# Why movies that are cheap sometimes most popular?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [June 3, 2002, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153 "2002-06-03T14:21:18Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Montezuma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Montezuma)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/1 "2002-06-03T14:21:18Z")
Take ‘Waterworld’ huge expensive failure,‘Starwars’ fantastic box office sucess.
Star wars was made on a small budget. Why do big budget films sometimes flop, and the more cost effective movies rake in the money?
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### Author:  [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/2 "2002-06-03T14:29:24Z")
First of all, you’re picking some rather extreme examples to prove your point.
“Star Wars” was cheap to make back in 1977, but there’s no way such a movie could be made on a shoestring budget today.
Moreover, most low-budget independent movies AREN’T very good or very successful. Most indie directors who make feature length films for, say, 50 grand, can’t find distributors for their work, and never earn back their costs.
Moreover, the biggest box office hit of all time, “Titanic,” cost about 200 million dollars to make.
Yes, there are expensive flops and a few super-cheap hits (“Blair Witch,” “El Mariachi”), but for the most part, if you want a film to be a huge hit, you have to spend a substantial amount of money.
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### Author:  [@kingpengvin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kingpengvin)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 2:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/3 "2002-06-03T14:54:27Z")
I’m not sure I agree completely.
You judge success on boxoffice and I’m not sure that is necessarily always an indication of the most popular films. If you are talking just box office gross then yess the bigger budgets win due to more exposure and adverstisng.
However, if you mean popular as in a lasting popularity then a quick poll might show the majority of favourite movies may not necessarily be the big budgeted movies or the box office successes.
In the end the ones that tend to win out are the ones where story and character are more important elements. The lower budgeted films have to rely on it more to make up for the lack of Star power or flashy effects. Which is why some cheapies can remain very popular (Resevoir Dogs, El Mariachi, Evil Dead, etc)
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### Author:  [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 3:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/4 "2002-06-03T15:22:43Z")
Star Wars’ budget was $11 million – on the mid-high end for 1977. **Annie Hall,** which won best picture, cost $4 million, and I’d guess SW was the most expensive movie up for best picture that year.
At the same time, **The Spy Who Loved Me** cost $13 million and **Close Encounters of the Third Kind** cost $20 million. The godawful **Sorceror** cost $22 million.
As to the answer to your question, there is no answer. Popularity and quality are independent variables:
Popular and good: Star Wars, The Godfather, Pulp Fiction
Popular and bad: Independence Day, Alien
Unpopular and good: Cobb, Resurrection, Days of Heaven
Unpopular and bad: Sorceror, Battlefield Earth.
You can add “cheap” and “expensive” to the categories and find films to fill each slot.
However, if anyone ever actually discovered why things work out the way they did, they’d get very rich very quickly.
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### Author:  [@Lamia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lamia)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/5 "2002-06-03T15:38:21Z")
It’s because after a certain point the amount of money spent on a film has nothing to do with how good it is. One obviously cannot make a movie for nothing, and some movies have more expensive minimum requirements than others, but throwing lots of money at a bad movie will not make it good.
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### Author:  [@The\_Asbestos\_Mango](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Asbestos_Mango)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/6 "2002-06-03T16:25:58Z")
[hijack]Am I the only person here who thought _Battlefield Earth_ was great?[/hijack]
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### Author:  [@Hello\_Again](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hello_Again)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 7:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/7 "2002-06-03T19:37:15Z")
yes, yes you are.
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### Author:  [@Montezuma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Montezuma)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 7:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/8 "2002-06-03T19:46:41Z")
Anyone who didn’t see the nose plugs on the alien actors doesn’t know how much the movie stank!
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### Author:  [@The\_Asbestos\_Mango](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Asbestos_Mango)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/9 "2002-06-03T22:44:04Z")
The actors were aliens? I thought Scientologists were mostly from Earth.
Soooo…
Because the aliens had to wear nose plugs to avoid being poisoned by Earth’s atmosphere, it was a bad movie?
Sheesh.
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### Author:  [@Osip](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Osip)
#### Post date: [June 3, 2002, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/10 "2002-06-03T22:50:13Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Thea Logica \*
> \*\*[hijack]Am I the only person here who thought _Battlefield Earth_ was great?[/hijack] \*\*
_shaking head_ Thea, darling. I have you know for the past year I have silently admired you. Building a grand illusion of you as one of the “super-cool dopers” in my book.
Today you shattered my whole world _sob_
Please tell me you were joking?
Please?
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### Author:  [@Manduck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Manduck)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2002, 12:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/11 "2002-06-04T00:07:43Z")
How about Sorceror? Am I the only one who liked that?
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### Author:  [@Fern\_Forest](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fern_Forest)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2002, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/12 "2002-06-04T00:17:05Z")
Here’s a hypothesis completely unrealted to reality.
Movies made by people just starting out in the industry most often have smaller budgets then movies made by people who’ve been around and proved themselves. Yet these people are also more likely to have ideas and takes on material that they have not yet had the chance to play with.
This hypothesis accepts the idea that most people who enter the industry have at least conceived (if not yet ripened) the vast majority of their ideas in their youth and that the subsequent pace of new ideas that comes to them slows down as they grow older.
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### Author:  [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2002, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/13 "2002-06-04T00:24:05Z")
I’m going to take a different kind of stab at this and say that often the put-together-on-a-shoestring movies are labors of love and show it, engendering love in moviegoers and causing them to become true fans (e.g., _Good Will Hunting_, which I haven’t seen but seems to fit the bill), whereas megabudget let’s-build-a-blockbuster-at-any-cost movies often come across as the soulless corporate toadstools they are, and alienate would-be fans by their very monolithitude (e.g., _Independence Day_, which I happen to like, but not I suspect for the reasons the makers want me to).
_Monolithitude_?
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### Author:  [@waterj2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/waterj2)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2002, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/14 "2002-06-04T02:31:48Z")
Just last night I was listening to the commentary on my _Run Lola Run_ DVD, and the director mentioned that the movie cost about $2 mil. Certainly not something I can afford to make on my own, but quite decent for a high quality film that doesn’t seem cramped by production constraints. They get some action, plenty of location shots, some special effects, and as many camera angles as they seem to need, all with quality actors.
_Trainspotting_, another of my personal favorites, cost about $3.5 mil. to make. Again, this seems enough to offer the director a significant amount of freedom.
Lying around my room, I have a copy of the book _Feature Film Making at Used Car Prices_, which explains how to put together a feature length film for as little as $12,000. This budget seriously constrains the filmaker. You get maybe a week of shooting, with actors willing to work for very little, using one camera, trying to get everything right in one take, filming in as few locations as possible.
However, Hollywood has come to rely increasingly on blockbusters, which tend to feature big names, innovative special effects, and other expenses.
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### Author:  [@Enderw24](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enderw24)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2002, 3:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/15 "2002-06-04T15:39:28Z")
A good script is absolutely essential to any good movie. It is the foundation upon which everything else is built. From there you find the director and he or she helps find the actors and they all work within a reasonable budget necessary to tell a good story. That’s what makes a good movie.
Reversing the process doesn’t work.
“Hey, we’ve got $200 million dollars to spend here, let’s see what Tom Cruise is doing. He’ll pull in a crowd. What? He’ll only work with one director? OK, we’ll get him. So what should the movie be about? I’ve always liked the idea of two headed monkey aliens.”
Yes, the famous actor will draw crowds. Yes, it will be a popular movie. But that doesn’t make it a good movie. Good movies come from good screenplays, period.
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### Author:  [@DMark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DMark)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2002, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/16 "2002-06-04T19:48:37Z")
I used to work for a movie studio, and I also once wrote reviews for the Berlin FilmFest…a good 80% of small, inexpensive films are crap…whereas a case can be made that 95% of big budget films are even worse.
The trick is to get a good story to film, and then to the screen with as little tampering as possible…along the way you have people fiddling with scripts, producers taking short cuts (or long cuts) depending on the budget, directors losing vision because of the producer or influence of the stars of the film, good and bad marketing and sometimes it is just a matter of timing.
Put it all togther and - well, who the hell knows.
Although I have seen labors of love that are truly horrible…more often than not, the person with the vision has to fight to keep his/her vision intact through the whole process. Then there is at least a fighting chance of getting the story to the film to the screen to the public at just the right time.
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [June 4, 2002, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/17 "2002-06-04T21:48:03Z")
> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Thea Logica \*
> \*\*The actors were aliens? I thought Scientologists were mostly from Earth.
>
> Soooo…
>
> Because the aliens had to wear nose plugs to avoid being poisoned by Earth’s atmosphere, it was a bad movie?
>
> Sheesh. \*\*
No, **Thea** , it was a bad movie because the people responsible for movie couldn’t grasp that the source material for their film (A light, frothy souffle of a read.) was an allegorical story of Scientology! Travolta, et. al. botching this movie (as they did) is like Christians making a movie about Jesus and forgetting the whole dying on the cross bit.
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### Author:  [@borschevsky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/borschevsky)
#### Post date: [June 5, 2002, 5:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/18 "2002-06-05T05:18:10Z")
Part of this has to be that we tend to only know about the good independent films, but we know about all the big studio films, good and bad.
This is like me asking why foreign films are so much better than domestics, when the only foreign films I’ve seen lately are **Run Lola Run** , **Crouching Tiger** and **Insomnia**. The only reason I know these movies exist is that they’re extremely good/popular. If they weren’t, they’d never have been included in my sample in the first place. In contrast, I get **Spiderman** ads thrown at me for months, regardless of how good it is (and I haven’t seen it, so I wouldn’t know - just an example. :))
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### Author:  [@Reeder](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Reeder)
#### Post date: [June 5, 2002, 5:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/19 "2002-06-05T05:27:33Z")
Isn’t good to subjective? What one person hates another person loves, yet it’s the same film.
This from a guy who watched **Redneck Zombies** again last night. And trust me…they don’t come any cheaper.
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### Author:  [@Feynn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Feynn)
#### Post date: [June 5, 2002, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-movies-that-are-cheap-sometimes-most-popular/112153/20 "2002-06-05T05:31:29Z")
Everyone’s favourite movie “Clerks” was basically made for some pocket change and has brought in tens of millions of dollars. With it’s release on DVD it will show an even higher profit to cost ratio.
Say it with me…
37!?!?!?
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