By Charles Peirce
There’s a certain watercooler betting-pool mentality that accompanies the box office results of movies, as though their success were completely encapsulated in a single opening weekend’s results. This despite the fact that everybody knows Hollywood accounting is particularly slippery, that budgets never reveal the accompanying marketing costs of films, that foreign market revenue is increasingly important to the success of many films, and that ancillarly sales can be a primary rather than secondary revenue stream. Nonetheless, we seem to equate box office numbers with whether a film worked, whether it’s worth anyone’s time, and whether it’s going to ruin somebody’s career or save it.
If you read my post from last week, on what makes a film good, you might think I’m taking the opposite path and lowering the bar for a successful film to a particularly base level — after all, if a good film is one that connects with any audience then wouldn’t any film also be succesful, at some level? If only film weren’t still such a costly endeavor. The difference between a film’s worth to an individual and its success is that — regardless of whether box office is the proper metric for charting that success — the costs of a film (its true, actualized budget including all associated costs) are a necessary reality for determining the equation of success. Simply put: a successful film is one whose earnings exceed its expenses.
That is intentionally simplistic, precisely so that the larger conceptual idea behind it can be broken down. Specifically, we have to think of what metric we’re tracking when we think of “earnings”, what revenue sources provide those earnings, and how audiences engage with and enable both.
The Metric of Success
Using monetary earnings as the measurement for success is deceptive to say the least. Net profit is never the only possible business aim, even in Hollywood which is ruthless in its profit maximization schemes. Studios have prestige films, films to appease their needed talent, and films that are designed to impede their competition. And Hollywood also has other forms of profit and other forms of success. Movies like Transformers 4 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aren’t only about box office — they determine the entire viability of Hasbro’s yearly profits and stock portfolio. Hasbro shuffled the release dates of these upcoming movies precisely so their toy lines wouldn’t compete on the shelf.
In micro-budget or Indie filmmaking the end metric often seems one of publicity and prestige within the film community rather than profit-motivated, though I suspect this happens more from people failing to set strategic goals than out of direct intent. Large franchises, too, are sometimes carefully constructed PR bids in disguise. Last summer’s Man of Steel had a pre-sale program via Walmart that inflated its box office numbers. Regardless of the true costs of Man of Steel, regardless of its actual monetary success, it needed to be successful in the public eye because its failure would call into question the entire range of DC Comics as IP (notice that the follow-up film is quick to include Batman and is trying to pave the way for a universe of films, a franchise model patterned to compete with Marvel).[1]
Foreign films often have different (often, government-aided) funding systems[2] and thus can have goals other than purely profit. And there’s equally the possibility that many films are funded by what amounts almost to a patronage system, singular financiers who are less interested in profit and more in cultural cache. While subscription services like HBO need individual work to attract people to their brand and service more than anything — resulting in a slate that needs people to talk about it more than it needs people to enjoy it.
Revenue Sources and Engagement
Given that the metric for success isn’t always solely financial, I think it’s better to think of “revenue” in terms of engagement by audience than just money, allowing spending habits to have greater meaning. Traditionally, people engage cinema via screens — whether those are defined by theatres, VoD, streaming services, television licensing, or even DVD sales.[3] This is becoming an increasingly difficult area to navigate, as there’s the paradoxical need of services for content and audience, content creators for the service with the biggest audience, and audiences for services with the most content. On the content-creation side it’s also important to remember that these channels are not equivalent: a film best experienced in a theatre isn’t necessarily appropriate to the small screen and the inverse can be equally true.
While there’s always some technological push to increase the spectacle of the theatrical experience, to expand or change the market that “screens” represent, there are a lot of other ways people engage with stories — besides the various modes of storytelling that the umbrella term of Transmedia is trying to encapsulate there is also merchandising and toys for instance.
It’s easy to dismiss toys as crass consumerism and the movies that feature them as nothing but large-scale commercials. But try to think of it this way — toys and merchandise are often totemic and of extreme importance to their owners. For them, stories are not solely something that makes for a pleasant evening of escape but rather themes and ideals that they want to form their life around. They’re more likely to spend their money on toys because toys allow them to personalize their own identity, making the narrative part of their everyday.[5] This is clear with children, but it applies equally to adults; it’s just that our “toys” become less obvious — cars, smartphones, shoes, etc. And this pattern of consumption shouldn’t be dismissed as something only of validity to the franchises of the world. There is a store in Manhattan that only sells things associated with The Big Lebowski. That’s a segment of the audience who doesn’t just love that film — they’ve made it part of their identity. How people choose to spend their money has to be seen as an active choice, and that choice gives insights into how they engage with stories and where they find both meaning and value.[5]
Audience
The last part of the equation is the most important, and most of my posts going forward will address the idea of audience, new ways of thinking about them, understanding them, and finding them, but I think it’s important to bear the other points in mind — that you have to know how you’re defining success if you’re going to attain it, and that the potentials for recouping expenses or creating earnings are as potentially diverse as your audience is.[6] Beyond that the obvious goal has to be to reach and engage the largest, most appropriate audience possible.
Hollywood has long courted a particular demographic — young and male or four quadrant family (with some recent expansion into young and female). It does not mean it is the only demographic capable of visiting the cinema in large numbers. But given the current models, it is the most direct and obvious bang for the buck. The question becomes if it is economically feasible or even worthwhile to change that pattern. If it is, then we have to change our understanding of what audiences outside that demographic are looking for from the cinema and from stories.
Going forward, you have to know your audience and also understand them, not just as a series of demographics, but as an aggregate of niches, people who not only find worth and value in your film based on their own culturally-expressed interests but also in the ways that the film resonates with their own life. Audience has to be understood in how they engage with your film — in the channels in which they consume media, in how they want to experience it, how they want to share it, how they’re willing to support it, and in how a film becomes part of their own life, identity, and personal story. Doing so will present the possibility of turning the individual, personal value of film into larger, worldly success.
Notes
1. Man of Steel also did aggressive niche marketing, focusing on Christian Americans. Probably we have Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ for re-proving the strength of that audience segment and in making Studios aware that said audience was willing to engage adult, R-rated content under certain terms.
2. I think it’s erroneous to think that American films are entirely without government support, as the increasing cooperation between Hollywood and the Military (right down to storylines) has to be seen as an in-kind contribution on some level.
3. Or even pirating, which still translates into audience engagement but which doesn’t have an accountable monetary stream.
4. There’s a recent adult perspective on toy collecting here, along with a little bit of information on how that market is changing.
5. For work that reconsiders individual’s relationships with products and consumer society, I recommend the cultural anthropology of Grant McCracken. Particularly his books Culture and Consumption I & II, his own blog, and his work at the Harvard Business Review.
6. I haven’t touched on advertising in films, which has only gotten more extreme since the days of Mac and Me. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is apparently an aggressive E-Harmony ad, and Iron Man 3 featured a direct plug for Downtown Abbey (among other products). Whether you think advertising has a place within films, it definitely has possibilities at much lower tiers than Hollywood properties.
Previously: What Makes A Film Good?
Next Week: Rethinking Franchises and Sequels
Nobody Knows Anything is a speculative journey through the more esoteric theories of popular culture: what that means, what comes next, and what can be done about it.
Charles Peirce is a screenwriter and musician, with an active interest in marketing, behavorial psychology and strategy. He finds it odd to talk about himself in the third person. He can be reached at ctcpeirce@gmail.com or via twitter @ctcpeirce.
