Facing Hard Times is Hollywood Going to Rein in its Film Budgets?

Recent decades have seen film production budgets explode--and with them promotional budgets as well, which have, if anything, grown faster. (Previously a fraction of what it cost to make a movie, promotional budgets are now comparable to the production budgets which swelled in size so much.)

What led to those burgeoning costs? There is, of course, Hollywood's famously wastefulness with money, from the pre-production process forward. There is the ever greater reliance on intellectual properties, which come with big bills (not least, in legal fees). There is the explosion of the compensation for people bringing Big Names to a project. (All of this, you will notice, has nothing to do with the actual film production process.) And there is the fact that Hollywood has become so reliant on lavishly staged action films.

In considering the expense those projects involved one has to consider that Hollywood might lay out only a small fraction of the advertised budget. The figures may be overstated for tax purposes, for example, or to diminish the portion of the profit to be shared by others to whom the studio may have commitments. (Remember how Forrest Gump, after almost $700 million banked, had officially not yet turned a profit?) And of course, there is the place of product placement, and government subsidy (with Heineken paying $45 million for Bond to drink its beer in Skyfall, and Mexican officials offering a $20 million tax credit for the makers of Spectre to shoot the pre-credits scene the way they wanted). And while there is a tendency to emphasize the highly publicized theatrical earnings, much of the money comes from less publicized revenue streams, like video, TV rights and merchandising (which easily turn flops into profitable ventures).

Still, it is hard to picture the blockbusters we now take for granted being made without the expectation of billion dollar grosses. And the pandemic has seen such grosses become harder to earn, when they were already getting tougher to score in an age of ever-multiplying entertainment options and intensifying media noise (hence those aggressive promotional budgets). While I have certainly underestimated how long the studios can keep selling superhero movies, audience fatigue with the same themes, the same franchises, seems bound to set in eventually. Meanwhile the Chinese market on which Hollywood has set such hopes has proven a harder one than is generally admitted with movies like Crazy Rich Asians, the live-action Mulan and the latest installments of the Star Wars failing to take; with rising great power tensions perhaps forcing American filmmakers to be more cautious; with the last two entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which usually does pretty well in China, failing to even get into Chinese theaters (likely because of such politics), potentially costing each of those productions hundreds of millions of badly needed dollars. (Pre-pandemic Black Widow and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings would each have had a good shot at the billion dollar club. As it is the two combined have not even pulled in $800 million so far, which can hardly be making Disney happy--any more than the sputtering out of their once grand ambitions with Star Wars have.)

One possible response is Hollywood's spending its money more carefully. I am not convinced it can become much less wasteful, because its practice is so entrenched, but it may be that it will give us shorter running times and tone down the overfamiliar bombast in its action movies--while, perhaps, opening the door at least a little wider to creativity in its handling of the form, giving us something at least a little fresher than the stultifying sameness of recent years. Still, modest as such modifications sound I find myself thinking they are far beyond the pack which humiliates itself so thoroughly when its reality gets a little media exposure--with their inability and unwillingness to adapt the greater because there is, in the press as elsewhere, never a shortage of sycophants telling them they are all wonderful geniuses and that everything is just fine, the same as they do with the powerful in every area of life.