Disney and Star Wars profitability

[monkey_roo]

Not my work but a very interesting read - https://www.jeditemplearchives.com/...-any-actual-profit-with-star-wars-since-2012/

If even close to the truth it would explain why things are going wrong...

 

[Cazza]

Read the Forbes article the other day and I can't get my head around these production budgets. They are wildly different (substantially more) to previously quoted figures e.g. Box Office Mojo have TFA @ $245 million. These new figures are twice that...

 

[Snaketibe]

Read the Forbes article the other day and I can't get my head around these production budgets. They are wildly different (substantially more) to previously quoted figures e.g. Box Office Mojo have TFA @ $245 million. These new figures are twice that...

Disney (and probably many other film studios) routinely lie about their film budgets, presumably to make their films look more profitable / less unprofitable (delete as appropriate) than they actually are (and if I was a shareholder in such a company, I wouldn't be very pleased about that at all!). This is no longer speculation, but proven to be true at least for those films made in the UK, as we quite literally have the receipts published. If the studios wish to qualify for millions in UK film tax credits, the trade off is that the money they spend over here gets published and hence becomes public knowledge. However, enormous though most of those budgets are, they still DON'T include the global marketing costs of the films, as that money is spent elsewhere, and hence the final budgets are even more titanic!

The budgets of most modern films are ridiculous, and wholly unnecessarily large. Disney (and most other studios, but Disney are especially bad at it) can't seem to help spending hundreds of millions on most of their tentpole productions, and it simply doesn't have to be that way. Just look at 'Godzilla Minus One', which had a budget estimated between between $10 million and $15 million (plus marketing). That film looks fantastic and certainly looks as good as anything Hollywood is cranking out for 10 or 20 times the budget!

 

[monkey_roo]

Disney are by far and away the biggest spenders when it comes to films, goodness only knows what the Avatar budgets are and of course the Marvel stuff - it is just out of control - The animation side is no better, every Pixar and Disney animation feature costs hundreds of millions to make - but to be fair Animation is damn expensive so Dreamworks and Illumination have the same sort of budgets for their animations as well - big difference is they are a hit factory right now, compared to Disney's big miss-hits of late.

The Studio's really only have themselves to blame, they have allowed everything to grow without checks and balances, but the problem now is the costs for the SFX, actors, production etc. has been normalised so it's going to be really hard to bring down again - Virtual Production is great and brings so much to the table - but it doesn't come cheep and Disney also had the costs that come with inventing most of that stuff rather than just renting.

Bottom line is film budgets need to come down and until they do there's going to be this issue.

 

[Cazza]

Was going to mention Godzilla -1. Hollywood could and should learn a huge amount from that production. Superb film.