Sunday, September 23, 2018

Dear Miguel: RE: Hollywood Accounting

h/t Gun Free Zone















"Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 budgeted $6 million. Made $3 million in opening weekend in over 1,100 theaters.
That is $27* per theater over the weekend or 32 seats.  The theaters’ bathroom toilets seated more people than his movie. 
Industry standards say he needs to double the production budget to break even. I don’t see that happening unless the movie suddenly becomes a hit in Venezuela, China and Russia with the DVD sales."
1) Natzsofast, sir.
$3M divided by 1100 theatres isn't $27 per theater, it's $2727 per theater.
* (UPDATE: He's corrected the original post to reflect that now. Happy to help. ;) )
If we assume three days, and 4 shows/day, that's $225/showing, or about 23 people per show at $10/ticket. Better than you thought, but still pretty bad, and we're not done yet.

2) Hollywood Rule Of Thumb (even for mockumentaries):
The actual budget vs. the published budget is 2:1. So for a $6M p.o.s. like this, the promo budget (not part of the production budget) was another $6M. If they spent much less than that, they might as well have posted flyers and slipped business cards under windshields.
So it's actually a $10-12M pic, because even if they don't acknowledge it, they still spent the money.

3) Other rule of thumb is after deals, breaks, promos, distributors' cuts, theater slice of the pie, etc., only half the gross comes back to the studio's till.
So it actually only brought in $1.5M, i.e. 1/2 of the published gross.

4) That makes double the budget and half the gross a net negative of $10.5M at opening, and even if overseas doubles that and DVD/BD doubles it again, they still lose $6M on this, and it won't break even in 200 years. The might as well have just set stacks of $100 bills on fire.

5) But they don't care.
It's about politics, not business, because unless someone puts out a counter-message film, in 50 years, this will be looked on as "the way it was". That's why the Left does this: to poison minds not yet born, who won't have annoying memories of how it really was to conflict with the Narrative.
{cf.: Lions For Lambs, Redacted, and a baker's dozen of craptastic anti-American movies about how our troops were baby killers and the war in Iraq was about oil, none of which even broke even, yet they kept churning out more, each one worse and lower-grossing than the one before. It's what Hollywood does.}

8 comments:

Tactless Wookie said...

Miguel eats more than $1.5M in Happy meals each year... Still a loser.

Anonymous said...

The communists are about to mount
another trophy head on the wall.
Go to Drudge.

Aesop said...

@TW:
Miguel is the actual guy who writes most of GFZ, AFAIK.
I was not referring to Blubberhead From Michigan himself.
Sorry if that was unclear.

Anonymous said...

It took me ages to understand that the left aren't motivated by money. A right wing guy would, at some point, ditch a business that's losing money. Not the Left. They appear to be motivated by power.

MMinWA said...

Just this past year, I see yet another retelling of the Anita Hill fabrication was made. Why? Whats the call for that kind of moviemaking? Simply, there’s none. It was, as they say in the military when heavy artillery shells an AO before an assault, preparing the battle field.

Now a new generation has been exposed to all the lies she told and with no counter to it, that’s the impression they’ll keep.

George True said...

A lot of what the movie industry puts out nowadays is for the purpose of shaping public opinion and indoctrinating impressionable youngsters with leftist (false) narratives.

For example, there was a movie last year about a black woman who supposedly did all the hard math at NASA in the 1960's for the moon landings. In rooms full of the highest IQ white guys that ever lived, it took a black woman to put us on the moon. Right. In the movie 'The Martian', the guy who figures out all the hard math and rocket trajectories that make the Mars rescue mission possible is, you guessed it, a black guy.

The fact that such notions are objectively false and absurd on their face has nothing to do with it. By putting out such ideas, they can get entire generations to buy into belief systems that are utterly false. Deceiving an entire population as to what is real and what is not real is a prerequisite for getting them to buy into Communism hook line and sinker.

Marshall McLuhan said "The medium IS the message". Yuri Besmenov, the Soviet KGB defector, talked about their techniques of misleading an entire population, which they called the Deception Phase. The Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev said back in the 1960's that they did not need to conquer the US militarily, because our children and grandchildren would, over time, buy into every aspect of Communism on the installment plan. We are now seeing these things happening all around us in real time.

Anonymous said...

Even something as supposedly innocuous and B-movie as "The Cloverfield Paradox" is puling this "message" crap.

Precis: Earth is running out of energy so somehow all nations scrape together enough money to put a massive particle accelerator in a space station that will give everyone free power forever.

1. If the Earth WERE to suddenly run out of fossil fuels (uh huh), if people put 2+2 together for 5 seconds they'd pull it together and start building reactors like crazy. With all of that money spent on a huge space station, they'd instead find a way to shoot all of the radioactive crap straight to the sun safely. They would never gamble all of that money on a crapshoot untried particle accelerator. Hidden message: Nuclear reactors are just bad, despite what thousands of engineers say (just maybe don't build them on active faultlines).

2. The woman who "solves" the problem with the accelerator (condensation apparently), is a Chinese woman who refuses to speak English on board a space station with an all English speaking worldwide crew. Instead two crew members can speak Mandarin, and that's just fine. In real life she'd be expected to speak English to even be on board, and any "condensation" problems would have been sorted out early on by a qualified engineer or physicist or a team of both. Message: Woman saves the day, and she's a Communist. Also, speaking English when it's the language you're supposed to speak is not required for good science (unlike millions of real-life examples).

3. Particle accelerator goes nuts, causing some sort of dimensional "hop" that unleashes monsters. Message: Science is evil. Science is usually evil in all movies. Hollywood HATES actual science. Probably because 99% of Hollywood can't understand it, and the rest of Hollywood is trying to pawn off rocks to stick in your hoo-hahs to make you feel good.

It seems innocuous. But every movie now follows pretty much the same plot - science bad, woman saves the day, white men are hapless idiots, and now we get the added bonus of the Communists as smarter heroes.

MMinWA said...

2 excellent takes above.