“Darling! This is the Industry! The real creative people in Hollywood are the accountants!”
– John D. MacDonald, Free Fall In Crimson
In the director’s commentary to Apollo 13 Ron Howard talks about how it was cheaper to shoot the movie on the KC-135 Vomit Comet than it was to shoot it on the ground, since the scenes on the ground (referring to the inside the capsule shots) would require all kinds of extra equipment and FX to make it look like the astronauts were weightless, whereas if they actually made the actors weightless (I know, I know, they’re not really, but you get what I mean), and that if the Vomit Comet hadn’t broken down during the shooting they never would have gotten to do this because it enabled RH to go to the studio and say, “We need to delay filming of the picture so that I can build these sets for the plane. If I build these sets for the ground it’s going to cost more money.” So circumstances “conspired” to enable them to do the film cheaper, and RH was astute enough and powerful enough to be able to take advantage of the situation.
Gatopescado has a point…
Everybody who works on a hit movie is going to trumpet that fact to the four corners of the earth. They’re going to take every opportunity to milk their association with the Big Blockbuster for everything it’s worth.
This will naturally result in a general trend of rising prices for a multitude of movie services, on the “I’m worth it because my last film grossed 500 million” principle. Once everyone involved has raised their price, the overall cost goes up.
NPR recently had a really interesting piece about the changing landscape of movie profitability. One of the key factors is the explosion of DVD sales. A big movie opening is almost always followed by a big DVD opening. Furthermore, the DVD sales last quite a bit longer. For a movie to be financially successful, it only needs to top the box-office for a couple of weeks and then follow with strong DVD sales.
Also, I believe the profits from tie-ins have really grown. In particular, the video game tie-in has exploded.
One thing that affects cost of the CGI is overtime. If a movie has a release date that it is married to and the production runs behind then the CGI artists must work and get paid overtime. James Cammeron said that moving Titanic back 6 months instead of two weeks saved the production a lot of money by not having to pay overtime to everyone working post production.
I can’t find the title of it, but I could swear that adjusted for inflation, a Russian version of “War and Peace” is by far the most expensive movie ever made. Can anyone help me out?
Does that refer to American box office totals, or worldwide ticket revenues? Along similar lines, on average, what percentage of a film’s box office revenues gets collected in the local market as opposed to the revenues generated by international distribution? I seem to recall that Titanic grossed 600 million dollars in the US and 1.2 billion worldwide (US included), i.e., a 50/50 revenue generation split between local and international markets, for this particular case.
[Nitpick]
Tusculan, it’s 24 frames per second, not 30.
[/Nitpick]
Cheers,
quasar
I’d wager that any given effect is cheaper now than it used to be (or at worst, the same price) when adjusted for inflation, but movies are trying things now they never did before. Just think, ten or fifteen years ago, would anybody have even considered filming a movie where half the main characters needed to have their size changed by a factor of two, next to other normal sized characters, in nearly every scene? When Willow wanted something similar, they had to hire actors who actually were short, and they really only had one choice for the lead. Obviously, the small talent pool is a problem, and you can’t have Warwick Davis play all four hobbits plus Gimli. So Lord of the Rings instead had effects in every scene.
Another example: In an old movie, whenever a nuke goes off, you see stock footage of one of the military’s tests. It’s the same shots in every movie, the look doesn’t match the rest of the film, the scene is nothing but the bomb going off, and most of them are black and white. Now, if you wanted to do a nuclear explosion of that same quality in a modern movie, you could hire some high-schooler with a computer to put it together in five minutes time for lunch money. But obviously, now that we can do better nukes than that, the moviemakers (and moviegoers) want better nukes. And a fully-modelled explosion costs a lot more than stock footage.