The Young Executive

Everyone who pitches a movie in this business will automatically associate it with proven successes. For example, “this is 300 meets DARK KNIGHT” or “This is SUPERBAD meets THE HANGOVER”. Its a common technique because of course people want to show where a similar movie had success. The problem with that mentality is that EVERYONE will begin to follow that trend, therefore after a movie like the Hangover is successful, every producer in town will be trying to sell something similar. The result? the market becomes saturated with hundreds of movies that are trying to be like the Hangover. The only way to have this kind of break out success is to be ahead of the pack. SET THE TREND! don’t follow it. Your idea should explore new territory and break the mold of typical material out there. Why do you think District 9 was such a success? It broke new ground.

Every now and then young people from around the industry learn how to centralize information to make it easier to look up. A recent one popped up around town that helps you keep track of the latest specs being shopped around town or open writing assignments (OWA). As for open directing assignments (ODA) that changes very frequently around town. These are projects already set up at studios that need a writer to come in for a rewrite. Really good resource if you want to know what new specs executives are reading around town.

Check it out:  Its On The Grid

It’s important to understand box office grosses. What does a movie that cost $30 million in production need to make overall to turn a profit? Well something important to remember is that a studio doesn’t just calculate the production budget, but as well as what the film costs in marketing and distribution.This can easily make that $30 million budget into $60 million.

Let us take for example the Universal film Public Enemies. It had a physical production budget of at least $110 million. The marketing of the film cost roughly another $75 million. Finally to distribute it worldwide cost another $70 million. At the end of the day this film costs $255 million. So in order to turn a profit the film would of course have to surpass this number to be considered a box office success. According to Box Office Mojo, Public Enemies made $214 million worldwide. It’s safe to conclude this was a loss for Universal.

Now a common misconception of film budgets are that people only look at physical production costs. It’s a little known fact just how much costs goes into marketing and distribution. Therefore if you would like to roughly assess what a film is going to cost just double the number of what you believe it would cost in physical production alone.

Very interesting article in the New York Times regarding the downfall of MGM and how film divisions aren’t as big as they used to be. Check out the article here.

Enjoy