Mountains of Sadness

[andrewducker]

Guillermo Del Toro's At The Mountains Of Madness has been dropped by the studio because it was going to be an $150million R-rated movie.

The forums are awash with people saying "How dare the bean-counters deny ART!"

The thing is, a movie costing $150million would have to make about $500million for them to make their money back. Del Toro says that he think that "the R should be worn like a badge of merit in promoting the movie", but if you look at the figures here, no R-rated movie has even come close to making $500million in the US. If you include worldwide figures then you get a total of...two in the last ten years.

Now, if he really thinks that his movie is the next The Passion of The Christ or The Matrix Reloaded, then great! But if I was a movie studio trying to work out where to put my money, I strongly suspect it wouldn't be in the hands of someone who's highest worldwide gross so far is about $160million...

Comments

[fub.livejournal.com]

Though I wonder how you could make a non-R rated movie of the Mountains of Madness.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

"The thing is, a movie costing $150m would have to make about $500m for them to make their money back."

Um. What?

[bugshaw.livejournal.com]

I don't know what proportion of ticket price stays with the cinema.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Ah, so a film would have to take about $500m for them to make their money back. That makes more sense.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Roughly 5% – about 95% goes to the movie companies, according to my old manager when I worked there. That's why the prices on popcorn/drinks are so high...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Interesting, thanks! Looking at the list, that means either the Matrix made a loss, or it cost considerably less to make than AtMoM was predicted to cost. Either surprises me - do you know which it is? Actually there's a third option, that the economics of these things has changed since then.

[andrewducker]

aha!

Looks like it's about 20-25% in the first week, rising after that to 50% and higher:
http://themovieblog.com/2007/10/economics-of-the-movie-theater-where-the-money-goes-and-why-it-costs-us-so-much

Of course, they'd probably be spending another 25-50 million on publicity.

[lilaanne.livejournal.com]

(trying for a fourth time to post this)

I am not sure that it's as simplistic as that.

I'm not sure where you got the stats about movie budget/returns from (I was under the impression that for a mid-level picture opening worldwide you'd be looking at budget plus about 75-100 million more back.

But, leaving that aside a good case study about giving directors money to do things that might be a risk is Christopher Nolan. He went from Memento (R rated, Budget: $5,000,000, 11 screens opening, $235k take in the opening weekend) to Dark Knight (budget $185 million, Gross: $530,000,000). Even though he cut his big budget teeth on Insomnia before he took over Batman he was by no means a safe bet.

Other similar stories come from game changers Peter Jackson, and the Wachowski brothers.

But Nolan and del Toro are very different. What has del Toro done to merit such a big gamble?

His last _directed_ picture before Hellboy II was Pan's Labyrinth - an R rated movie. That had a budget of about 10million dollars and grossed about 35million dollars. It isn't Avatar but it did make it's money back and then some. In the meantime much like Jackson he's been making his name by not directing things and producing a stable of young artists that may otherwise not have gotten a chance to be seen on the worldwide stage (have a check at his credits on IMDB - they are impressive). He is at the moment one of the smartest game players in Hollywood and over the last 5 years he has made a lot of noises and changed a lot of rules.

But, Universal don't want to spend the money?
This coming from a studio that last year gave the director of Jumanji and Hidalgo $150 million to make the R rated flick 'The Wolfman' and got back $61 million?

Perhaps Universal didn't want to spend the money in case it was another bomb like the Wolfman. Odds are they will release it and another studio will snap it up .

But many films are getting cut and chopped without regard to scope or story in order to suit the PG-13 that gets all the revenue. They have been sad stories all over the shop in the last years of great projects with big budgets that get dropped because they have an R rating that can't be changed. And it's sad that writers and directors are feel that they need to make huge sacrifices in order to get a film made. And there is always the idea that if they don't play along they won't get the money for their next picture.

Some stories need to be told at a certain level and studios should be investing their money and their faith in them and if it's not happening that is something that needs to be questioned.

[andrewducker]

The Dark Knight, of course, was rated PG-13. LOTR, likewise PG-13. And at that rating, I suspect it could make its money back (although it wouldn't be guaranteed). At an R rating, I can't see much evidence that it would.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I think you could. Most of the horror is suggested rather than gory. I can't imagine that the odd shoggoth or giant albino cave penguin would warrant an R-certificate and surely neither would depictions of madness or non-Euclidian geometry.

I also think that you could do it with a much lower budget. Hell, I reckon you could do it as a TV mini-series of say six times 50 minutes.

But then I'm a beancounter...

[lilaanne.livejournal.com]

Sadly things are changing since that article was written in 2007. The ticket prices going up now are also compensating for the huge investment movie theatres are making in digital 3D technology. The cost of this investment is being passed on through ticket prices (and not just for the 3D presentations).

Another reason why 3D is evil.

[lilaanne.livejournal.com]

Again, the 'making the money back' thing is confusing me but Hellboy and Hellboy II did pretty well and were PG-13.


Pan's Labyrinth made it's money back at an R rating. I don't get where the idea that giving del Toro a lot of money to make an R rated picture is a bad idea. Specially if you look at the titles he's been involved with - there has hardly been a false step there. District 9 may not have been finished if not thanks to him, same goes for the much maligned Splice. He produced the oscar nominated Bitufiul (the director Alejandro González Iñárritu has had three major Hollywood films mainly thanks to him) and Edgar Wright has been publicly thanking him for his support since Hot Fuzz.

Trying to put a decision to give a film a large budget into context does not just involve looking at it's rating and how much money it is likely to take.

[lilaanne.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that link! I was getting annoyed that I couldn't find anything to back it up and my knowledge of this is based on figures from about five years ago,.

[andrewducker]

None of those movies made anywhere near $500million. I don't see why handing him more money would necessarily make more money back.

The combination of a director whose never made anywhere near that much money, and a certificate that almost never makes that much money would make me deeply suspicious that the movie would pull in anywhere near enough to make a profit.

[andrewducker]

I think you mispelled "awesome" there :->

[lilaanne.livejournal.com]

Sorry - I wrote to much, to badly. None of those movies had a budget that large either. But they all made their money back.

And the bit that I may have missed in all that is that we have had the game changers Wachowskis, Nolan, Jackson and now del Toro who have constantly been proving that it's possible to come in with big ideas. At lower budgets and using the R rating you've got Boyle, Aronofsky and to a certain extent Fincher (that's another story though).

I admit that it's a big gamble to combine the two and give a lot of money for an R rated film but I don't think that this narrow minded point is the real reason this has happened. More than likely since everyone is trying to save the pennies they're scared. If this is the reason I am personally going to blame The Wolfman. But, if so we can hope that they release the options and let someone else that has the money run with it.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

The question is not necessarily that the picture would make it’s money back or generate a profit. It’s a little more subtle than that.

There is not a limitless supply of cash to be invested in making movies. Funds will go to the movies most likely to make the most return. So a film that would make a modest profit will not be chosen when there is a competing film that makes a big profit.

Funds may also not be invested in making a movie but in doing other things. There is a rate of return hurdle to be jumped.

This hurdle will be risk adjusted. By that I mean the higher the risk that the movie doesn’t make money (or enough money) the higher the required return will be in order to make the investment worthwhile.

Risk factors will include the rating and the historical data about how ratings influence ticket sales and the size of the budget. If you have $150m to invest you could chose to invest it in one $150m movie or in ten $15m movies. I think there is a better chance of losing hundreds of millions of dollars by placing a big one off, winner takes all $150m plus distribution etc bet compared to lots of small bets, most of which will give you some thing in return, one of which might bomb (and cost you $15m) and one of which might be a smash and net you a fantastic return.

The movie business is a business.

[lilaanne.livejournal.com]

3D is horrid.

The only 3d movie I will pay to see is 'the cave of forgotten dreams'. But it's only being shown in the Cameo which doesn't have a 3D installation.

I can only hope that what's gonna happen is that 3D cgi films are /all/ going to be the filler soon (think Clash of the Titans or a cinema version of E4's repeats of Friends) and the real money, talent and passion goes into films like 'Mountain's of Madness', Monsters, etc, etc.

At the moment the money is going into 3D and nothing else. As soon as that's taken away and channelled into better films then the world may start to right itself.

In what was a very boring Oscars years the best thing was that 90% of the nominations across all categories where relatively modest films. The biggest budget film there was Toy story 3 - a 3D film that had been 11 years in the making and is the last instalment in what is arguably the best trilogy in movie history that made more money from 2D showings than 3D.

3D evil /and/ bad for the brain: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2011/01/post_4.html

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

So if we assume that most of the profit is made in the first week and then account for the fact that the profit represents 75% of the ticket sales, the ticket sales would have to be $200m to make the money back. Now, OK, say the publicity is $50m (no idea what your justification there is, but I trust you to be on the ball with these things). That means it'd be $260m required takings. Neither of those numbers are $500m, so where is that number coming from?

[andrewducker]

Good question. I don't know enough about the movie business to know all the details sadly.

I did a quick check into how much is spent on movie marketing. Apparently Fox spent $150million on Avatar:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/oscars/2009/12/how-much-did-avatar-really-cost.html
but I assume that ATMOM would get significantly less than that spent on it.

[andrewducker]

3D is awesome and gorgeous, and Ebert is as much of an idiot on the topic as he was on whether computer games are art.

[lilaanne.livejournal.com]

Umm.... it is pretty. But I'd like to know what qualifies it as 'awesome'. I've yet to see any film where it's had any value add. But it is possible that I've been watching the wrong films.

The blog post from Roger Ebert is a reprint of a letter from an editor and sound designer working in California rather than his rants.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I'm not a fan of 3D either, but will admit to having seen two films where it improved the film. The first was Avatar, the other How to Train Your Dragon. But aside from those two, every other 3D film I've seen has just been annoying and I now try to avoid it by seeing the 2D version wherever possible.

[andrewducker]

I've seen them. And I don't care. It looks pretty, and has invoked feelings of awe/amazement in me. Thus "awesome". As a fair chunk of what I go to the cinema for (as opposed to watch TV, or read a book) is the feeling of "Ooooh, WOW!") this makes it very worthwhile for me.

Certainly, it has limitations, but I'm very happy that I saw some movies in 3D (Avatar, and How to Train Your Dragon being my prime examples).

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

It's possible both are true. The last two Matrix films would have saved money on production because they were made simultaneously. Also, Revolutions performed the worst at the box office of the three films. It took only $139m in the US compared to $171m for the first one and $281m for Revolutions.

And of course this doesn't include box office around the rest of the world, DVD sales, TV licensing, rental income etc.