I would assume that the billionaire covering the expenses means that the movie studio won’t go into the hole, not that they get all the gross profit. So that if the billionaire’s movie made $150 million, that would go back to him for expenses, but if it made $350 million then the studio would get $45 million or something like that, and he’d get back his $300 million for expenses and $5 million for profit or something like that.
It doesn’t look exactly like either The Kid and I or Butterfly fit the OP. The Kid and I was produced by The Kid & I Productions, which unsurprisingly only made The Kid & I. Butterfly was produced by Par-Par Productions, which only made Butterfly and Fake-Out, both movies starring Pia Zadora. It doesn’t look like any studios were involved. The big companies that they worked with were the distribution companies to get the movies into theaters and home video, but neither of the rich guys involved here walked into a the studio saying something like the hypothetical billionaire here.
A lot of the Christian movies do have actual major companies listed as production companies though. Fireproof has Samuel Goldwyn, Moms’ Night Out and War Room have Tristar. I can’t tell where exactly the budget comes from for those movies, if it’s mainly the big studio, or mainly the small production companies, or equally split, or what. But I don’t know of any of those movies that are primarily paid for by one rich person. And a lot of the recent Christian movies have been profitable, so you wouldn’t need one person to put up all the money; a studio would be willing to make it because they’ll likely make a profit.
I don’t know what would happen if a billionaire actually wanted to make and finance a big budget movie. But if he really wanted to make it, I don’t know if he’d need to walk in to a major studio anyway. He could just set up his own production company, hire some experienced movie producer to do the actual work on everything, and make the movie that way. He’d just need to work with some distribution companies to get the movie seen.
But even legitimate movie making brings money into the studio. Movie production works on a two tier system. Studios get paid for selling movie tickets but they also get paid for making movies.
Let’s say you’re the billionaire in question and you go to Goldmine Studios and offer to finance the production of your dream movie, Gone With The Dope: The Cecil Adams Story. You and Goldmine Studios work out a deal where you’ll each get half of the ticket sales when the movie is released.
A production company is then set up for this movie. Let’s call it EZ Productions. This company exists solely to make one movie. You invest your money into the company.
EZ Productions now begins making a movie. It does things like hire somebody to write a script and hire a cast and crew and rent out filmmaking resources. And a lot of these things it gets by paying Goldmine Studio. For example, when you want a soundstage, EZ Production will rent it from Goldmine Studios. A lot of the crew members will be working for Goldmine Studios, which will be billing EZ Production for their services.
This is all legit. EZ Productions needs to pay somebody to do all these things that are necessary to make a movie and Goldmine Studios is charging EZ Productions a fair rate.
But the point is the Goldmine Studios is already getting paid for this movie while it is being made. So even if the movie ends up never getting released, they’ve made money off of its production.
But why does the billionaire need the big-name studio? Why doesn’t he produce his own movie?
I don’t really know how the film industry works, but I can’t imagine a billionaire just being able to go into GM and having them produce a custom car line or have Apple build some dumb product at his own cost. Why would a movie studio let some billionaire just make whatever movie he wants?
Why does he have to be a billionaire? How come I can’t go into Disney and ask them to make a $100,000 movie that I’m willing to pay for? It will probably make millions and even if it doesn’t they still have my money.
The reason is “opportunity costs”. If Disney or Marvel is making my shitty Blair Witch knockoff or even some Billionaire’s Citizen Kane Goes To Washington to Fight Optimus Prime, that’s time and resources not making the next six Star Wars or Avenger films (with all the associated merchandising). And now the studio has a crappy bomb associated with it.
There’s a bit more to business than “OOO!! I’ll give you a bunch of money and do what I want.”
There are presumably lots of cases of people worth less than a billion dollars who have financed movies purely as a whim. Look at the movie The Room. The star/director/writer/producer, Tommy Wiseau, somehow had $6 million to play around with and decided to make his own movie. Somehow it got made:
Exactly! The whole notion of “going to a movie studio” isn’t really relevant. If you have the money, then set up a production company, start hiring people, rent equipment, rent production facilities, and off you go! Later on you might benefit from partnering with a studio to market and release the movie.
Simple answer, studios are in the movie distribution and revenue generation business. They don’t give a rat’s ass who makes a movie.
Studios don’t make many movies themselves. They contract and buy independent productions. If someone is paying the bills they’ll use only a few management resources, and they will charge or deduct from profits millions of dollars for some phone chat and a boilerplate contract. Everything else will go out to selected production companies that know how to send as much of that money back to the studio as possible.
If the guy is smart he’ll find an independent to produce the film for a fraction of what a major studio would want. But if he wants his kid to be seen by anybody he’ll need to get in bed with the big boys before it’s done. If he can get a good movie made he can get a good deal with studio. If the movie sucks the studio won’t have any problem taking his money and distributing a bomb. He’s just gonna have to pay them enough to guarantee their profit.
This is sort of where the majority of Mel Gibson’s wealth comes from. No studio would take up his pet project of The Passion of the Christ. So he bankrolled it entirely himself, including the promotion costs. Total budget was $30MM production and $15MM marketing. It earned over $600MM worldwide.
I don’t know if Howard Hughes was a billionaire during his 25 years in the movie business (among about a dozen other careers at the same time) but in today’s dollars he probably would have been. At any rate he got heavily involved in movie making, and as in most of his other areas of endeavor he was quite successful.
The thing is making a movie involves a lot of resources. You could in theory purchase all the property and equipment and hire all of the people you’d need to make a movie and then make your movie. But what you’ve done is essentially start your own studio. Doing that for one movie would be financially insane - it would be the equivalent of building a automobile factory in order to make one custom car.
You’re a lot better off going to an existing studio that already has all of the resources needed to make a movie and using their facilities. Whatever they’ll charge you will be less than the cost of buying everything.
I’m just guessing. But I would think someone at the studio would see this guy as “a real big sucker looking to get fleeced”. They would also see that it should be fairly easy for them to get a big piece of his money for themselves. They might just hand him off to a friend or relative in exchange for a percentage of the money spent. That would be easiest and also legal. It would be a “consulting fee”.
I must say however, this scenario is extremely unlikely. People don’t become billionaires by doing stupid things with their money - unless of course, they buy a lottery ticket and win.
I think this case was a little different from the scenario you present. George was helping his friends. The Python guys were all set to make this film and someone pulled their funding at the last minute. George stepped in to help a friend. He mortgaged his home to raise a few million dollars. So, it’s considerably different than your scenario.
If anyone is a fan of The Beatles (or just George), I think you will enjoy this film very much. It is an excellent film and provides much historical info about The Beatles. Very much worth seeing and I hope you enjoy it.
You don’t need a “big studio” for all that stuff. You don’t need to purchase capital goods for your one-movie production company. Hiring people for movies is already done on a piecework basis. There aren’t people sitting around at a big studio who go to work on whatever movie needs sound guys or camera guys that minute. Instead if you want a sound guy for your movie you hire a sound guy for your movie. You need cameras, you find a company that rents cameras. You need an edit bay, you buy time in an edit bay. Or you hire a guy who already has the equipment you need, and you pay for both the work and the equipment.
This is how regular movies are made in Hollywood all day every day. The production company is just a “general contractor” that hires the subcontractors and manages the project from start to finish. If I want to build a house I don’t need to buy cranes and excavators and drilling equipment and so on. I hire a guy with a crane to come and do the crane work. I hire a guy with an excavator to come and do the dirt work. And so on. Or I might not hire them, instead I hire a guy who knows who to hire, and the general contractor hires the individual guys. No capital purchases needed, except the capital goods that are consumed in building the house.
The point is, there is an existing entertainment ecosystem full of people and companies and equipment that can do any and every job in the entertainment industry. No job too big, no job too small. You don’t need to be a billionaire who can call the head of Sony Pictures to get a movie made, and you don’t need to be an unemployed bum with a digital camera and a bunch of pals who will act in your movie for free. You can be anything and everything in between. It all depends on how much money you’ve got, and how savvy you are about how moviemaking happens.
In other words, if you’re a billionaire who wants to make Titanic II: In Space, you don’t call Fox and tell them you’ve got a pile of money you want to turn into a movie. You call James Cameron, and tell him you want to finance a movie, and you’d love for him to take a role. You call a guy who can get movies made and hire him to be your fixer, aka “producer”. Or “executive producer”. But since you’re putting up the money, you’ll take the title of executive producer for yourself. So the Hollywood guy you hire gets another title.
It absolutely isn’t a question of showing up at a studio with a bucket of money and asking what can be done with it. It is showing up in Hollywood with a bucket of money and hiring people and companies to do what you want them to do.
I have a female friend who did this a few years ago. My friend was a documentary filmmaker who got a gig wrangling a vanity production for an heiress. She hired the crew and reserved the locations and pretty much handled all the logistics of shooting the thing, allowing the heiress to play director. The project ran for several years because the heiress had no idea what she was doing and kept changing things and reshooting sections. My friend’s attitude was “Hey, I’ll keep taking her money as long as she’s willing to keep paying me.”
Eventually though, she couldn’t help herself and started offering the heiress creative advice. That got her fired.
Except if hiring people and equipment to make a film were like building an entire automotive factory, how do independent films get made? It isn’t like Kevin Smith went to the bigwigs at Miramax and offered them $27,000 if they’d let him make a movie.
People make independent movies all the time. If you’re Mel Gibson, you can make extremely expensive independent movies. Then once you’ve made the movie, you get it distributed.
Yes, there are similarities between making a movie and building a car from scratch. There are also some significant differences. In Hollywood, every movie is like a custom car, even cookie-cutter rom-coms and action movies. I mean, yes, you’re stamping out thousands of identical copies of your product, but that’s the trivial part of the business. The hard part is shooting the movie, and that’s a custom process.
Keven Smith can make a cheap independent movie for $27,000. Maybe it’s not a good movie, maybe no one will see his movie, but he can make it. How could he do that, without a movie-making factory? The answer is you don’t need a movie-making factory to make a movie.