wikipedia says The Last Airbender was made for $150 million and marketed with a budget of $130 million, making total costs at least $280 million
what a waste of money. How can it cost almost as much to market a film as to make it.
Yes, that is the twist.
ETA: I agree though.
Well, how much would you charge to hype that movie to most everybody in the western hemisphere? I think they might have gotten a pretty good deal, personally.
Around the world, not the western hemisphere. Asian markets are huge. Movies are released in 50-100 countries. It’s only surprising that marketing is so low.
Print, newspapers, magazines
Outdoor, billboards, bus sides, bus stops
TV, with all those cable channels to cover
In theatre, trailers, posters, standees etc
Internet marketing.
Personal appearances by the stars, press junkets,
It adds up. Quickly.
Not to mention Hollywood accounting. They use the word “marketing,” but it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Before awards season/Oscar nominations came out a few months ago, had you heard of/seen these films?
An Education
A Serious Man
Crazy Heart
The Hurt Locker
Precious
or even Up In The Air, The Blind Side or District 9? You’d probably heard of Inglorious Basterds in advance if you’re a Tarantino fan. I’m going to assume you’d heard of Avatar and Up, because those movies had, you know, big marketing budgets.
It’s called Hollywood Accounting. A great example is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was such a huge star that he got very good terms.
For instance, on most movies the stars agree to do marketing for the movie. They go on talk shows and such. Shows like Leno and Letterman pay scale (minimum). The value is in the advertising.
But Schwarzenegger would get paid scale by the show and he’d command a huge ADDITONAL salary as well. Not only that his staff he traveled with was paid for as well. And the staff doens’t stay at no Motel 6. They’re staying in the Four Seasons, in suites that run upward of $5,000 a night. And they don’t eat at McDonalds. And they fly at minimum first class, and usually on private rented jets.
So you can see on some movies the marketing costs can be huge depending on stars.
But the marketing cost is really all about creative accounting. The more the cost the less net profit the movie makes and the better for those involved. A book called “Movie Money” is a good place to start to understand how this works
Perhaps, PSXer, you could tell us how much money YOU think is a reasonable amount they should spend advertising a multimillion dollar production to everyone in the world.
Also, if you have just spent $150 million, you are not going to let that movie fail due to lack of publicity. Maybe you could hope for word of mouth? No, you have no choice but to ram it down throats worldwide.
Imho, they worse a movie is, the harder they have to advertise.
Nowadays, with movies barely lasting a month in the theaters, it’s imperative to make back as much as you can in the first two weeks. By advertising heavily, they artificially create an excitement about the film, so people go during the opening week.
You know how much it costs to run a commercial on TV? A 30-second spot on American Idol (which admittedly is the most expensive primetime show to buy ad time on) costs $623,000. So with your $130 mil marketing budget you could buy about 208 ads on AI, or 104 minutes of advertising. Now obviously, they aren’t spending all their marketing budget on buying ads on AI (probably none of it, in fact), but the point is that running ads ain’t cheap.
Whenever you talk about spending on a mass scale - not just with movies but the spending of governments, corporations, etc. - you have to change your perceptions about what “a lot” of money really is. I mean, to an individual, $130 million seems like a ton of money because if you had that much you’d be super-rich, right? But consider that there are over 300 million people in the U.S. alone, and if you had $130 million to spend on a large scale you wouldn’t be able to do so much as buy everyone in the U.S. a pack of gum. Doesn’t seem like quite as much now, does it? And as noted upthread, we’re not just talking about the U.S., but marketing to (virtually) the whole world. With about 6.8 billion people, that means that they spent a little under 2 cents per person to get their message about The Last Airbender out to the good peoples of Earth. Seems downright economical.
Marxxx, not everyone involved benefits from creative Hollywood accounting. A famous example occurred when Art Buchwald sued Paramount for lifting his original idea for Coming to America. When assessing damages the studio argued that the film had made no net profit, despite $288 million in revenues.
Apparently the formulas used by the studios make it virtually impossible for a film to show a profit. Furthermore, contracts for authors and performers based on net profits don’t correspond to GAAP, and in the end Paramount settled out of court rather than throw the ruling open for its other films.
Wiki link here.
Yes. Hollywood invented “interest costs” aka “rolling breakpoint” to prevent films from ever making a net profit.
Basically, they take the money invested in the film and assume it was invested elsewhere (at absurdly high rates). Then they call this figure a cost.
In other words, if a film costs $40M, they assume they’ve invested $40M at 10% and charge an extra four million a year to the expenses of the film. And, of course, that extra four million makes the film cost $44M, so that figure is used the next year. . . .
You can sue them over this, but if you ever get close to actually getting a trial that could make a ruling on a practice, they’ll offer you tons of money to drop the case.
This is almost all wrong. Moving people around is a tiny fraction of the cost of marketing a movie. As other people have correctly said, the cost comes from advertising. I doubt that as much as 1% of that $130 million in marketing costs in the OP is because of people. The people may go to a few locations, but the advertising is in every country.
Everything a studio does is charged to a particular production.
For instance, all the costs to develop Star Trek Phase 2 (the tv series sequeal to the original series that never aired) was put into the production cost of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Another example is that when Titanic was made, a studio was built in Mexico. The entire cost of building that facility was charged to Titanic.
Many years ago, back before Photoshop existed, I worked for a specialty photo retouching company that did what Photoshop does now. We had a one-of-a-kind proprietary computer system (that filled a small room) that could be used to manipulate images in amazing and magical ways. If you saw an ad in 1988 that looked digitally retouched, we probably did it.
We did a lot of work for movie studios. There was a joke around the office that we could tell how bad a movie was by how long they had us work on the print ads. An ad for a movie the studio felt positive about would be in an out in 24 hours. An ad for a stinker would take a week or more, with the studio asking for multiple revisions and fine tuning. I think our record was 3 weeks of retouching work … on the print ads for Ghost Dad.
On some movies, some of the marketing is done by the fast food companies that agree to promote the movie tie-in toys. And for Avatar, I remember endless commercials from Panasonic for their televisions that mentioned the movie.
I call this my “Side of the Bus Rule.” If a movie is advertising on the side of a bus, it’s probably not very good.
1% goes to the stars, maybe, but 100% of the money goes to paying people.