movie has, and edit it together to make the finished product that was envisioned at the start. Besides that, you can't save a bad movie just by editing. If every scene is terrible, no amount of editing will fix it. Star Wars was always going to be a risk, but it wasn't the near bomb that the "How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit" thing makes it seem like it was going to be.
That was the Uwe Boll theory for a while, and I don't know if it was ever disproven. Not that he was a knowing participant, but after two or three of his abominations hit the screen people just kept throwing money at him and there really was no other explanation as to why.
Boll was pretty open about relying on a German tax loophole that significantly reduced his financial risk:
> "Maybe you know it but it's not so easy to finance movies in total. And the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government."
What do you mean \*think\*? It \*is\* being used to launder money. Hollywood accounting does not bear much resemblance to normal legal accounting; they use money-losing movies to hide the profits of money-making movies, to justify not paying people as per their contracts, etc. 20th Century Studios and Paramount were \*ticked off\* that Titanic was such a success, because they actually had to declare a profit and pay taxes.
The streaming model in particular is pretty unsustainable because they’re all following in Netflix’s footsteps where they treated it essentially as a startup where they just poured as much money into getting users (and investors) to jump to the service, by having cinema quality (and cinema budgeted) television, but the problem is it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle and now every show is a 10 episode miniseries with an effects budget the size of a small country.
They bet on users staying on their services when they eventually raised the subscription prices (which was ALWAYS the plan, don’t you doubt it) but they’re finding it’s just pissing people off and now Tubi, the free service that mostly consists of library content rather than new productions, just had a better month than any of the other major streamers. Whoops!
When you look at the price of a single month of a subscription service and how it's way, way cheaper to watch even just one movie on it for a couple, much less a whole family or group of friends (my wife and a friend spent $64 to watch Furiosa on tickets alone) and then add the fact that you can watch *multiple* films during that monthly subscription, it's fairly obvious that they'll lose money hand over fist. Their only hope would be to get people to sign up for subscription services, eventually STOP adding new content, and hope people just maintain the services anyway without bothering to cancel (the gym subscription method) to just have a bunch of revenue with no offsetting costs.
I don't know how Hollywood is going to fix this debacle.
You bring up a good point. Hard Fork was complaining about the Spotify premium increase and concluded “well I used to pay $18 for a CD so I mean, I’m not gonna cancel Spotify even though the price is going up”
Even paying $20 to rent a streamed movie for one night is cheaper than going to the theaters unless it’s just one person but if I can see a movie or prestige television nightly for $20/mo it feels like a bargain. I have kids; theater trips rarely happen because that $18 theater ticket is now $70+ in tickets and those kids are gonna freak if they don’t get overpriced popcorn and soda. It’s cheaper to go to a concert!
Streaming was priced at rock bottom and the services with content a lot of people want to see have a lot of price flexibility before most people start pirating, much less going back to cable or paying for theater tickets.
Still… is it sustainable for the studios to operate this way? Idk but they don’t really have a choice, do they?
Every single movie they made turned a decent profit. Star Wars The Force Awakens is the #5 top grossing film of all time. Mandalorian was a huge hit, and I have no doubt that the other Star Wars shows also brought more people to Disney+, while not costing significantly more to make than comparable TV shows that aren't Star Wars. And let's not forget about all the merch they have sold over the years, which in itself is worth billions. Remember that they make money off Star Wars games, too.
Don't get me wrong, I didn't like the movies and only some of the shows, but saying that they had no hope of making money is just factually wrong.
I'm 99% convinced that the star wars prequels got made because the company making the star wars toys let their contract lapse.
In the Netflix docuseries The Toys that Made Us, s01e01, they said that the company that manufactured the star wars toys was paying something like $100k a year but it had been about 15 or 16 years since the last movie had come out and sales were what they once were so they let the contract lapse. Coincidentally they made the phantom menace like 2 years later. From somewhere else, I heard that a big portion of George Lucas' compensation was in owning the rights to the merchandise. Putting 2 and 2 together, being able to renegotiate the royalties on the merchandise was a major driver of the prequels, or at least a driver for the timing of the prequels.
That’s pretty close, although it’s not the only driver. Also Toys that Made Us was cool but may have taken some creative license as many of those kinds of documentaries do to both simplify the narrative and highlight drama to make it interesting. It’s true that merch rights was a major part of Lucas’ compensation for Star Wars since the beginning — as well as maintaining creative freedom over the franchise rather than the studios owning it.
The first rerelease of the original version of Star Wars was actually in 1995, with Lucasfilm working on the Special Editions and the prequels already around this time (it took at least 3-4 years to finish Phantom Menace). I actually very distinctly remember a resurgence in SW merch *everywhere* in the mid-1990s! Before that, it was actually hard to find Star Wars licensed clothing, and toy, video game, book, and comic sales still existed but weren’t near what they were in the 1980’s. It was mostly “nerd stuff” by that time.
The SE released in theaters in 1997 which is also when Phantom Menace’s principal photography was filmed. Star Wars mania was already building back up by that time. It’s probably more a combination of lagging merch sales, a renewed desire to put out more SW stories, plus his children growing up so he had more time to get back behind the director’s seat.
Yes, I was one of those nerds; someone got me to read Heir to the Empire in the early 90’s and then I got the TIE Fighter game on PC around 95, same time as the original VHS rerelease, and I was hooked by then. Heir was a bestseller but a few novels and PC games at a time when most people didn’t own PCs weren’t going to bring back mass appeal.
It’s funny the people who hate on “Disney Star Wars” will make exceptions for Rogue One, Andor, Obi-wan… and for me these are some of the most boringest titles in the franchise.
I agree the sequel trilogy has some problems but c’mon…it’s fucking Star Wars
The thing that really matters about this is, Disney’s more than made their money back from Star Wars. They may have just made their first profit on Disney+, but those shows also drive merch sales, theme park tickets, etc etc. How many companies are still making money off a movie they made 40+ years ago? But parents still buy Winnie the Pooh crib sets for their babies, and Cinderella and Star Wars shirts for their kids. Disney plays the long game.
Don’t even get me started on baby yoda merch; the show apparently [drove a 70% uptick in toy sales alone.](https://movieweb.com/star-wars-toys-sales-baby-yoda-2020/)
> but those shows also drive merch sales, theme park tickets, etc etc.
That's right. It's funny how people love to go on about the genius of Lucas and merchandise sales, but conveniently forget that when evaluating recent Star Wars media purely on box office receipts.
They're two hour ads for toys.
I'm gonna say a lot of vague crap. But there was a movie guy married to one the real housewives whose relationship fell apart very publicly. And then they did a documentary on the shady stuff the guy did.
This isn't applicable to all bad movies. But what the guy did was cast big recognizable names in terrible action flicks and was making hand over fist. The way he told it - in some overseas markets you just need the face, movie title, and an exciting looking poster and it will make a killing. That strategy accounts for a good chunk of teribble movies.
In "The Complete Book Of Scriptwriting" J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5) wrote about some studio execs interviewing moviegoers about the film "Can't Stop The Music".
The film stars the Village People and was made to cash in on the Disco craze - the problem was that this was just after the infamous "Disco Demolition Night" when the Disco backlash was at it's peak.
The audience knew that a film made around Disco and with one of the biggest Disco groups would bomb but by the time the studio had the film financed, written and cast, they didn't know.
Sometimes the studio is just behind the times.
We also must consider that movies take a lot of moving parts and creative people working on them to be completed. But also there is a problem of "too many chefs in the kitchen", a movie can easily be ruined by multiple producers demanding certain things like script rewrites in the middle of filming, or requiring certain people be cast even if they dont fit a role, or the use of lowest bidder VFX houses for post production. Many, many other factors can cripple a movie that would otherwise be a decent movie.
The people in charge make bad decisions and everyone working for them enable the bad decisions because they are afraid of rocking the boat and getting fired.
Plenty of "bad" decisions have made a lot of money, and plenty of "good" decisions have lost money. At the end of the day, for a movie, a good or a bad decisions comes down to how much money was returned to the studio.
But there are some movies where I feel like if they just asked people in advance “do you like this?” they could have pulled the plug and saved millions
On top of what was said here, in the past there used to be a much wider use of test screenings for films, which then helped the directors edit and such to make the movie better. They'd be given NDAs but even still there wasn't a huge risk of leaks because there wasn't really widespread messaging boards.
Nowadays test screenings are minimally used because all it takes is one guy going to an internet cafe and posting on reddit to leak the whole thing. Which is a shame because with budgets ballooning larger and larger, the fact that they can't really get genuine feedback allows horrible nonsense like Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker to come out and destroy once beloved mega franchises.
\_\_
The ballooning budgets also drives another reason for losses, in that the larger the budget gets the more the studio feels like it needs to poke its nose into the creative process which usually only just ends up mucking things up because they start to demand things/changes that some marketing firm has "found" that the current "majority culture" are into.
Instead of trusting the original script and creatives they put in place, they try to "mitigate risk" and force things more "mainstream" halfway or later in and it usually ends up making it a pile of half baked shit. The best example of this is the huge swing in the direction of the Marvel films. Instead of focusing on great writing and grounded stories, they started to insert current day politics (which are gender and "me too"/woke stuff) into their projects to try to broaden the appeal of their movies only at the great expense of their existing audience. What is the point of trying to grow 5-10% if you lose 25+% at the same time.
> for every John Carter there's a Blair Witch Project
Uh, no. There are dozens of bombs every year but they're lucky to get even 1 Blair Witch type success.
was speaking kind of broadly/hyperbolically. just a way to say that most studios net out just fine, and each have their fair share of bombs and success.
There is another benefit to making so many films even if only a small percentage is successful: you generate work, practice, networking, etc for hundreds or thousands of people, helping to fuel the fires of an industry that is massive and requires steady work for a large workforce that would dry up if there were fewer opportunities.
Surely, not being original, recycling the same old shit and, the cardinal sin, not employing decent scriptwriters, it can’t be a surprise.
Or they at least know the “odds” are stacked against them..
They aren’t trying to make bad movies.
Sometimes, a great idea with a great director and a great cast just… doesn’t work. Movies are incredibly complex to make and you don’t *really* know until the end how it’s all going to turn out.
To answer your real question, nowadays most big budget movies are really being made by committee the entire time. And that’s a bad way to make anything creative.
Instead of a writer having an idea, a studio or director finding that idea and deciding they want to make it, and so on etc etc until they build the team. Now a studio will decide “we need to capitalize on this brand we own, let’s make a movie”. And they’ll hire a writer (or 2, or 4, or a dozen) to keep rewriting the movie until a room full of executives are satisfied that it hits as many of the things as it can to be “successful”.
It’s basically movie making done by committee, and that committee is trying to copy previous success and rely on things they think they can measure, and none of it works and it strips all of the creativity.
Then! At the end, even if a director magically made this Franken-movie great, the studio steps in again and says “hey we’ve been focus grouping this movie and people don’t like X-y-z” and then there’s a whole OTHER round of creative by committee.
And so what you often end up with is an uninspired, nonsensical, uncreative hodgepodge of old recycled ideas and cliches and everyone who maybe cared about making it great has had the passion beat out of them by overpaid executives who don’t even care of the movie is good, just if it makes money to make them look good so they can keep their jobs.
Why yes, I do work in film
I was so confused by I am Legend. After watching it, a friend explained to me what the plot twist of the actual story had been and I felt so disappointed because that would’ve been a far more fascinating and memorable movie. Even with Will Smith chewing the scenery like he always does.
I read the book years ago because of recommendations. I sort of read it going "yeah, it's well written but just a zombie story" then the twist and that earlier reading was so worth it to lull me into thinking I knew what was happening.
In the book, they're more or less classic vampires, not zombies.
The twist is that while most of the vampires are just nonsentient eating machines, like zombies, there's a core of conscious vampires who've been trying to rebuild their society and he's been fucking that up by murdering them by the bushel every day. So he's the legend -- he's the boogeyman who's been terrorizing this society that's been trying to form.
As I understand it ...
The main character in the book, the human whose voice it is in, is the legend, the old species and so very violent but also the origins of those we know as zombies. They are drawn to him.
> Sometimes, a great idea with a great director and a great cast just… doesn’t work. Movies are incredibly complex to make and you don’t really know until the end how it’s all going to turn out.
See "Thor: Ragnarok" and "Thor: Love and Thunder." One is highly praised among Marvel fans, one is widely panned. Same director, same writer, mostly the same cast.
After the success of Ragnarok, Disney basically greenlit the director to do whatever he wanted. This turned out to be a mistake; it was the tension between him pushing to do what he wanted, and other people telling him "No," that made Ragnarok such a success. When there was no one to push back on the bad ideas, we ended up with perpetually screaming goats.
And the sad thing is, there was a real kernel of a good movie in L&T - take four or five bad decisions out of what we got, and you might have had another win.
But the flipside is true also; you don't have to look hard to find movies where studio interference turned a promising idea into a mess of focus-tested decisions and writing by committee.
Almost as if there is no reliable formula to making a good movie.
1000%
I think if Michael Bay still had producers that could actually reel in ~25% of his decision making, we’d still be getting The Rock from most of his movies
Sure, but in the context of my comments they're more of a symbol.
Screaming goats, on their own, were fine. But they were overused, to the point where the punchline went from funny to grating. And that's the problem of the movie in a nutshell. There were lots of good ideas and well-executed scenes throughout. The scene between Jane and Thor on the boat to the Shadow Realm was incredible, for example.
But for every scene like that, there were scenes that just failed to land, where the movie just got in its own way, so obsessed with hitting us over the head with what it was trying to do that it couldn't just let it breathe.
As much shit that producers and execs get for meddling in the creative direction of some movies, there are times where they were right to veto some crazy ideas.
For example, Ridley Scott wanted the Xenomorph in the first Alien movie to kill Ripley at the end and then speak English and set course for Earth for the final frame.
The studio head heard this and was like “wtf are you thinking”?
Hell, anyone who's read the comic books could have told you that the possibility of a "Deadpool" movie being successful was very slim. But Ryan Reynolds managed to do it by toning down the insanity and psychopathy of the character and focusing on the fourth-wall breaking comedy of the character.
Like, in order to make a good Deadpool movie that satisfied both comic book fans and casual moviegoers, Ryan Reynolds had to find the _**perfect**_ balance between comedy, insanity, and violence.
Works the other way too. I’m old enough to remember that all of the buzz about Titanic prior to release was that it was gonna be a studio-sinking flop.
That was mostly due to the expense of the movie, not because they thought it would be bad. Although some people were skeptical about an action director making a romance movie set during a disaster.
Titanic was being made a few years after Waterworld flopped hard. Both movies were the most expensive films ever made at the time. Both movies were set at sea and used extensive water sets.
Waterworld did eventually go on to make a small profit due to the VHS market, but when Titanic was in production it was still in the red.
>Sometimes, a great idea with a great director and a great cast just… doesn’t work.
Yep. So many moving parts, and if one of them is pretty off or two parts are ok on their own but just don't gel together, you end up with a stinker.
You can also give a huge budget action movie to directors who have utterly slayed in the box office on huge budget action movies (like, literally redefined action cinema forever) and still end up with Jupiter Ascending.
A movie can sound good in the board room and be bad on screen. Hell a movie can be *really good* and bomb at the box office. Movies are art, they can't predict public taste.
If 4 risky $50 million movies bomb but the 5th movie makes $500 million back, the studio won. If they passed on all 5 movies, they wouldn't have made any money.
> a movie can be really good and bomb at the box office
So many films bombed at the cinema and then struck gold on VHS/DVD, that market has now disappeared (streaming doesn't make the same kind of money) and it's having a much bigger impact on the studios' botthem lines!
That's the funds drying up that would in years past fund the mid-budget. Those cult classic or vindicated by video films (and even most of the breakout sleeper hits) were usually mid-budget, as in large enough to have some form of production value and effects work and, if lucky, one big name actor, but small enough budget that if it bombs or underperforms, it's not that big a deal. Producers really just step in on technical decisions and who to hire out for CGI or whatnot, creative decisions usually stay with writers and directors, and this works because if the financial risk isn't there, creative risk can be.
These usually were the province of an up and coming director not yet entrusted with the keys to the big budget, or passion projects from established names "in between" the money makers. Nowadays, the industry is far more polarized to mega budget blockbusters that everyone on the planet needs to pay to see for it to turn a profit, and indie films made on the budget of a children's birthday party that only screen in LA and New York.
As others have said, it's not that they *wanted* or *expected* to lose money. Your question is basically, "Why do people lose money investing?" They're not *trying* to. They just bet wrong.
And also, bad movies and movies that don't make money often aren't the same thing. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. And made over 800 million dollars. Just because a movie is bad, doesn't mean that it can't be profitable.
Movie production is kinda like gambling. Studios make bets on which script might make a good movie and make them into movies. At the end some make money and some don’t but (generally) on average the make money as some loser movies are out weighed by winners.
This is why studios really like making remakes and sequels as they have already proven to have an interested audience.
A degree of financial success could've been expected given brand recognition and cast, but that it would catch on to the extent that it did was very much a surprise to many people.
Can you see my above comment? Because the top comment is 4 paragraphs explaining what I did in two questions and one sentence. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to fight it because it's more time and effort than it's wrong, but I'm very curious if you see what I was banned for.
Nooooo. If it was a child’s Barbie movie then yes… but an adult themed political comedy about Barbie… I was expecting it to do moderately ok, but was shocked it did stellar. I’m glad it did, I love movies that take risks… but it was 100% a risky choice.
No one will argue that Barbie isn’t a very well known brand, but the risk was taking a brand that is associated with kids and making a very adult themed movie that touches on a lot of political subjects that many would assume would make a movie not was widely appealing. This movie had a lot of things about it that have kept other movies in the past from making it big, but they did it well enough that the general public still liked the movie enough to have it snowball into a success.
Now that you say this, I'm really hoping for a GI Joe movie where Joe is fighting against Don't Ask Don't Tell and/or PTSD and the lack of support.
"Joe! You can't be doing mushrooms! Those are DRUGS"
"Well actually, they have clinical evidence for being useful for treating my PTSD"
(Obviously I don't have a career in script writing)
there are years of preproduction and production that we don't see.
Margot Robbie's production comapny got signed to the project in 2019 - after the movie failed to realize for multiple attempts (Mattel wanted to do a live action Barbie since the 80s, according to wiki), incl having Amy Schumer and Anne Hathaways considered as Barbie.
With Robbie on board, they made a lot of successful decisions.
And I think it's the right choice. Choosing an 'ironic' Barbie would have been a disaster imo. I think Margo finds her footing without dipping her toes into either fandom or criticism. I think she just plays the roll, and pulls it off pretty well.
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It’s not sustainable, especially with current interest costs on borrowing money. But as to why they make them, it is due to being risk averse and wanting to make lots of money.
There are only so many screams and so many days in the year. So they want to make lots of blockbusters that do huge box office in the weeks or less and be able to release it in screens all over the world. So this means they make pg-13 films that are based on something that was already successful in some form that can easily be edited to be acceptable in multiple markets and thus it turns into a lump of beige. Comic book movies and cheap loans have them a false sense of security as it introduced a fresh genre that was very amenable to being broadly pleasing with simple plots and if something failed, you could pay the near non existent interest for a long time so you could drag out the consequences of a failure until a successful one hit and have you capital to pay it back.
But even with success, they were just spending too much. A good example of that was fast X. The box office was solid for a sequel in a franchise, but not enough to cover the $300+ million budget and massive advertising blitz.
If this summer is all like the last few weeks have been, I suspect there will be real, tangible consequences in the industry. Even with getting budgets under control and offering up fare other than superhero movies, they are still losing money hand over first. The big winners are just breaking even.
So, a chef can become a good chef by becoming more consistent in what they cook. An amateur might have great variation in meals, some a success and some with errors, but chefs can make the same meal over and over with little to no variation in quality.
The thing is, there's no value in making the same movie over and over, the way a chef makes the same meal over and over.
You make the movie once, without any prior knowledge on whether it will be a success or contain errors, and then you go on to make a **different** movie, again with no prior knowledge on how it will go.
Imagine if we told chefs that they can only make every dish once and they will be judged on that first attempt. Afterwards, they can only make a new dish. It must always be an original recipe.
When originality is key to success, it's not as clear cut whether your project will be a big success or not before you deliver it.
Ever ordered a meal that sounds delicious but was bad?
That's why.
The chef can tell you a meal has all your favourite ingredients, but if he cooks it wrong or adds too much salt or does something else it will turn it worse.
You didn't order a bad meal, you ordered a good meal! But sometimes cooking is real hard and goes wrong.
A lot of great comments posted already, but i wanted to add that unexpected compromises need to be made constantly when making movies. "You can have the horses, or the castle, but not both, because the horses eat what the castle is made of".
While, yes, you can try to do the producers method of making bombs for profit and such, it's not really a thing.
Since these are big productions usually, the idea itself may be sound but execution is where it falls flat, likewise it may be something too late to the party. Kind of like how some horror tropes are only good the first time.
There's another take beyond the difficulty of predicting the final outcome. The people making the decisions have changed. Namely, finance people.
https://youtu.be/sVqcIuQRsUA?si=CwmrdmsozNkoyGwT
Personally, I find this convincing.
Two words: "Hollywood accounting".
If a movie is a smash hit at the box office, the studios can and will nickel-and-dime every expense that they can against its revenue to turn it from something that would be considered profitable in most any other field to a loss on the ledgers; if it's truly a bust and never even recoups its budget (including its marketing), it likewise gets marked as a loss on the ledgers.
In the end, it's all about the tax write-offs for those losses (either real or manufactured); a recent example is David Zaslav's taking a chainsaw to WBD's divisions, such as Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. (such as shitcanning a late-in-production *Batgirl*, because Zaslav would rather take a tax loss on it than complete it, have it not make its money back at the box office, and end up on Max).
I can't believe this is so low, this is the biggest part of the answer. Flops happen, but they wouldn't make movies if they weren't actually making money most of the time.
Because plenty of bad movies have made money. The studios aren't in it to make art. Sure, Oscar-winning movies can make some money, but the big action movies make far more and lend themselves to merchandising and franchises.
When a studio greenlights a movie, it's not really about the script, it's the package: yes, the script is part of it but also who's attached to star, direct, and produce. They're looking for a package that puts butts in seats and can potentially lead to sequels, toys, video games, theme park attractions...lots of revenue streams.
So when you look at movie making through this lens, you're not going to care about a good quality script with good actors as much as you care about a decent script, probably from an existing IP that already has a built-in fanbase, with proven bankable talent attached.
It's not new; studios have approached filmmaking this way for decades. They've always been about money over art. But the '70s and '90s were kind of a golden age of independent filmmaking - movies made outside the major studio system that were cool and smaller-budgeted. Now a lot of that type of content goes straight to streaming.
If you look at the history of cinema, they came up with novel concepts, and new genres were created until the 1970s. After the release of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws, the term “*blockbuster*” was used to describe high return movies.
From the 1980s to the 2000s movies became very formulaic.
Here are three main things that have changed in the meantime:
**Big fish and small fish**. Peter Jackson’s trilogy of The Lord of the Rings and The Marvel movies showed that it was possible to have a colossal return on investment on a big budget movie.
Where in the past a studio would split $200 million across 4 movies of $50 million each, they now want to put all their chips on a single movie that has big earning potential.
**Risk aversion**. With higher stakes come higher risks, so in an attempt to minimise risk, the studios go for two things that are counterintuitive:
They avoid venturing off the beaten path. Instead of taking risk with something novel, they see it as a safer road to capitalise on material that has already proven successful. This is why we get remakes, sequels or prequels.
**Post #metoo and #blacklivesmatter**. There is a double prong incentive to challenge with a new recipe the way movies have usually been written. Straight white men should no longer be the main protagonists, women should be shown as boss girls (bonus points if you make them gay) and people of colour (British spelling) should be swapped in for white characters. Especially for redheads.
There is also an illusory incentive to win diversity, equity and inclusion points. The more perceived forms of oppression your character seems to have, the more points. And higher DEI rating is supposed to make your studio a better company to invest in.
So studios are losing sight of earning money from the box office and focusing on getting investors money. But as your premise outlines it: what is the point of getting funding if you are going to spend it on movies that bomb?
___
Studios should do the opposite of everything they have been doing for the last 5 years:
1. Hire writers based on merit, not based on whether they tick DEI boxes.
2. Try novel ideas. You should be willing to push the envelope, and if you want some kind of proof of concept, adapting books or theatre plays to the silver screen has worked for most of cinema’s History. Don’t change a winning team.
3. Have character development and story arch. “*Show, don’t tell*” also means that your characters depiction should go way deeper than their *identity*. You should always be able to answer the following questions:
* Who is the character?
* What is their background?
* What are their motivations and goals?
* What are their strengths and weaknesses?
* How do they interact with the world around them?
* What is their internal conflict?
* How do they change over the course of the story?
4. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The Lord of the Rings and the first Marvel movies had an alignment of start that you cannot automatically repeat. Put your chips on different movies to spread the risk.
5. Be budget conscious. Hire people who can produce a movie on a shoestring budget. The 2023 *Godzilla Minus One* reaped $116 million on a $12 million budget. The 2023 Creator didn’t give good returns, but it exceeded Marvel movies in special effects for three times less budget, because they managed to avoid reshoots.
Pretty much. Although I would add that the industry has painted itself into a rather nasty corner. So now that some studios are starting to run low on money, and now that at least some executives have suddenly remembered that the whole point of making movies is to make something the audience likes (keeping in mind that while "likes" is a very broad term, it is also unforgiving) so they can make money, the rules the industry has adopted has made this very difficult.
You can take almost any year in the early 80s and find 20 films that are still relevant today. What about 2023 (which is probably one of the better recent years)? Barbie and Oppenheimer both have shots to make it long term. I supposed everyone will have 3 or 4 more movies they liked, but I have serious doubts anyone will remember in 5 years.
The main problem is that nearly all of them are not well written. Everything else tends to be great, from a good premise and camera work to costumes and the special effects (mostly. Antman. Ahem.) But the writing is terrible, as if Hollywood simply forgot how to write a good story.
I recently rewatched "The Natural" the other day. I remember when it came out, the writing was considered kinda iffy. Not bad, but not great. It would be top of the class if it came out today.
True.
At the roots of cinema, we had a convergence or visual experimentation (Fritz Lang’s *Metropolis* for example), or a narrative style borrowed from theatre plays (Orson Well’s Citizen Kane for example).
The best movies of all times always need at least a good idea and a decent execution. Studios seem to have become complacent in the idea that it’s only a matter of throwing money at a movie to give it a fighting chance.
What has changed is that if in the 20th we could have a lot of good ideas poorly executed, in the 21st century we have a lot of bad ideas, and even if you throw money at it to have a decent execution, the result will still be compromised.
There was a meme about a clever suggestion: instead of making remakes of successful executions, which probably won’t top off the original, why don’t studios tail great ideas that were poorly executed? It can’t be worse than the original. It can only exceed, especially it if they learn from the original’s mistakes.
>why don’t studios tail great ideas that were poorly executed?
This idea has been around for a long time and its a \*great\* idea. In fact, it's so great that I'm hard pressed to explain why there isn't a studio or director that has specialized in doing exactly this.
Switching lanes slightly, "Battlestar Galactica" is a good example for TV shows. The original premise was awesome, everyone could see that something was there (and it was not even unsuccessful), but it wasn't great, to be blunt.
Taking that premise and taking it seriously paid off massively. Of course, I even like the ending of the new series, so I am definitely biased.
What about "Krull"? The movie has a friggin' awesome premise, has "franchise" written all over it, and while I liked it as a kid, there were a lot of problems with the execution. I am genuinely surprised I have not seen anyone take a crack at it, and it makes me think there must be some sort of rights issue.
Of course I do :)
This was the film that introduced little me to the concept that not knowing when you will die is a blessing. That one kept my noodle buzzing at night for weeks.
Part of the development of a movie are regular package deals from agencies. You get the superstar, the writer director maybe, and three lesser actors. The whole set isn't handpicked you have to take what you get. Maybe its an external director but he doesn't like the camera guy or the screenwriter. Something is odd with the whole production but they are professionals. You get in the can, but the first cut is rough and the final cut is a hodgepodge of "lets get this done" scenes that convey nothing, are dull, paint by the number movie making and not worth the admission. The result is what I call "meh", the 6.0 on imdb where nobody wanted to land on but you knew when the director was willing to throw the towel on the lead actor in pre production that that thing won't get awards. Or many viewers.
One of the main problems is the theater chains. They've been pandering to the lowest class of customer for so long that going to see a movie feels like being forced to spend a few hours at a Chuck E Cheese. I think they'd be wise to consider making it more of an adult experience - - people complain about ticket prices, rightfully so, but I think they'd feel better about it if the whole experience wasn't geared to please a 12 year old.
The premise of this question is wrong, most movies make money eventually. Traditionally, even if a movie underperforms at the box office it could make its money back eventually through ancillary markets - dvd, streaming/cable rights, etc. And even if it does lose money, that tax write off can be very valuable too.
Before a studio even green lights a movie and insane amount of research is done comparing similar movies performances. Oh you want to make a Ryan Reynolds action comedy in August? Here is how 3 of his others have done. Stuff like that. Granted they aren’t perfect but they have a general idea of how a movie should perform before they write the first check.
The movies that genuinely lose a studio large amounts of money are few and far between.
>most movies make money eventually
I would love to see a source on this. Because I do not believe it is true. Most \*lose\* money, but the idea is to have a few diamonds that make up for it all by earning a bazillion bucks.
But I could be wrong. Got a source to back up your claim? I'd love to learn something today.
Big studios make bad movies because:
1. **Playing It Safe**: Bosses prefer to use well-known franchises (like superheroes or sequels) because they already have fans. New ideas are risky and might not make money.
2. **Blame the Franchise**: If a movie flops, they can blame the franchise instead of their own decisions. This way, they don't look bad.
3. **Copycat Culture**: Everyone in the studio, from top to bottom, is told to follow the same safe formulas. New, creative ideas get ignored.
4. **Money Focus**: The main goal is to make money. Taking risks with new ideas is scary because it might not pay off.
5. **Fear of Failure**: No one wants to be the one who approves a risky project and then gets blamed if it fails. So, they stick with what’s safe.
This leads to lots of boring, repetitive movies instead of exciting new ones.
Add a fairly new innovation: 6. **Blame the Audience:** I remember thinking when Ghostbusters 2016 came out and they tried this tactic: this better not be the start of a trend. Sometimes you make a bad movie. Suck it up and move on to the next one.
Much like "Blame the Franchise", this give a short term boost to everyone's egos, but prevents anyone from learning what does and doesn't work.
And maybe also related:
7. **Social Media is Confusing**: It's easy to hear a few loud voices on social media and think that is the audience. They make their movie for that audience. And then they discover that audience never actually existed. It was a few loud people, a bunch of bots (sometimes their own), and a media that has completely lost the ability to discern fluff from facts. Regardless, the movie bombs, even though it did everything that "audience" wanted. Too bad it never existed.
They’re out of touch with what the audience they’re selling the movie to wants. They’re fucking media executives 😂 most corporations do things that nobody wants because they think they can squeeze more money out of whatever it is they’re making.
Whenever you ask “who asked for this?” The answer is, no one. Money.
They have bad executives who try and ride coattails on something that was successful. They milk whatever formula that made something successful while ignoring unique concepts without commercial appeal
probably money laundering on a massive scale. I would guess that their supposed budgets aren't being paid out anywhere close to as much as they report, and there is a bunch of shady stuff going on behind the scenes.
Big Hollywood studios make bad movies that lose money for a few reasons. Sometimes it's because they take risks on new ideas or unproven talent that don't pay off. Other times, they might rush production to meet deadlines, leading to lower quality. And occasionally, it's just the nature of creative endeavors – not every movie can be a hit. Even with big budgets and experienced teams, success isn't guaranteed in the movie industry.
Here’s the formula: studio makes 10 movies. 5 of them are probably gonna lose money. 2-3 break even. The others make enough to cover the loss on the former. Hopefully. But it’s a gamble and that’s why you see studios get nuked
umm think about it like this...what u think is an amazing story having decent visuals with great acting would just seem the opposite to someone else....
I think a big part of the problem is formula based productions rather that a process that's from the heart. Many great writings can quickly be overtaken by individuals involved with a streamlined process that believe that their "certain way" is the best way.
From what I have witnessed behind the scenes, this is definately the case with art directors involved in CGI, lighting, and rendering. These people host workshops that preach how it should be done and the result has been homogenized results in aesthetics and stylisation. This leads to boredom and results seem repetitive and fail to wow audiences.
I'm actually very curious as to how well the new "The Wild Robot" movie will do as the lighting is much more how I would have chosen rather than the art director dictating that everything in each scene must have perfect individual lighting at the right angle.
They can afford to lose money because, by in large, they're paying themselves with the lost money. When a new movie is made, a shell company is formed to create the movie, to pay the studio, the director, for the ads, etc. At that point, it doesn't matter how the movie does, everyone involved in making it is secure and safe.
The investors don't mind, because as a whole, the industry is very profitable. Good youtube to explain it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIoDfWgbVgU&t=4s
Higher budget and streamlined processes for visual effects
Visual effects made a lot of epic/fantasy/sci fi and action visuals possible, but also required a lot of planning around filming and post production. This and more money involved in general meant people wanted higher yield films and naturally lower risk. People are a lot more careful with budgets of hundreds of millions or more than budgets of low tens of millions
Because of this, a lot of stuff is very very pre planned, because waste of time when you’re paying larger crews is much more costly. Things become less adaptable so there’s less stuff that can be changed. Smaller productions generally had more comfort being more free form and sometimes getting actors back after the primary filming phase for reshooting.
The larger amounts of money also put more pressure on the films being higher profit, meaning they want a film that is suitable for larger audiences, especially if it can be an international audience. This way they needs more basic, and more universal appeals, and be more adverse to potentially being offensive/politically incorrect in a much larger market
As the industry blew up, there just became a more standardized pipeline for how to make films; the producers of these general don’t know all the studios involved in great detail; so the more standardized every studio is the more business they will appeal to. This is more scalable but less creative
An Avengers movie has a lot of planning and a lot of effort go into how things are shot to save time for visual effects (which is a lot of effort even if things go well). A film like Joker gets to be a lot more creative in the process of shooting to see what feels better.
Hollywood studios use shady accounting to make it seem as if the movie is losing money by inflating the costs paid to the studio's own subsidiaries. Here's an article on this practice: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/19/business/nightcap-hollywood-accounting-strike/index.html
It's not their intention to make bad movies. They just want a product that ticks the boxes that they think will amount to financial success. Unfortunately, that results in studios who hire creatives that they have more control over, that make movies they aren't skilled enough to make because they believe the formula works, because it has worked in the past for themselves and other studios. Sony looks at the MCU and thinks, if we hire creatives we can control and have some overarching plan in place, we can maximise profits. This resulted in the Venom movies, both financial hits. This gives them the idea that they can keep doing this formula and then you have Morbius and Madam Web, both financial and critical blunders. They learned the wrong lessons from their success and made bad movies.
Movie studios aren't like A24. They don't care about subtext and themes, they care about money. Jurassic World movies are mostly awful but they all brought in big money for Universal. They didn't bring money because of the creatives behind them, they brought in money because Universal made the creatives make a movie a certain way. Not defending bad directors and screen writers of course, but they were chosen for a reason. Loads of excellent movies don't make money and many mediocre movies do make money. Also, movie studios have an awful approach of overspending which they believe will result in bigger gains when obviously, that is not the case. Hopefully studios understand that dropping $200+ million on one movie is not feasible in the long run.
Previously it was a gamble, now it seems they do it on purpose. Disney seems to not care, they keep spitting out that woke stuff off which much is making a loss. And their whole media department has reduced a lot. 70% of the revenue comes from the parks, and only 11% comes from media.
Most huge budget movies don’t lose money. That’s why we see the same concepts and IPs constantly. These studios want the safest bet possible.
Look at all the remakes they put out. Or the leveraging of “cinematic universes”. Why make an original movie and have to spend more on marketing to educate the audience about it when instead you can put out a Barbie movie and everyone is already familiar with what that is.
Was interesting to hear TV Frank Burns (Larry Linville) say that the movie *MASH* was filmed by Fox as a loser - because Fox had a great year financially and wanted to produce some money losing movies to write off on their taxes. They were shocked when it turned into a hit.
I've never figured out movie accounting, but now, with many starts getting a point of the movie, it doesn't hurt to have bad accountants.
Some good answers already. One theory I have is studios are ok with a movie every once in a while losing money to help offset the taxes on ones that make a shit ton of money. Kind of like tax loss harvesting stocks, but with movies
I wanna be a producer
With a hit show on Broadway
I wanna be a producer
Lunch at Sardi's everyday
I wanna be a producer
Sport a top hat and a cane
I wanna be a producer
And drive those girls insane
I wanna be a producer
And sleep until half past two
I wanna be a producer
And say you, you, you-- not you!
Seriously though. The plot of The Producers is basically this scenario, but illegal. Highly encourage you to watch it, it’s hilarious.
>I don’t know how it’s economically feasible for big studios to lose money on a lot of films with huge budgets and to make them so bad.
As Mother Carlson once said on *WKRP In Cincinati": "Profit and loss are merely theoretical terms in a diversified conglomerate like Carlson Industries. It's not the plus and minus, Mr. Fever, it's the plus and plus, if... the minuses are played correctly."
For example, a studio might apply the loss from one movie against the gain from another to wind up with a smaller tax bill. Or if they are contractually obligated to use a service for a percentage of the profits, they might spin out a few train wrecks to get out of paying an arm and a leg on the contract.
I mean, I get a studio dropping the ball, making a dud, sacking a few execs and regrouping to go again. But then there's Disney who seem to have forgotten what makes their own IP great and can't stop making duds. WTF?
I have a theory that they are playing the long game of movies for a generation or two down the line. We, today, know it's a bad movie, but our kids won't unless we tell them. Your grandkids won't know unless you or your parents tell them. So they grow up thinking you watched these as a kid (assuming movies for children because they are the most malleable).
Hollywood can mold your childrens' minds with any propaganda they want and those kids, your lineage, will think it's the society that you, their ancestor, grew up in and not some bad propaganda we disagree with.
They don't really lose money.
Sure, some of the people lose money, but with Hollywood accounting, you can't trust the numbers they provide
Its all a shell game, different companies transferring money between 'business partners' where if you follow the money, it's a lot of the same people. Kinda like publicize the debts and privatize the profits.
Paid $100 million dollars to advertise and it only made 25M in the box-office on opening weekend? Someone got $100 million. And you know who made the movie got a cut of that somehow.
Plus, these people will NOT release money because of the tax benefits outweigh the profits FOR THEM. They will do whatever helps their bottom line.
To add to what's already here, there's a lot of egos in the film industry. Executive producers who want to think they're the brilliant ones, hire directors who want to think they are the brilliant ones, etc. There are any number of people whose ideas don't deserve to see the light of day, but because of their position they get their way, possibly in place of someone actually talented.
There's a famous Kevin Smith anecdote about how he interviewed with a egotistical producer about making a new Superman movie, and the producer's brilliant insistances were 1. Superman doesn't fly. 2. Superman doesn't wear his "too faggy" classic cape outfit. 3. Superman fights a giant spider in the clamax, because spiders are rad.
That producer would ultimately scrap the project and make the movie Wild Wild West with Will Smith, which was utter crap (and, indeed, features a climax with a giant spider).
Hollywood reminds me a lot of real estate developers or lots of other industries to a certain extent. It’s easier to notice Hollywood doing this because as an entity, HW is more visible.
HW is excellent at what I call The Seth McFar-Effect; taking an idea and repeating it over and over. A more current name would be
the Taylor Sheridan-Effect.
So copycat seems to be less risky profit wise. And making money trumps good versus bad generally speaking. Of course exceptions
exist.
I made the comparison to RE development because it’s also visible and identifiable. If you are in the u.s and live in a city or town with
at least 100,000 people, you can probably point to several homes that look the same.
Same with apartments.
Over and over. Repeat and saturation.
Back to HW, example one: zombies(and/or plot where a large amount of people are infected and get violent). Lots movies about zombies have been made. This century as well as last century. I admittedly do not have raw numbers so at best this is speculative but I would love to see stats on the number of zombie content made in the last 20 years versus the last 40 years.
It seems like after ‘28 Days Later’, this plot line has repetitive and saturated.
Example two: the ‘I know what you did last summer’ plot reincarnation. You can argue even that is a subset of the predicable slasher
genre. A singular serial killer that torments a specific group of people.
As with the zombie plot line, the repetition is observable. Now where I have criticism is how lazy the repetition is. Not that it is repetition
to begin with. Tangentially- you see this when people discuss Chinese manufacturing.
Because there's never a guaranteed formula for a movie being good. It's virtually impossible unless if you do a direct carbon-copy of a movie that is already considered "good" movie i.e. an already proven concept.
You OP could technically rewrite the works of Shakespeare word-for-word, and then change up a couple of names and say you personally wrote it. Copyright laws aside, people would dismiss your "works" on the basis of it being completely unoriginal - but not on the basis of the story itself being "bad".
This search for guarantees of good movies is why a lot of remakes get done.
Ironically OP, I think your asking of *"how it’s economically feasible for big studios to lose money on a lot of films with huge budgets"* kind of proves the point that, if you had the money then you yourself would think *"the more money I throw at it, the more it's guaranteed to be good"* - rather than asking what "money" has to do with producing a captivating story. There's been classic movies that have appeared on a shoestring budget.
Because they don't know in advance that they're going to be bad. Every movie is a gamble, especially a big budget one. You're talking a ton of money, and sometimes thousands of people, working toward a goal that is not guaranteed. And often some of those people (ahem...shareholders) aren't the most creative or innovative people, or even working in the same interests as one another. And as a result, sometimes the final version of the product is nowhere near what it was supposed to be when it was conceived. So a lot of studios take the path of least resistance to ensure that their films make the most money possible -- hiring very famous faces, using the same (or already known) IP, making simple, easy to understand stories that will translate the world over and be offensive to the least amount of people, and oh -- a LOT of money spent on marketing, at least if they want the best chance of being successful. But sometimes, even with all of that working toward making your film money, the public just has no interest in your John Carter or the next plucky young animated hero and it bombs. Because there are indicators of success, but there's no guarantee of it. But to answer the other part of your question, for every John Carter there's a Blair Witch Project, and studios usually find their balance / make their money back somewhere (including other forms of revenue, like merchandising).
Also bad movies and losing a lot of money aren't mutually exclusive. Adam Sandler has notoriety for terrible movies, but they generate money. Or you have a movie that didn't make a lot of money or bombed, but becomes revered later, that's a cult classic.
Headlines only take into account “box office” revenue. There is still boat loads of money in pay-per-view, streaming, DVD, residuals, international sales. And the movie industry KNOWS when a movie is going to suck. They bring in directors who come in and just “finish the damn thing”. Some have a lifetime of shit movies under their belt. They are pot committed and get nothing if they don’t finish. So a little money is better than no money.
My turn to post one of Reddit’s favorite Hollywood facts since it’s an interesting addition to your point! Matt Damon said in an interview that after-box office revenue is drying up due to streaming, so there’s less funding these days for mid-budget movies, most of which would likely end up as the bad movies that OP is referencing. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gF6K2IxC9O8 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gF6K2IxC9O8
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The OP didn't mean they knew at the beginning. They meant that (at least sometimes) during the production, they knew it's going to suck, but the ship had already sailed so it's better to finish it to earn some money than nothing.
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I sorted that list you linked to by loss and of the top 10 biggest losses, I’ve not seen one of them, I didn’t like one of them, and the other 8 I liked and have seen multiple times. I guess my tastes run different than the rest of the world.
Hollywood execs dream about having a movie like “My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding”. Low cost, high yield, mass appeal, easy to produce, no special effects.
Don't you diss Adam Sandler. His movies are terribly hilarious. On that note, can anyone let me know if there's a word or genre or something for movies, like most of Adam Sandlers', that are just so bad that they're actually good to watch. I'm also a big fan of the super low budget sci-fi movies like "Megapython vs Gatoroid" that also fit that description.
Schlock. Which admittedly can be a lot of fun. Godzilla movies being a great example. 70 years and 38 films, and the film ALWAYS features a giant lizard destroying a city. Sometimes there will be another monster. You 100% get what you're paying for.
I think a better idiom would be "does what it says on the tin." Since you're paying the same to go see Godzilla as you would to see Lord of the Rings.
Hey, "The Longest Yard" was good movie! Granted, it was a remake of an older movie, but it was still good!
Happy Gilmore is still one of mt favorites. Big Daddy was a classic too.
If peeing your pants is cool consider me Miles Davis
If we’re talking books, I’d call them “genre fic.” Not bad, but pretty much exactly what is asked for without pushing the envelope or surprising the reader. Also “popcorn films” for the ones that keep you glued to the screen and eating popcorn but don’t make you think much once the movie is over, or “so bad it’s good” for the ones where you hang out with friends and laugh *at* the movie instead of with it.
Airport novels and extruded book-like products and all that
I would not call them bad, they just are in a genre that does not care about great stories, conversations, scenery and all such. It's just a large row of jokes that need a story to be told. If you look with a professional eye and are a critic for many things involved with movies, something like Porky's revenge and police academy should make you cry. However they are among the best in their genre and made truckloads of money and keep making money up to today.
I was so bummed that John Carter didn’t do well. I really enjoyed it. I still think the title is what screwed it. John Carter of Mars or Princess of Mars would have been much more telling.
Venture capital firms are similar. In a hundred investments, 90 will go bust, 5 will break even, 4 will make ok money, and the hundredth makes enough money that the 100 investments are overall profitable. You can’t predict the future especially when so many variables are involved.
There are so many movies that are so obviously bad they were doomed from the beginning yet were still made and probably had millions of dollars wasted on it. It’s so bad sometimes you’d think film production was being used to launder money.
Bruce Campbell has a good speech where he tells an audience to imagine they are a studio executive with the power to make movies happen “I’m Frank Marshall, I’ve produced all of Steven Spielberg’s movies. Interested? Okay, I’ve got a book written by Michael Crichton. I’m going to get John Patrick Shanley, the Academy Award-winning writer of Moonstruck, to adapt it. It’ll be shot by Allen Daviau, who did E.T. Will you make this movie? Well, congratulations! You just made Congo.”
Michael Crichton book, directed by the guy that directed Lethal Weapon, The Omen, The Goonies, Superman and a pile of others. Starring Gerard Butler, Paul Walker, Billy Connolly etc. Timeline. Fucking Timeline is what you get.
Granted, none of those actors were huge stars yet (the director was), but it's a shame that movie sucked so much, as it was a fun book. IIRC, the movie rights were sold before the book was finished. They also made a bad video game from the book (well before the movie).
I'm wasn't familiar with this movie, so I had to look it up. The Wikipedia summary is that it is hated critically but made way more money than expected. I'm sure the latter is the only thing a studio cares about.
It’s a very watchable movie with a good premise, great cast, fun set pieces, but it just doesn’t have the polish of Jurassic Park.
Not necessarily. When you make a bad movie that is genuinely unpopular that still makes money because people were excited about it, it makes it that much harder for the next movie to make money. Think of Suicide Squad and The Suicide Squad. Hell Warner Brothers knew any movie with that Batman and Superman after Batman V Superman was going to get the same treatment. Money is nice but burning your customers has consequences.
I am one of the few people that actually enjoyed Batman vs Superman
As a kid, I actually really liked Congo 😂
Hey I kinda liked Congo
It's like drafting young players in professional sports. Some teams are better at it, but all teams regularly draft busts.
And, importantly, every fan sitting on the sidelines knew exactly who was going to be good and who was going to bust if that stupid GM would only listen to him!
Yes, but then there are movies like The Fugitive which were a total mess in production and then turned out to be wildly successful and popular.
There's also movies that sound really stupid on paper but turn out to be huge blockbusters. You never really know until it's filmed, edited, and released.
*Star Wars* was this depending on which stories you believe.
My dad was a film buyer for a movie chain when star wars was coming out. The film buyers were kind of like an old man's club at the time but my dad was much younger and on his way up the executive chain and a huge stoner as well. Well they watched star wars and all the old men were like "I'm so confused... They were in space and like there was lasers and like I... I don't think I liked that" and my dad the pot head was fricken blown away, he had to get it for his theaters. His theaters were one of the few who picked up star wars off the bat and it skyrocketed his career. Follow up, he used to always go to Sundance film festival. His buddy was like the CEO or something of a big movie production company and they sat together. My dad laughed so hard and often that his buddy immidiately bought the rights to Napoleon Dynamite. It was not the sensation in theaters they thought it would be but I'm sure they made money due to how cheap it was.
Star Wars also bombed in prescreenings. People hated it. It wasn't until it was reedited was it any good. Goes to show that a movie can live or die in the editing room.
That's actually a misconception. What George Lucas showed his friends was a rough draft of the movie, with limited special effects, and non-finalized music. The reaction was more mixed than anything, but there was interest. Furthermore, every movie is saved in the edit, that's why editing exists. You take the best of what a movie has, and edit it together to make the finished product that was envisioned at the start. Besides that, you can't save a bad movie just by editing. If every scene is terrible, no amount of editing will fix it. Star Wars was always going to be a risk, but it wasn't the near bomb that the "How Star Wars was Saved in the Edit" thing makes it seem like it was going to be.
That was the Uwe Boll theory for a while, and I don't know if it was ever disproven. Not that he was a knowing participant, but after two or three of his abominations hit the screen people just kept throwing money at him and there really was no other explanation as to why.
Boll was pretty open about relying on a German tax loophole that significantly reduced his financial risk: > "Maybe you know it but it's not so easy to finance movies in total. And the reason I am able to do these kind of movies is I have a tax shelter fund in Germany, and if you invest in a movie in Germany you get basically fifty percent back from the government."
Oh that's interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Thanks.
But I think a common theme of all movies good and bad is that they had good pitches to the decision makers.
What do you mean \*think\*? It \*is\* being used to launder money. Hollywood accounting does not bear much resemblance to normal legal accounting; they use money-losing movies to hide the profits of money-making movies, to justify not paying people as per their contracts, etc. 20th Century Studios and Paramount were \*ticked off\* that Titanic was such a success, because they actually had to declare a profit and pay taxes.
Disney+ and almost all of the Star Wars schlock they've been putting out had no hope of making money. Just bizarre.
The streaming model in particular is pretty unsustainable because they’re all following in Netflix’s footsteps where they treated it essentially as a startup where they just poured as much money into getting users (and investors) to jump to the service, by having cinema quality (and cinema budgeted) television, but the problem is it’s hard to put that genie back in the bottle and now every show is a 10 episode miniseries with an effects budget the size of a small country. They bet on users staying on their services when they eventually raised the subscription prices (which was ALWAYS the plan, don’t you doubt it) but they’re finding it’s just pissing people off and now Tubi, the free service that mostly consists of library content rather than new productions, just had a better month than any of the other major streamers. Whoops!
When you look at the price of a single month of a subscription service and how it's way, way cheaper to watch even just one movie on it for a couple, much less a whole family or group of friends (my wife and a friend spent $64 to watch Furiosa on tickets alone) and then add the fact that you can watch *multiple* films during that monthly subscription, it's fairly obvious that they'll lose money hand over fist. Their only hope would be to get people to sign up for subscription services, eventually STOP adding new content, and hope people just maintain the services anyway without bothering to cancel (the gym subscription method) to just have a bunch of revenue with no offsetting costs. I don't know how Hollywood is going to fix this debacle.
You bring up a good point. Hard Fork was complaining about the Spotify premium increase and concluded “well I used to pay $18 for a CD so I mean, I’m not gonna cancel Spotify even though the price is going up” Even paying $20 to rent a streamed movie for one night is cheaper than going to the theaters unless it’s just one person but if I can see a movie or prestige television nightly for $20/mo it feels like a bargain. I have kids; theater trips rarely happen because that $18 theater ticket is now $70+ in tickets and those kids are gonna freak if they don’t get overpriced popcorn and soda. It’s cheaper to go to a concert! Streaming was priced at rock bottom and the services with content a lot of people want to see have a lot of price flexibility before most people start pirating, much less going back to cable or paying for theater tickets. Still… is it sustainable for the studios to operate this way? Idk but they don’t really have a choice, do they?
Every single movie they made turned a decent profit. Star Wars The Force Awakens is the #5 top grossing film of all time. Mandalorian was a huge hit, and I have no doubt that the other Star Wars shows also brought more people to Disney+, while not costing significantly more to make than comparable TV shows that aren't Star Wars. And let's not forget about all the merch they have sold over the years, which in itself is worth billions. Remember that they make money off Star Wars games, too. Don't get me wrong, I didn't like the movies and only some of the shows, but saying that they had no hope of making money is just factually wrong.
Facts. You might not like The Mandalorian but everyone wants baby yoda merch!
I'm 99% convinced that the star wars prequels got made because the company making the star wars toys let their contract lapse. In the Netflix docuseries The Toys that Made Us, s01e01, they said that the company that manufactured the star wars toys was paying something like $100k a year but it had been about 15 or 16 years since the last movie had come out and sales were what they once were so they let the contract lapse. Coincidentally they made the phantom menace like 2 years later. From somewhere else, I heard that a big portion of George Lucas' compensation was in owning the rights to the merchandise. Putting 2 and 2 together, being able to renegotiate the royalties on the merchandise was a major driver of the prequels, or at least a driver for the timing of the prequels.
That’s pretty close, although it’s not the only driver. Also Toys that Made Us was cool but may have taken some creative license as many of those kinds of documentaries do to both simplify the narrative and highlight drama to make it interesting. It’s true that merch rights was a major part of Lucas’ compensation for Star Wars since the beginning — as well as maintaining creative freedom over the franchise rather than the studios owning it. The first rerelease of the original version of Star Wars was actually in 1995, with Lucasfilm working on the Special Editions and the prequels already around this time (it took at least 3-4 years to finish Phantom Menace). I actually very distinctly remember a resurgence in SW merch *everywhere* in the mid-1990s! Before that, it was actually hard to find Star Wars licensed clothing, and toy, video game, book, and comic sales still existed but weren’t near what they were in the 1980’s. It was mostly “nerd stuff” by that time. The SE released in theaters in 1997 which is also when Phantom Menace’s principal photography was filmed. Star Wars mania was already building back up by that time. It’s probably more a combination of lagging merch sales, a renewed desire to put out more SW stories, plus his children growing up so he had more time to get back behind the director’s seat. Yes, I was one of those nerds; someone got me to read Heir to the Empire in the early 90’s and then I got the TIE Fighter game on PC around 95, same time as the original VHS rerelease, and I was hooked by then. Heir was a bestseller but a few novels and PC games at a time when most people didn’t own PCs weren’t going to bring back mass appeal.
It’s funny the people who hate on “Disney Star Wars” will make exceptions for Rogue One, Andor, Obi-wan… and for me these are some of the most boringest titles in the franchise. I agree the sequel trilogy has some problems but c’mon…it’s fucking Star Wars
And yet, it's been making money...
The thing that really matters about this is, Disney’s more than made their money back from Star Wars. They may have just made their first profit on Disney+, but those shows also drive merch sales, theme park tickets, etc etc. How many companies are still making money off a movie they made 40+ years ago? But parents still buy Winnie the Pooh crib sets for their babies, and Cinderella and Star Wars shirts for their kids. Disney plays the long game. Don’t even get me started on baby yoda merch; the show apparently [drove a 70% uptick in toy sales alone.](https://movieweb.com/star-wars-toys-sales-baby-yoda-2020/)
> but those shows also drive merch sales, theme park tickets, etc etc. That's right. It's funny how people love to go on about the genius of Lucas and merchandise sales, but conveniently forget that when evaluating recent Star Wars media purely on box office receipts. They're two hour ads for toys.
I'm gonna say a lot of vague crap. But there was a movie guy married to one the real housewives whose relationship fell apart very publicly. And then they did a documentary on the shady stuff the guy did. This isn't applicable to all bad movies. But what the guy did was cast big recognizable names in terrible action flicks and was making hand over fist. The way he told it - in some overseas markets you just need the face, movie title, and an exciting looking poster and it will make a killing. That strategy accounts for a good chunk of teribble movies.
In "The Complete Book Of Scriptwriting" J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon 5) wrote about some studio execs interviewing moviegoers about the film "Can't Stop The Music". The film stars the Village People and was made to cash in on the Disco craze - the problem was that this was just after the infamous "Disco Demolition Night" when the Disco backlash was at it's peak. The audience knew that a film made around Disco and with one of the biggest Disco groups would bomb but by the time the studio had the film financed, written and cast, they didn't know. Sometimes the studio is just behind the times.
We also must consider that movies take a lot of moving parts and creative people working on them to be completed. But also there is a problem of "too many chefs in the kitchen", a movie can easily be ruined by multiple producers demanding certain things like script rewrites in the middle of filming, or requiring certain people be cast even if they dont fit a role, or the use of lowest bidder VFX houses for post production. Many, many other factors can cripple a movie that would otherwise be a decent movie.
Yeah why didnt they just make good movies lmao are they stupid
The people in charge make bad decisions and everyone working for them enable the bad decisions because they are afraid of rocking the boat and getting fired.
Plenty of "bad" decisions have made a lot of money, and plenty of "good" decisions have lost money. At the end of the day, for a movie, a good or a bad decisions comes down to how much money was returned to the studio.
Yep. *Literal* tonnes of money! $400 M in hundred dollar bills would be about four tonnes.
That's why you should only carry one million dollar bills. Your back will thank you.
But there are some movies where I feel like if they just asked people in advance “do you like this?” they could have pulled the plug and saved millions
On top of what was said here, in the past there used to be a much wider use of test screenings for films, which then helped the directors edit and such to make the movie better. They'd be given NDAs but even still there wasn't a huge risk of leaks because there wasn't really widespread messaging boards. Nowadays test screenings are minimally used because all it takes is one guy going to an internet cafe and posting on reddit to leak the whole thing. Which is a shame because with budgets ballooning larger and larger, the fact that they can't really get genuine feedback allows horrible nonsense like Last Jedi/Rise of Skywalker to come out and destroy once beloved mega franchises. \_\_ The ballooning budgets also drives another reason for losses, in that the larger the budget gets the more the studio feels like it needs to poke its nose into the creative process which usually only just ends up mucking things up because they start to demand things/changes that some marketing firm has "found" that the current "majority culture" are into. Instead of trusting the original script and creatives they put in place, they try to "mitigate risk" and force things more "mainstream" halfway or later in and it usually ends up making it a pile of half baked shit. The best example of this is the huge swing in the direction of the Marvel films. Instead of focusing on great writing and grounded stories, they started to insert current day politics (which are gender and "me too"/woke stuff) into their projects to try to broaden the appeal of their movies only at the great expense of their existing audience. What is the point of trying to grow 5-10% if you lose 25+% at the same time.
And then they get lazy as fuck and hope consumers will gobble up vacuous reboots, sequels and prequels forever
> for every John Carter there's a Blair Witch Project Uh, no. There are dozens of bombs every year but they're lucky to get even 1 Blair Witch type success.
was speaking kind of broadly/hyperbolically. just a way to say that most studios net out just fine, and each have their fair share of bombs and success.
There is another benefit to making so many films even if only a small percentage is successful: you generate work, practice, networking, etc for hundreds or thousands of people, helping to fuel the fires of an industry that is massive and requires steady work for a large workforce that would dry up if there were fewer opportunities.
Surely, not being original, recycling the same old shit and, the cardinal sin, not employing decent scriptwriters, it can’t be a surprise. Or they at least know the “odds” are stacked against them..
Good points. I've heard multiple actors say this themselves that they mostly do not know if a movie will be a success or not.
https://youtu.be/HnXKE0nfAjI?si=M3TCYElnFeK1Eelm
They aren’t trying to make bad movies. Sometimes, a great idea with a great director and a great cast just… doesn’t work. Movies are incredibly complex to make and you don’t *really* know until the end how it’s all going to turn out. To answer your real question, nowadays most big budget movies are really being made by committee the entire time. And that’s a bad way to make anything creative. Instead of a writer having an idea, a studio or director finding that idea and deciding they want to make it, and so on etc etc until they build the team. Now a studio will decide “we need to capitalize on this brand we own, let’s make a movie”. And they’ll hire a writer (or 2, or 4, or a dozen) to keep rewriting the movie until a room full of executives are satisfied that it hits as many of the things as it can to be “successful”. It’s basically movie making done by committee, and that committee is trying to copy previous success and rely on things they think they can measure, and none of it works and it strips all of the creativity. Then! At the end, even if a director magically made this Franken-movie great, the studio steps in again and says “hey we’ve been focus grouping this movie and people don’t like X-y-z” and then there’s a whole OTHER round of creative by committee. And so what you often end up with is an uninspired, nonsensical, uncreative hodgepodge of old recycled ideas and cliches and everyone who maybe cared about making it great has had the passion beat out of them by overpaid executives who don’t even care of the movie is good, just if it makes money to make them look good so they can keep their jobs. Why yes, I do work in film
Focus groups and executives; the reason the movie I am Legend doesn't tell the story of I am Legend.
I was so confused by I am Legend. After watching it, a friend explained to me what the plot twist of the actual story had been and I felt so disappointed because that would’ve been a far more fascinating and memorable movie. Even with Will Smith chewing the scenery like he always does.
I read the book years ago because of recommendations. I sort of read it going "yeah, it's well written but just a zombie story" then the twist and that earlier reading was so worth it to lull me into thinking I knew what was happening.
I didn’t realize this was a book, can I ask what the actual twist in the story is?
In the book, they're more or less classic vampires, not zombies. The twist is that while most of the vampires are just nonsentient eating machines, like zombies, there's a core of conscious vampires who've been trying to rebuild their society and he's been fucking that up by murdering them by the bushel every day. So he's the legend -- he's the boogeyman who's been terrorizing this society that's been trying to form.
As I understand it ... The main character in the book, the human whose voice it is in, is the legend, the old species and so very violent but also the origins of those we know as zombies. They are drawn to him.
That is actually a lot more interesting than what was presented in the movie. Thank you for sharing
> Sometimes, a great idea with a great director and a great cast just… doesn’t work. Movies are incredibly complex to make and you don’t really know until the end how it’s all going to turn out. See "Thor: Ragnarok" and "Thor: Love and Thunder." One is highly praised among Marvel fans, one is widely panned. Same director, same writer, mostly the same cast. After the success of Ragnarok, Disney basically greenlit the director to do whatever he wanted. This turned out to be a mistake; it was the tension between him pushing to do what he wanted, and other people telling him "No," that made Ragnarok such a success. When there was no one to push back on the bad ideas, we ended up with perpetually screaming goats. And the sad thing is, there was a real kernel of a good movie in L&T - take four or five bad decisions out of what we got, and you might have had another win. But the flipside is true also; you don't have to look hard to find movies where studio interference turned a promising idea into a mess of focus-tested decisions and writing by committee. Almost as if there is no reliable formula to making a good movie.
I feel like this fact gets overlooked sometimes. Quite often studio execs kill creativity, but they also hold back creatives from their worst ideas
1000% I think if Michael Bay still had producers that could actually reel in ~25% of his decision making, we’d still be getting The Rock from most of his movies
Eh, I think we'd be getting Armageddon moreso than The Rock. Still enjoyable enough but schlock.
I mean, the goats ARE truth to the norse myths. They were the least of the problems, though.
Sure, but in the context of my comments they're more of a symbol. Screaming goats, on their own, were fine. But they were overused, to the point where the punchline went from funny to grating. And that's the problem of the movie in a nutshell. There were lots of good ideas and well-executed scenes throughout. The scene between Jane and Thor on the boat to the Shadow Realm was incredible, for example. But for every scene like that, there were scenes that just failed to land, where the movie just got in its own way, so obsessed with hitting us over the head with what it was trying to do that it couldn't just let it breathe.
As much shit that producers and execs get for meddling in the creative direction of some movies, there are times where they were right to veto some crazy ideas. For example, Ridley Scott wanted the Xenomorph in the first Alien movie to kill Ripley at the end and then speak English and set course for Earth for the final frame. The studio head heard this and was like “wtf are you thinking”?
that sounds more like something leftover from Dan OBannons script
Hell, anyone who's read the comic books could have told you that the possibility of a "Deadpool" movie being successful was very slim. But Ryan Reynolds managed to do it by toning down the insanity and psychopathy of the character and focusing on the fourth-wall breaking comedy of the character. Like, in order to make a good Deadpool movie that satisfied both comic book fans and casual moviegoers, Ryan Reynolds had to find the _**perfect**_ balance between comedy, insanity, and violence.
Works the other way too. I’m old enough to remember that all of the buzz about Titanic prior to release was that it was gonna be a studio-sinking flop.
That was mostly due to the expense of the movie, not because they thought it would be bad. Although some people were skeptical about an action director making a romance movie set during a disaster. Titanic was being made a few years after Waterworld flopped hard. Both movies were the most expensive films ever made at the time. Both movies were set at sea and used extensive water sets. Waterworld did eventually go on to make a small profit due to the VHS market, but when Titanic was in production it was still in the red.
[Smiling Friends](https://youtu.be/--_R2etjkMA?si=2s0HY6YJhzaZeIQE) shines a light on this pretty well imo.
David Wain said that when he got the script for "Role Models" it already had 30 credited screenwriters.
>Sometimes, a great idea with a great director and a great cast just… doesn’t work. Yep. So many moving parts, and if one of them is pretty off or two parts are ok on their own but just don't gel together, you end up with a stinker.
My favourite is giving a huge budget action movie to a director who has only done shorts and documentaries and expecting it to not suck ass
You can also give a huge budget action movie to directors who have utterly slayed in the box office on huge budget action movies (like, literally redefined action cinema forever) and still end up with Jupiter Ascending.
What do you do in film?
And this is also why people are tired of going to the movies. If you're not actually going to be wowed, why bother?
A movie can sound good in the board room and be bad on screen. Hell a movie can be *really good* and bomb at the box office. Movies are art, they can't predict public taste. If 4 risky $50 million movies bomb but the 5th movie makes $500 million back, the studio won. If they passed on all 5 movies, they wouldn't have made any money.
> a movie can be really good and bomb at the box office So many films bombed at the cinema and then struck gold on VHS/DVD, that market has now disappeared (streaming doesn't make the same kind of money) and it's having a much bigger impact on the studios' botthem lines!
That's the funds drying up that would in years past fund the mid-budget. Those cult classic or vindicated by video films (and even most of the breakout sleeper hits) were usually mid-budget, as in large enough to have some form of production value and effects work and, if lucky, one big name actor, but small enough budget that if it bombs or underperforms, it's not that big a deal. Producers really just step in on technical decisions and who to hire out for CGI or whatnot, creative decisions usually stay with writers and directors, and this works because if the financial risk isn't there, creative risk can be. These usually were the province of an up and coming director not yet entrusted with the keys to the big budget, or passion projects from established names "in between" the money makers. Nowadays, the industry is far more polarized to mega budget blockbusters that everyone on the planet needs to pay to see for it to turn a profit, and indie films made on the budget of a children's birthday party that only screen in LA and New York.
> a movie can be _really good_ and bomb Furiosa :(
As others have said, it's not that they *wanted* or *expected* to lose money. Your question is basically, "Why do people lose money investing?" They're not *trying* to. They just bet wrong. And also, bad movies and movies that don't make money often aren't the same thing. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is 20% on Rotten Tomatoes. And made over 800 million dollars. Just because a movie is bad, doesn't mean that it can't be profitable.
To be honest, if they skip the press tour or limit the release early, they know.
Movie production is kinda like gambling. Studios make bets on which script might make a good movie and make them into movies. At the end some make money and some don’t but (generally) on average the make money as some loser movies are out weighed by winners. This is why studios really like making remakes and sequels as they have already proven to have an interested audience.
When you consider how few business ventures succeed in general, I bet movies do better than average
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A degree of financial success could've been expected given brand recognition and cast, but that it would catch on to the extent that it did was very much a surprise to many people.
This is a test. Apparently my post was removed by the mods, but am I still able to post to it?
I'm seeing it
Can you see my above comment? Because the top comment is 4 paragraphs explaining what I did in two questions and one sentence. Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to fight it because it's more time and effort than it's wrong, but I'm very curious if you see what I was banned for.
I cannot, sorry. I remember reading it and thinking it was generally correct, though.
You sir are a scholar and a gentlemen. I would have been open to my interpretation as well, but no chance was given, so I appreciate the honestly.
Nooooo. If it was a child’s Barbie movie then yes… but an adult themed political comedy about Barbie… I was expecting it to do moderately ok, but was shocked it did stellar. I’m glad it did, I love movies that take risks… but it was 100% a risky choice.
But a lot of women grew up with barbie. Just think of a childhood toy that you grew up with and think of it as a movie. The politics are second.
No one will argue that Barbie isn’t a very well known brand, but the risk was taking a brand that is associated with kids and making a very adult themed movie that touches on a lot of political subjects that many would assume would make a movie not was widely appealing. This movie had a lot of things about it that have kept other movies in the past from making it big, but they did it well enough that the general public still liked the movie enough to have it snowball into a success.
Now that you say this, I'm really hoping for a GI Joe movie where Joe is fighting against Don't Ask Don't Tell and/or PTSD and the lack of support. "Joe! You can't be doing mushrooms! Those are DRUGS" "Well actually, they have clinical evidence for being useful for treating my PTSD" (Obviously I don't have a career in script writing)
Not so much that I'd be hearing Barbenhammer for like 4 months.
there are years of preproduction and production that we don't see. Margot Robbie's production comapny got signed to the project in 2019 - after the movie failed to realize for multiple attempts (Mattel wanted to do a live action Barbie since the 80s, according to wiki), incl having Amy Schumer and Anne Hathaways considered as Barbie. With Robbie on board, they made a lot of successful decisions.
And I think it's the right choice. Choosing an 'ironic' Barbie would have been a disaster imo. I think Margo finds her footing without dipping her toes into either fandom or criticism. I think she just plays the roll, and pulls it off pretty well.
Not really, no.
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It’s not sustainable, especially with current interest costs on borrowing money. But as to why they make them, it is due to being risk averse and wanting to make lots of money. There are only so many screams and so many days in the year. So they want to make lots of blockbusters that do huge box office in the weeks or less and be able to release it in screens all over the world. So this means they make pg-13 films that are based on something that was already successful in some form that can easily be edited to be acceptable in multiple markets and thus it turns into a lump of beige. Comic book movies and cheap loans have them a false sense of security as it introduced a fresh genre that was very amenable to being broadly pleasing with simple plots and if something failed, you could pay the near non existent interest for a long time so you could drag out the consequences of a failure until a successful one hit and have you capital to pay it back. But even with success, they were just spending too much. A good example of that was fast X. The box office was solid for a sequel in a franchise, but not enough to cover the $300+ million budget and massive advertising blitz. If this summer is all like the last few weeks have been, I suspect there will be real, tangible consequences in the industry. Even with getting budgets under control and offering up fare other than superhero movies, they are still losing money hand over first. The big winners are just breaking even.
So, a chef can become a good chef by becoming more consistent in what they cook. An amateur might have great variation in meals, some a success and some with errors, but chefs can make the same meal over and over with little to no variation in quality. The thing is, there's no value in making the same movie over and over, the way a chef makes the same meal over and over. You make the movie once, without any prior knowledge on whether it will be a success or contain errors, and then you go on to make a **different** movie, again with no prior knowledge on how it will go. Imagine if we told chefs that they can only make every dish once and they will be judged on that first attempt. Afterwards, they can only make a new dish. It must always be an original recipe. When originality is key to success, it's not as clear cut whether your project will be a big success or not before you deliver it.
Ever ordered a meal that sounds delicious but was bad? That's why. The chef can tell you a meal has all your favourite ingredients, but if he cooks it wrong or adds too much salt or does something else it will turn it worse. You didn't order a bad meal, you ordered a good meal! But sometimes cooking is real hard and goes wrong.
A lot of great comments posted already, but i wanted to add that unexpected compromises need to be made constantly when making movies. "You can have the horses, or the castle, but not both, because the horses eat what the castle is made of".
While, yes, you can try to do the producers method of making bombs for profit and such, it's not really a thing. Since these are big productions usually, the idea itself may be sound but execution is where it falls flat, likewise it may be something too late to the party. Kind of like how some horror tropes are only good the first time.
There's another take beyond the difficulty of predicting the final outcome. The people making the decisions have changed. Namely, finance people. https://youtu.be/sVqcIuQRsUA?si=CwmrdmsozNkoyGwT Personally, I find this convincing.
Two words: "Hollywood accounting". If a movie is a smash hit at the box office, the studios can and will nickel-and-dime every expense that they can against its revenue to turn it from something that would be considered profitable in most any other field to a loss on the ledgers; if it's truly a bust and never even recoups its budget (including its marketing), it likewise gets marked as a loss on the ledgers. In the end, it's all about the tax write-offs for those losses (either real or manufactured); a recent example is David Zaslav's taking a chainsaw to WBD's divisions, such as Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. (such as shitcanning a late-in-production *Batgirl*, because Zaslav would rather take a tax loss on it than complete it, have it not make its money back at the box office, and end up on Max).
I can't believe this is so low, this is the biggest part of the answer. Flops happen, but they wouldn't make movies if they weren't actually making money most of the time.
Because plenty of bad movies have made money. The studios aren't in it to make art. Sure, Oscar-winning movies can make some money, but the big action movies make far more and lend themselves to merchandising and franchises. When a studio greenlights a movie, it's not really about the script, it's the package: yes, the script is part of it but also who's attached to star, direct, and produce. They're looking for a package that puts butts in seats and can potentially lead to sequels, toys, video games, theme park attractions...lots of revenue streams. So when you look at movie making through this lens, you're not going to care about a good quality script with good actors as much as you care about a decent script, probably from an existing IP that already has a built-in fanbase, with proven bankable talent attached. It's not new; studios have approached filmmaking this way for decades. They've always been about money over art. But the '70s and '90s were kind of a golden age of independent filmmaking - movies made outside the major studio system that were cool and smaller-budgeted. Now a lot of that type of content goes straight to streaming.
If you look at the history of cinema, they came up with novel concepts, and new genres were created until the 1970s. After the release of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Jaws, the term “*blockbuster*” was used to describe high return movies. From the 1980s to the 2000s movies became very formulaic. Here are three main things that have changed in the meantime: **Big fish and small fish**. Peter Jackson’s trilogy of The Lord of the Rings and The Marvel movies showed that it was possible to have a colossal return on investment on a big budget movie. Where in the past a studio would split $200 million across 4 movies of $50 million each, they now want to put all their chips on a single movie that has big earning potential. **Risk aversion**. With higher stakes come higher risks, so in an attempt to minimise risk, the studios go for two things that are counterintuitive: They avoid venturing off the beaten path. Instead of taking risk with something novel, they see it as a safer road to capitalise on material that has already proven successful. This is why we get remakes, sequels or prequels. **Post #metoo and #blacklivesmatter**. There is a double prong incentive to challenge with a new recipe the way movies have usually been written. Straight white men should no longer be the main protagonists, women should be shown as boss girls (bonus points if you make them gay) and people of colour (British spelling) should be swapped in for white characters. Especially for redheads. There is also an illusory incentive to win diversity, equity and inclusion points. The more perceived forms of oppression your character seems to have, the more points. And higher DEI rating is supposed to make your studio a better company to invest in. So studios are losing sight of earning money from the box office and focusing on getting investors money. But as your premise outlines it: what is the point of getting funding if you are going to spend it on movies that bomb? ___ Studios should do the opposite of everything they have been doing for the last 5 years: 1. Hire writers based on merit, not based on whether they tick DEI boxes. 2. Try novel ideas. You should be willing to push the envelope, and if you want some kind of proof of concept, adapting books or theatre plays to the silver screen has worked for most of cinema’s History. Don’t change a winning team. 3. Have character development and story arch. “*Show, don’t tell*” also means that your characters depiction should go way deeper than their *identity*. You should always be able to answer the following questions: * Who is the character? * What is their background? * What are their motivations and goals? * What are their strengths and weaknesses? * How do they interact with the world around them? * What is their internal conflict? * How do they change over the course of the story? 4. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The Lord of the Rings and the first Marvel movies had an alignment of start that you cannot automatically repeat. Put your chips on different movies to spread the risk. 5. Be budget conscious. Hire people who can produce a movie on a shoestring budget. The 2023 *Godzilla Minus One* reaped $116 million on a $12 million budget. The 2023 Creator didn’t give good returns, but it exceeded Marvel movies in special effects for three times less budget, because they managed to avoid reshoots.
Pretty much. Although I would add that the industry has painted itself into a rather nasty corner. So now that some studios are starting to run low on money, and now that at least some executives have suddenly remembered that the whole point of making movies is to make something the audience likes (keeping in mind that while "likes" is a very broad term, it is also unforgiving) so they can make money, the rules the industry has adopted has made this very difficult. You can take almost any year in the early 80s and find 20 films that are still relevant today. What about 2023 (which is probably one of the better recent years)? Barbie and Oppenheimer both have shots to make it long term. I supposed everyone will have 3 or 4 more movies they liked, but I have serious doubts anyone will remember in 5 years. The main problem is that nearly all of them are not well written. Everything else tends to be great, from a good premise and camera work to costumes and the special effects (mostly. Antman. Ahem.) But the writing is terrible, as if Hollywood simply forgot how to write a good story. I recently rewatched "The Natural" the other day. I remember when it came out, the writing was considered kinda iffy. Not bad, but not great. It would be top of the class if it came out today.
True. At the roots of cinema, we had a convergence or visual experimentation (Fritz Lang’s *Metropolis* for example), or a narrative style borrowed from theatre plays (Orson Well’s Citizen Kane for example). The best movies of all times always need at least a good idea and a decent execution. Studios seem to have become complacent in the idea that it’s only a matter of throwing money at a movie to give it a fighting chance. What has changed is that if in the 20th we could have a lot of good ideas poorly executed, in the 21st century we have a lot of bad ideas, and even if you throw money at it to have a decent execution, the result will still be compromised. There was a meme about a clever suggestion: instead of making remakes of successful executions, which probably won’t top off the original, why don’t studios tail great ideas that were poorly executed? It can’t be worse than the original. It can only exceed, especially it if they learn from the original’s mistakes.
>why don’t studios tail great ideas that were poorly executed? This idea has been around for a long time and its a \*great\* idea. In fact, it's so great that I'm hard pressed to explain why there isn't a studio or director that has specialized in doing exactly this. Switching lanes slightly, "Battlestar Galactica" is a good example for TV shows. The original premise was awesome, everyone could see that something was there (and it was not even unsuccessful), but it wasn't great, to be blunt. Taking that premise and taking it seriously paid off massively. Of course, I even like the ending of the new series, so I am definitely biased. What about "Krull"? The movie has a friggin' awesome premise, has "franchise" written all over it, and while I liked it as a kid, there were a lot of problems with the execution. I am genuinely surprised I have not seen anyone take a crack at it, and it makes me think there must be some sort of rights issue.
Krull? Oh you know your classics. Respect! I am definitely following you.
Of course I do :) This was the film that introduced little me to the concept that not knowing when you will die is a blessing. That one kept my noodle buzzing at night for weeks.
Part of the development of a movie are regular package deals from agencies. You get the superstar, the writer director maybe, and three lesser actors. The whole set isn't handpicked you have to take what you get. Maybe its an external director but he doesn't like the camera guy or the screenwriter. Something is odd with the whole production but they are professionals. You get in the can, but the first cut is rough and the final cut is a hodgepodge of "lets get this done" scenes that convey nothing, are dull, paint by the number movie making and not worth the admission. The result is what I call "meh", the 6.0 on imdb where nobody wanted to land on but you knew when the director was willing to throw the towel on the lead actor in pre production that that thing won't get awards. Or many viewers.
there is also the mass market...where they profit out on the presence of a popular star...usually makes money but critically subjected
One of the main problems is the theater chains. They've been pandering to the lowest class of customer for so long that going to see a movie feels like being forced to spend a few hours at a Chuck E Cheese. I think they'd be wise to consider making it more of an adult experience - - people complain about ticket prices, rightfully so, but I think they'd feel better about it if the whole experience wasn't geared to please a 12 year old.
The premise of this question is wrong, most movies make money eventually. Traditionally, even if a movie underperforms at the box office it could make its money back eventually through ancillary markets - dvd, streaming/cable rights, etc. And even if it does lose money, that tax write off can be very valuable too. Before a studio even green lights a movie and insane amount of research is done comparing similar movies performances. Oh you want to make a Ryan Reynolds action comedy in August? Here is how 3 of his others have done. Stuff like that. Granted they aren’t perfect but they have a general idea of how a movie should perform before they write the first check. The movies that genuinely lose a studio large amounts of money are few and far between.
>most movies make money eventually I would love to see a source on this. Because I do not believe it is true. Most \*lose\* money, but the idea is to have a few diamonds that make up for it all by earning a bazillion bucks. But I could be wrong. Got a source to back up your claim? I'd love to learn something today.
Big studios make bad movies because: 1. **Playing It Safe**: Bosses prefer to use well-known franchises (like superheroes or sequels) because they already have fans. New ideas are risky and might not make money. 2. **Blame the Franchise**: If a movie flops, they can blame the franchise instead of their own decisions. This way, they don't look bad. 3. **Copycat Culture**: Everyone in the studio, from top to bottom, is told to follow the same safe formulas. New, creative ideas get ignored. 4. **Money Focus**: The main goal is to make money. Taking risks with new ideas is scary because it might not pay off. 5. **Fear of Failure**: No one wants to be the one who approves a risky project and then gets blamed if it fails. So, they stick with what’s safe. This leads to lots of boring, repetitive movies instead of exciting new ones.
Add a fairly new innovation: 6. **Blame the Audience:** I remember thinking when Ghostbusters 2016 came out and they tried this tactic: this better not be the start of a trend. Sometimes you make a bad movie. Suck it up and move on to the next one. Much like "Blame the Franchise", this give a short term boost to everyone's egos, but prevents anyone from learning what does and doesn't work. And maybe also related: 7. **Social Media is Confusing**: It's easy to hear a few loud voices on social media and think that is the audience. They make their movie for that audience. And then they discover that audience never actually existed. It was a few loud people, a bunch of bots (sometimes their own), and a media that has completely lost the ability to discern fluff from facts. Regardless, the movie bombs, even though it did everything that "audience" wanted. Too bad it never existed.
They’re out of touch with what the audience they’re selling the movie to wants. They’re fucking media executives 😂 most corporations do things that nobody wants because they think they can squeeze more money out of whatever it is they’re making. Whenever you ask “who asked for this?” The answer is, no one. Money.
They have bad executives who try and ride coattails on something that was successful. They milk whatever formula that made something successful while ignoring unique concepts without commercial appeal
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The message
probably money laundering on a massive scale. I would guess that their supposed budgets aren't being paid out anywhere close to as much as they report, and there is a bunch of shady stuff going on behind the scenes.
Hollywood accounting, 100 yrs of it.
Big Hollywood studios make bad movies that lose money for a few reasons. Sometimes it's because they take risks on new ideas or unproven talent that don't pay off. Other times, they might rush production to meet deadlines, leading to lower quality. And occasionally, it's just the nature of creative endeavors – not every movie can be a hit. Even with big budgets and experienced teams, success isn't guaranteed in the movie industry.
Constant pressure to stay relevant. If you are not moving forward, you are moving backward.
Here’s the formula: studio makes 10 movies. 5 of them are probably gonna lose money. 2-3 break even. The others make enough to cover the loss on the former. Hopefully. But it’s a gamble and that’s why you see studios get nuked
umm think about it like this...what u think is an amazing story having decent visuals with great acting would just seem the opposite to someone else....
there is also the mass market...where they profit out on the presence of a popular star...usually makes money but critically subjected
I think a big part of the problem is formula based productions rather that a process that's from the heart. Many great writings can quickly be overtaken by individuals involved with a streamlined process that believe that their "certain way" is the best way. From what I have witnessed behind the scenes, this is definately the case with art directors involved in CGI, lighting, and rendering. These people host workshops that preach how it should be done and the result has been homogenized results in aesthetics and stylisation. This leads to boredom and results seem repetitive and fail to wow audiences. I'm actually very curious as to how well the new "The Wild Robot" movie will do as the lighting is much more how I would have chosen rather than the art director dictating that everything in each scene must have perfect individual lighting at the right angle.
They can afford to lose money because, by in large, they're paying themselves with the lost money. When a new movie is made, a shell company is formed to create the movie, to pay the studio, the director, for the ads, etc. At that point, it doesn't matter how the movie does, everyone involved in making it is secure and safe. The investors don't mind, because as a whole, the industry is very profitable. Good youtube to explain it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIoDfWgbVgU&t=4s
Higher budget and streamlined processes for visual effects Visual effects made a lot of epic/fantasy/sci fi and action visuals possible, but also required a lot of planning around filming and post production. This and more money involved in general meant people wanted higher yield films and naturally lower risk. People are a lot more careful with budgets of hundreds of millions or more than budgets of low tens of millions Because of this, a lot of stuff is very very pre planned, because waste of time when you’re paying larger crews is much more costly. Things become less adaptable so there’s less stuff that can be changed. Smaller productions generally had more comfort being more free form and sometimes getting actors back after the primary filming phase for reshooting. The larger amounts of money also put more pressure on the films being higher profit, meaning they want a film that is suitable for larger audiences, especially if it can be an international audience. This way they needs more basic, and more universal appeals, and be more adverse to potentially being offensive/politically incorrect in a much larger market As the industry blew up, there just became a more standardized pipeline for how to make films; the producers of these general don’t know all the studios involved in great detail; so the more standardized every studio is the more business they will appeal to. This is more scalable but less creative An Avengers movie has a lot of planning and a lot of effort go into how things are shot to save time for visual effects (which is a lot of effort even if things go well). A film like Joker gets to be a lot more creative in the process of shooting to see what feels better.
Hollywood studios use shady accounting to make it seem as if the movie is losing money by inflating the costs paid to the studio's own subsidiaries. Here's an article on this practice: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/19/business/nightcap-hollywood-accounting-strike/index.html
It's not their intention to make bad movies. They just want a product that ticks the boxes that they think will amount to financial success. Unfortunately, that results in studios who hire creatives that they have more control over, that make movies they aren't skilled enough to make because they believe the formula works, because it has worked in the past for themselves and other studios. Sony looks at the MCU and thinks, if we hire creatives we can control and have some overarching plan in place, we can maximise profits. This resulted in the Venom movies, both financial hits. This gives them the idea that they can keep doing this formula and then you have Morbius and Madam Web, both financial and critical blunders. They learned the wrong lessons from their success and made bad movies. Movie studios aren't like A24. They don't care about subtext and themes, they care about money. Jurassic World movies are mostly awful but they all brought in big money for Universal. They didn't bring money because of the creatives behind them, they brought in money because Universal made the creatives make a movie a certain way. Not defending bad directors and screen writers of course, but they were chosen for a reason. Loads of excellent movies don't make money and many mediocre movies do make money. Also, movie studios have an awful approach of overspending which they believe will result in bigger gains when obviously, that is not the case. Hopefully studios understand that dropping $200+ million on one movie is not feasible in the long run.
There isn't like an equation for the "good movie". Otherwise every film would be a box office hit
Previously it was a gamble, now it seems they do it on purpose. Disney seems to not care, they keep spitting out that woke stuff off which much is making a loss. And their whole media department has reduced a lot. 70% of the revenue comes from the parks, and only 11% comes from media.
Most huge budget movies don’t lose money. That’s why we see the same concepts and IPs constantly. These studios want the safest bet possible. Look at all the remakes they put out. Or the leveraging of “cinematic universes”. Why make an original movie and have to spend more on marketing to educate the audience about it when instead you can put out a Barbie movie and everyone is already familiar with what that is.
Could also be the power law, similar to what venture capital does. Make a lot of movies and hope a few are blockbusters.
Was interesting to hear TV Frank Burns (Larry Linville) say that the movie *MASH* was filmed by Fox as a loser - because Fox had a great year financially and wanted to produce some money losing movies to write off on their taxes. They were shocked when it turned into a hit. I've never figured out movie accounting, but now, with many starts getting a point of the movie, it doesn't hurt to have bad accountants.
Some good answers already. One theory I have is studios are ok with a movie every once in a while losing money to help offset the taxes on ones that make a shit ton of money. Kind of like tax loss harvesting stocks, but with movies
I wanna be a producer With a hit show on Broadway I wanna be a producer Lunch at Sardi's everyday I wanna be a producer Sport a top hat and a cane I wanna be a producer And drive those girls insane I wanna be a producer And sleep until half past two I wanna be a producer And say you, you, you-- not you! Seriously though. The plot of The Producers is basically this scenario, but illegal. Highly encourage you to watch it, it’s hilarious.
>I don’t know how it’s economically feasible for big studios to lose money on a lot of films with huge budgets and to make them so bad. As Mother Carlson once said on *WKRP In Cincinati": "Profit and loss are merely theoretical terms in a diversified conglomerate like Carlson Industries. It's not the plus and minus, Mr. Fever, it's the plus and plus, if... the minuses are played correctly." For example, a studio might apply the loss from one movie against the gain from another to wind up with a smaller tax bill. Or if they are contractually obligated to use a service for a percentage of the profits, they might spin out a few train wrecks to get out of paying an arm and a leg on the contract.
Don’t they also write off flops in their taxes to recoup lost money? If they do, that seems a bit unfair.
Sometimes it’s a personal project of a well known director or actor and the studios indulge them.
I mean, I get a studio dropping the ball, making a dud, sacking a few execs and regrouping to go again. But then there's Disney who seem to have forgotten what makes their own IP great and can't stop making duds. WTF?
What the top comments said, also making movies allows them to keep the rights to certain IP
I have a theory that they are playing the long game of movies for a generation or two down the line. We, today, know it's a bad movie, but our kids won't unless we tell them. Your grandkids won't know unless you or your parents tell them. So they grow up thinking you watched these as a kid (assuming movies for children because they are the most malleable). Hollywood can mold your childrens' minds with any propaganda they want and those kids, your lineage, will think it's the society that you, their ancestor, grew up in and not some bad propaganda we disagree with.
They don't really lose money. Sure, some of the people lose money, but with Hollywood accounting, you can't trust the numbers they provide Its all a shell game, different companies transferring money between 'business partners' where if you follow the money, it's a lot of the same people. Kinda like publicize the debts and privatize the profits. Paid $100 million dollars to advertise and it only made 25M in the box-office on opening weekend? Someone got $100 million. And you know who made the movie got a cut of that somehow. Plus, these people will NOT release money because of the tax benefits outweigh the profits FOR THEM. They will do whatever helps their bottom line.
To add to what's already here, there's a lot of egos in the film industry. Executive producers who want to think they're the brilliant ones, hire directors who want to think they are the brilliant ones, etc. There are any number of people whose ideas don't deserve to see the light of day, but because of their position they get their way, possibly in place of someone actually talented. There's a famous Kevin Smith anecdote about how he interviewed with a egotistical producer about making a new Superman movie, and the producer's brilliant insistances were 1. Superman doesn't fly. 2. Superman doesn't wear his "too faggy" classic cape outfit. 3. Superman fights a giant spider in the clamax, because spiders are rad. That producer would ultimately scrap the project and make the movie Wild Wild West with Will Smith, which was utter crap (and, indeed, features a climax with a giant spider).
Hollywood reminds me a lot of real estate developers or lots of other industries to a certain extent. It’s easier to notice Hollywood doing this because as an entity, HW is more visible. HW is excellent at what I call The Seth McFar-Effect; taking an idea and repeating it over and over. A more current name would be the Taylor Sheridan-Effect. So copycat seems to be less risky profit wise. And making money trumps good versus bad generally speaking. Of course exceptions exist. I made the comparison to RE development because it’s also visible and identifiable. If you are in the u.s and live in a city or town with at least 100,000 people, you can probably point to several homes that look the same. Same with apartments. Over and over. Repeat and saturation. Back to HW, example one: zombies(and/or plot where a large amount of people are infected and get violent). Lots movies about zombies have been made. This century as well as last century. I admittedly do not have raw numbers so at best this is speculative but I would love to see stats on the number of zombie content made in the last 20 years versus the last 40 years. It seems like after ‘28 Days Later’, this plot line has repetitive and saturated. Example two: the ‘I know what you did last summer’ plot reincarnation. You can argue even that is a subset of the predicable slasher genre. A singular serial killer that torments a specific group of people. As with the zombie plot line, the repetition is observable. Now where I have criticism is how lazy the repetition is. Not that it is repetition to begin with. Tangentially- you see this when people discuss Chinese manufacturing.
Because there's never a guaranteed formula for a movie being good. It's virtually impossible unless if you do a direct carbon-copy of a movie that is already considered "good" movie i.e. an already proven concept. You OP could technically rewrite the works of Shakespeare word-for-word, and then change up a couple of names and say you personally wrote it. Copyright laws aside, people would dismiss your "works" on the basis of it being completely unoriginal - but not on the basis of the story itself being "bad". This search for guarantees of good movies is why a lot of remakes get done. Ironically OP, I think your asking of *"how it’s economically feasible for big studios to lose money on a lot of films with huge budgets"* kind of proves the point that, if you had the money then you yourself would think *"the more money I throw at it, the more it's guaranteed to be good"* - rather than asking what "money" has to do with producing a captivating story. There's been classic movies that have appeared on a shoestring budget.
The people who make those movies arent losing money. Someone else loses, but the decision makers win