Another Weekend, Another Tale of Woe for Tentpoles.....

[Bruce Greene]

Well Bruce, a lot of studios have gone down the tubes using this business model :) I can make a list.

 

The more you spend, the more you have to get back, doesn't matter if you're a studio or an independent.

 

Also, once you factor in P&A costs and the theatre splits, you start to realize, the studios are losing a lot more on these tent poles, and they are also not making near as much as they claim on the tent poles that "succeed."

 

I don't see how the "upside" on the studio model is that great either.

 

R,

I don't disagree, but Warner Bros and Sony and Viacom don't seem to be going out of business. I suspect that they make more on these films that it might seem at a glance. A film might loose money, but the distribution company might do quite well with the same title....

[Guest]

I agree that Disney can absorb a lot of flops, and given their track record on big budget tent-poles I guess they have to, because they sure do produce a lot of big budget misfires.

 

Question is.....how many big budget flops can a studio that is doing "well" today, absorb before they end up filing for bankruptcy protection?

 

R,

[David Mullen ASC]

People seem to forget that the studios practically died out in the late 1960's -- compared to then, they are doing pretty well. Another thing to keep in mind is that in the past, studios just made movies, they were a much smaller industry, but today they are part of bigger multi-media giants. Disney doesn't just live on the profits from their movies after all, the movies feed bigger systems.

[Guest]

Disney doesn't just live on the profits from their movies after all, the movies feed bigger systems.

 

Right, that's what I mean in their case since they have TV networks, a cruise line, theme parks, etc, they can absorb the giant losses on, Mars Needs Moms, Treasure Planet, The Prince of Persia, John Carter, Tomorrow Land, The Lone Ranger, The BFG......

 

R,

[Rakesh Malik]

I like prepping, I like going to set with a piece of paper that shows what every shot needs to be. I like having discussions with the crew about those shots weeks, sometimes months in advance, so when we get there, the list of surprises are low. That's how you get excellent lighting setups and appropriate coverage to make your end product look top notch. I also like to be right next to or running the camera. Being there I feel really helps to speed things up. You can do a 2nd take right away with notes without even moving.

 

Hindsight is always 20/20.

 

Prepping is the only way to pull off good and fast, and since time is money that's also the most economical approach. I like being able to prep for a shoot, though sometimes things till go awry like the power outlets being non-functioning on the day of the shoot (argh), but since we had a plan we were able to get what we needed filmed anyway. If we hadn't planned for that shoot, we probably would have ended up having to scrap a shot or two.

[Max Field]

 

they can absorb the giant losses on, Mars Needs Moms, Treasure Planet, The Prince of Persia, John Carter

I remember a high school marketing class where they had a specific day of teaching how poor the advertising for John Carter was handled.

[David Mullen ASC]

I remember a high school marketing class where they had a specific day of teaching how poor the advertising for John Carter was handled.

 

 

Probably based around this book, which is pretty good:

https://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers-ebook/dp/B00AFCZ1S4/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467765122&sr=1-17&keywords=john+carter

[Guest]

I thought it flopped because the entire, premise, script, and execution, was totally ridiculous :)

 

R,

[David Mullen ASC]

I think that's a bit reductive -- for one thing, it's not that bad of a movie, there are a lot of good elements to it and it's well-made. I enjoyed it.

 

The book does a good job of breaking down what went wrong, but the basic problem (the same that BFG is going through) is that the size of the potential audience for that story did not equal the budget it took to tell that story. So many elements of the John Carter books had already been redone in other movies, particularly "Star Wars" but even "Avatar" is rather similar in storyline, so by the time that "John Carter" came out, it felt like a retread, even though in some ways it was the original version of these tales.

 

If Andrew Stanton had scaled down the production to match the size of the audience out there, it would have been fine, but by spending so much on the movie, it had to find a much wider audience that simply didn't exist. But combine that with a bungled marketing campaign and then Disney throwing it under the bus quickly because they wanted the failure to go on the earlier shareholder earnings report so at the next shareholder meeting, Disney could announce the acquisition of Lucasfilm without "John Carter" hovering over the meeting. The book also blames the casting in the sense that by not hiring real stars, it made it harder to earn back the costs... but a year later, you had "The Lone Ranger" with a star actor and it didn't save that movie either (and again, it's not a half-bad movie, it just shouldn't have been made for that amount of money.)

[Guest]

I find the production values and art direction in these movies (the Disney flops) to always be excellent. I would say this especially about, Tomorrow Land. Now here's the big but.....the script for Tomorrow Land was so convoluted who did Disney think was going to watch this? Kids could certainly never follow the story with all the time jumps, etc.

 

(Amazingly it was the SECOND movie I saw that heavily featured George Clooney in the marketing, only to discover that he only had a small part. The first was, Gravity, all of the promotional materials for that movie lead one to clearly believe that Sandra Bullock and George Clooney were, "lost in space." Only one problem....George Clooney is killed off in the first 5 minutes and that's the end of that.)

 

I really think these studios suffer from the, "we can so we should" syndrome. So many smallish indie movies take the Academy Award for Best Picture every year because the budget constraints force a higher degree of creativity and discipline on the movie.

 

I can't say enough bad things about, Batman vs Superman, what a ridiculous movie on so many levels.

 

R,

[Max Field]

 

 

Probably based around this book, which is pretty good:

https://www.amazon.com/John-Carter-Hollywood-Michael-Sellers-ebook/dp/B00AFCZ1S4/ref=sr_1_17?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467765122&sr=1-17&keywords=john+carter

I was done with that class 7 months before publication. I think my teacher should find a good lawyer ;)

[David Mullen ASC]

One issue with some of those movies is that they rely on nostalgia, but the audience who remembers and liked the John Carter books, or the Lone Ranger serials, or 60's TV shows like "Man From U.N.C.L.E." or "The Avengers", are too old and not large enough as a group to make those movies more successful at the box office, and knowing this, sometimes the adaptation is so far removed from the original in order to expand the audience, it sours the movie for the original fans, and then you end up with a movie that doesn't seem to know who its audience is.

[Justin Hayward]

 

I remember some behind-the-scenes video from "War of the Worlds" where they had an alien cage full of extras + Tom Cruise suspended from a stage ceiling and Spielberg is on a tall ladder with a lens finder, basically moving this lens around a tiny space hovering in midair full of extras in a jumble, arms and legs everywhere, and he designs this complex 180 degree camera move inside this case that moves from a close-up to an insert to another close-up, etc. I watched the video and was thinking "boy, this is going to be tough to rig for the camera move in a set hovering twenty feet off of the ground... and then figure out how to light in that tiny space without getting a camera shadow with all of that movement, assuming the camera even fit" -- Spielberg finishes lining up the shot and hands the lens finder to Kaminski and asks "how long?" -- I figured he'd say an hour and a half, maybe two, but he said "40 minutes" or something like that.

 

Janusz Kaminski screamed, "an hour!" before Spielberg was finished describing the shot. The best thing about this thread is I was reminded of the behind the scenes of "War of the Worlds" which I recently bought on blu ray. I've watched it all day today, and with screaming kids in the background :) The set design and FX are amazing, but it's so much fun to watch the lighting and production design and how one of the masters of blocking, blocks.

[Tyler Purcell]

I thought it flopped because the entire, premise, script, and execution, was totally ridiculous :)

I actually liked John Carter. It's far better then the god awful crap we're force fed today like Batman VS Superman and Independence Day: Lets do this all over again but worse.

 

I think John Carter failed because the studio failed to understand what they had and how to market it.

[Landon D. Parks]

I think John Carter failed because the studio failed to understand what they had and how to market it.

 

Studios have the same mentality in marketing as the big book publishers do. I work in Publishing, and there is no customized marketing plan for each book. Basically, it's generic marketing. Throw cash at the wall and see where it sticks sorta mentality. Often times, I find it a large waste of money. If only the studios (and publishers) would spend time putting together a specific marketing plan for each title - they might be able to spend less and still come up ahead in the game.

[David Mullen ASC]

It's usually a mix of techniques, some movies (or books) get more attention paid by the marketing department than others. The problem isn't that human decision isn't involved, it is, someone has to come up with and approve a marketing plan whether it is for a release of a new movie, book, or car... it's just that marketers have certain fallback solutions, tried-and-true formulas, that don't always work particularly if the project falls into multiple categories.

 

After I shot "Jennifer's Body", I noticed how the studio marketing had a hard time dealing with something that mixed horror and comedy because those two genre are often marketed very differently from each other.

 

In the case of "John Carter", if I remember the book correctly, Disney went through a major shake-up in their marketing division so there was a period of months leading up to the release where they were switching the head of marketing and had no plan that they could agree on regarding the marketing of the movie, and I think it was the outgoing exec who had pulled all references to Mars from the movie and marketing out of a belief that "Mars" was marketing death for a movie after the failure of "Mission to Mars" and "Red Planet". I also recall that the person being replaced had no film marketing background and had been attempting new forms of marketing that were a bit hit and miss (it's the corporate issue of realizing that the internet has created new ways in which to market any product but no one really understands the new market, so they hire an outsider to rethink how the company does business, which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. Probably this person they hired and fired was just ahead of the curve, I don't know.)

[John E Clark]

One issue with some of those movies is that they rely on nostalgia, but the audience who remembers and liked the John Carter books, or the Lone Ranger serials, or 60's TV shows like "Man From U.N.C.L.E." or "The Avengers", are too old and not large enough as a group to make those movies more successful at the box office, and knowing this, sometimes the adaptation is so far removed from the original in order to expand the audience, it sours the movie for the original fans, and then you end up with a movie that doesn't seem to know who its audience is.

 

I'm sort of in the mind of 'let the dead bury the dead'... I stopped watching TV in general after 'Star Trek: The Geriatric Generation' and the 'Smother's Brothers' were cancelled... and haven't paid much attention since... I'm in the 'cable never' category... ok there was a 6 month flirt... but fortunately the concept of 'video library' sprung up, and I immediately switched to Beta then VHS, etc.

 

The few part 'nostalgia' films would be the Star Trek Reboot, and now the next installment in the Star Wars series. I think I'm more 'ok' with Star Trek Reboot than with Star Wars... the latter latest installment was 'light years' ahead of the Episodes I-III... but I thought the Leia character was underplayed, and wasn't too 'surprised' by Han's fate... and Sonny Boy is no Darth Vader...

 

In any case, fortunately for Netflix I can watch a few of those 'oldies' and think 'how the hell did we think this was 'entertainment''... and look at some of the remakes and

think... 'was the studio management on Mars when they thought this up'...

 

And I'll be going to the new "Independence Day" on Saturday... at Matinee pricing... if the plan still holds by then...

[Bruce Greene]

One issue with some of those movies is that they rely on nostalgia, but the audience who remembers and liked the John Carter books, or the Lone Ranger serials, or 60's TV shows like "Man From U.N.C.L.E." or "The Avengers", are too old and not large enough as a group to make those movies more successful at the box office, and knowing this, sometimes the adaptation is so far removed from the original in order to expand the audience, it sours the movie for the original fans, and then you end up with a movie that doesn't seem to know who its audience is.

It is interesting that "John Carter" did extremely well in Russia, where many people read Burroughs in school and were familiar with the character. I think that the title of this film kind of doomed it in the US and elsewhere. Everyone knows of Tarzan, but John Carter, not so much...

[Landon D. Parks]

I too liked John Carter, but felt it had too much of the Hollywood treatment. Of course, I also liked Burroughs - being a large fan of literature. I think Disney simply overestimated the number of fans of book. While I liked the book, 95% of my HS English classmates did not. Burroughs is an acquired taste, much like is all the fiction from the pre-1960's era.

[Tyler Purcell]

I'm not a book worm, so I didn't even know John Carter was a book! LOL :P

[David Mullen ASC]

Off-topic, but speaking of old books, I finally sat down and read "Treasure Island" the other day, it was quite fun and clearly any pirate adventure book or movie that followed owes a lot to that book. Just watched the 1950's Disney version too (shot by Freddie Young in 3-strip Technicolor) and it was quite well done, particularly considering all the tropical island stuff was done somewhere in Cardiff I believe.

[Tyler Purcell]

Really, I had no idea that film was 3 strip. Was that right in the period prior to adoption of single strip color?

[David Mullen ASC]

The movie was released in the summer of 1950, so it was either shot that winter/spring or the fall before in 1949.

 

The first Kodak single-strip color negative, Eastmanaolor 5247 (16 ASA daylight), was released in 1950, probably midyear.

 

Technicolor stopped using their 3-strip camera in 1955, so there was a five-year overlap between color negative and the 3-strip camera process.

 

What's interesting is that before 1950's, the major studios had a lock on the 3-strip Technicolor cameras, but not only was there a court case where it was ruled that Technicolor had to start offering their cameras to independent smaller studios, but at the same time, with color negative's arrival, most of the major studios dropped 3-strip Technicolor because they could process color negative at their own labs. So in the period from around 1951 to 1955, many of the 3-strip Technicolor movies were smaller movies made by independent studios like John Ford's production company, which is why movies like "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" and "The Quiet Man" were shot in 3-strip Technicolor at a time when the major studios were shooting Eastmancolor.

[Satsuki Murashige]

What's interesting is that before 1950's, the major studios had a lock on the 3-strip Technicolor cameras, but not only was there a court case where it was ruled that Technicolor had to start offering their cameras to independent smaller studios, but at the same time, with color negative's arrival, most of the major studios dropped 3-strip Technicolor because they could process color negative at their own labs. So in the period from around 1951 to 1955, many of the 3-strip Technicolor movies were smaller movies made by independent studios like John Ford's production company, which is why movies like "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" and "The Quiet Man" were shot in 3-strip Technicolor at a time when the major studios were shooting Eastmancolor.

That's fascinating. 'The Quiet Man' is especially lush looking, I love revisiting it. A now-faded Eastmancolor version would not be the same!

[Edward Lawrence Conley III]

The big flops are insured :)

 

they aint really losing money.