With 47 Ronin’s dismal opening and Universal Pictures taking a $200 million hit on Lone Ranger, this question popped in my head.
Do executives or anyone else in a studio’s corporate chain regularly get fired for making bad bets on green-lighting projects? I’m not talking about the writers, actors, or directors. I’m wondering if every studio executive or producer is always one bomb away from losing their job.
Studios go under for sure, it’s happened quite a lot in the past 20 years.
I’m not sure about executives though…
I would think producers/directors and the like more than likely are “freelance” more or less and aren’t tied to a studio. I could be wrong though.
Movies tend to be independent businesses, more or less. So pretty much everyone is fired when the movie is completed. If a movie fails, it means they don’t get any “pension” checks (from continuing royalties and residuals) and are less likely to be hired for the next job.
Put another way, studios that wholly finance movies as an internal project are all but gone. Studios provide financing and semi-captive resources for rent to a production company, then act as a distributor for the finished product. They don’t “make” movies the way they used to.*
And even this only applies to those with points. Nobody ever “fires” a cameraman because a movie tanks. Ditto the craft-services people, etc., etc., etc. The only people who take a career hit are the director and maybe the lead actors. Sometimes the writer, if the failure can be traced back to him (doubtful with all the rewrites that go on.)
A massive failure can sink a director, and maybe a studio that invested in the project, but the suits and union guys soldier on.
Again, I don’t mean the cast and crew actually making the movie. I mean a scenario like, “Jones, you green-lighted a stinker and we’re now $100 million in the hole. Clean out your desk and get out.”
Edit: I understand that these decisions are made by committee and not individual, but someone was in charge.
Again, generally no, because as you noted, these decisions are made by committee or by someone high enough that they can’t be fired.
You also have to take into account that because of Hollywood bookkeeping, it is the rare movie that actually “loses” money. Between DVD sales, overseas rentals and such, plus the fact that the loss can be written off against profitable movies, it’s hard these days to find a film that actually makes some company poorer.
The producer is ultimately responsible for a movie, from convincing people to make it to delivering the finished product. If it sucks it’s because he didn’t fire people soon enough.
If you’re the head of the studio that did John Carter and bunch of other bombs, you “resign” with a lot of encouragement.
Studio heads are exempt from the usual protective mechanisms. There is no other person to shift blame to. But it usually takes several bombs to get pushed out. With the last bomb taking all the credit, of course.
My favorite example of standard Hollywood blame shifting is the US version of Coupling. I only saw the first episode and it was practically word-for-word Moffat’s UK pilot (with some trimming to get it into a US half-hour). It was awful. Bad acting, bad directing, bad production. Of course the excuse for what went wrong was the writing. Moffat lived in London, so blame the outsider!
If they only put as much effort into making shows good in the first place as they do in shifting blame after, we’d see a lot higher quality product on our screens.
I have heard recently that Studio Executives that make the greenlighting decisions are in fact perpetually in panic mode, in fear of losing their job for the smallest dumbest mistake, which is why they tend to stick with “safe” decisions as much as possible. By “safe” I mean sticking with what has already worked before, be it plots, remakes, actors, Directors, etc, and not taking any unnecessary risks. Which is why a lot of movies are bland cookie-cutter formulaic dreck.
The most recent Lone Ranger film was produced and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. Universal had nothing to do with it.
One bomb is too few: most studios have bunches of movies in a constant cycle of development and a blockbuster will make up for a bunch of failures.
But the larger answer is yes, absolutely. Ever since the old Hollywood studio system died in the 1950s, executives all live in fear knowing they are one whim away from being fired, either by a higher up or the real bosses, the money who own the corporations that they are very tiny pieces of. Surviving for 10 years is rare. I remember reading that the average life of a studio executive is four years. Which is why GuanoLad is right.