Take a look at this great interactive chart over at the New York Times, illustrating comparative revenue of feature films over the course of their theatrical releases.
Scroll all the way to the left, and then quickly scroll right. What do you notice? My eye is caught by how what start as small "bumps" in profitability turn into large spikes over the twenty years covered.
That's the trend we see today, where a movie makes the bulk of its money in its first week or two. No more "legs," no more long runs. Get a monstrous opening weekend that people will talk about (and which will encourage more people to check it out), and you can make $100 million with any shitty movie.
The color ratios (which correspond to how much money a movie makes) stay close to the same; I'd say that there are more upper-middle level films, but the difference appears to be minimal. What changes over the decades is less how much money is made, than how long it takes to make it.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
When Movies Make Money
2 comments:
That is a crazy chart. Very interesting. Aside from the monster that is Titanic, it looked like Forest Gump had one of the longest sustained runs of fairly recent movies. It is wild to see how the blueprint today is to have a huge first weekend and hope it trickles down, rather than just getting a good number of people to see a movie every week for a long period of time. I wonder how much of that has to do with what theaters will carry? I would think that a movie like Juno would make a good amount of money over a long period of time in a number of different places without ever having any big splash weekends. But, it was only playing at one theater in DC and I found it sold out twice before I got smart enough to buy my ticket incredibly early. Anyway...just thinking...
Hutson you ever heard of the idea of the long tail? I can't remember the specifics off the top of my head, but it has to do with the idea that in the digital world money can be made by providing a large number of obscure titles to many people (via cheap digital storage) rather than selling a large number of a select group of popular items. This post just made me think of it, since its the opposite idea (employed by the likes of Netflix) from that used by the big hollywood producers.
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