From Charlie Kaufman’s highly recommended 2011 BAFTA lecture: ‘People all over the world spend countless hours of their lives every week being fed entertainment in the form of movies, TV shows, newspapers, YouTube videos and the internet. And it’s ludicrous to believe that this stuff doesn’t alter our brains. It’s also equally ludicrous to believe that – at the very least – this mass distraction and manipulation is not convenient for the people who are in charge. People are starving. They may not know it because they’re being fed mass produced garbage. The packaging is colorful and loud, but it’s produced in the same factories that make Pop Tarts and iPads, by people sitting around thinking, ‘What can we do to get people to buy more of these?’
Tag: financial models
Movies don’t have the same value as they used to, but they now cost much more to market.
Okay, maybe this simple observation is not as simple as I first thought.
When I started out in the film business, it was considered reasonable to value North American rights on a feature at 50% of negative costs. If I was asked to value such rights today, on the average, I would say they were either zero or they would be a negative.
When I started producing movies, a well packaged and developed project could anticipate get 80% of it’s negative cost from licensing foreign rights. The value of foreign rights has been dropping consistently for years. What were once major territories in terms of revenue they returned, now seem virtually impossible to do deals in. Television rights abroad supported acquisition prices for years, but now those slots are increasingly difficult to obtain everywhere. If an independent film can piece together 50% of its negative cost from international, I think they are pretty fortunate.
