How to make money producing films

Unless movies make money, the money to make movies would dry up pretty quickly. But where does this money come from? It comes, almost entirely, from you and me and people like us. The real question should be how does this money get from our back pockets and into the coffers of the big movie studios.

Some of the pathways are incredibly obvious, some perhaps a little less so. I had just started working in a cinema when Jurassic Park was released. We had over comfy chairs in that cinema, and there was still a scramble for the best ones. It almost makes me feel nostalgic to think of the fuss and fluster. The last time I went to the opening night of a new film and my screening was packed full was Casino Royale, I think, and that was in one of those little box-rooms that make up multiplexes now.

Every adult ticket sold was costing the cinema something like 25p. I spent some time booking films for rep, and got quite used to the system. The cinema would then pay whichever was higher, the guarantee or the percentage. Various cinemas have tried all sorts of bad ideas to cut overheads, from underpaying the staff and keeping them on booby-trapped zero-hour contracts, to letting more or less anybody run the projection booth. So the concession stand becomes incredibly important to the cinema.

Those overpriced popcorns, sodas and fat, fattening bags of delicious, deferred arterial congestion are stacked high with price mark-ups, the better to make a cinema into a money-making enterprise.

The Veronica Mars movie is a good, recent example. In these cases, the distributor will buy out the screens where the film would play, paying the cinema a flat fee for the run. There are two kinds of films that typically get four-walled. Bousman took the film on a tour of the US, shouldering the risk by buying out cinemas and selling tickets directly.

The other is the loss-leader. Arguably, Veronica Mars was one of those. It was never intended, or at least never expected, to make a great pile of cash at the box office, but the four-walled engagements gave the film a theatrical release and all of the benefits to its profile that would bring.

How Does the Film Industry Actually Make Money? - The New York Times

As noted, some films are being offered via VOD at the same time as their cinema releases. Not because they intend to screen films for the duration, of course, but because they want some perceived distance to the imminent home entertainment release. Ask yourself now what the reasonable price for a film on disc is. Now think about what you get for that money. Come day of release, the titles were there, but Amazon had shut down any pre-sales.

The various Sky Movies channels make for an interesting study here. They have their high-profile, premiere splashes, with new and big-name films advertised and given good slots on the schedule.

Then they fill up their schedule with Even crummy old films are pushed on TV stations, and charged for.

Another small screen outlet will be up in the air. Movies are also licensed for those smudgy little panes on the back of airplane seats. Uwe Boll certainly has. Australia has recently agreed to welcome the next Pirates Of The Caribbean movie to its shores.

And the Australian government know it, so they made sure it was going to happen by offering a tax incentive. From their press release:. Dead Men Tell No Tales in Australia. That package had been offered to Disney by the previous Labor government to film the 20, Leagues Under the Sea remake in Oz but that project was shelved after director David Fincher departed.

Movie merchandising started in earnest with Walt Disney and his licensing of Mickey Mouse and, interestingly, The Three Little Pigs. Have you seen the sheer volume of Pigs merchandise they produced?

And then Star Wars. And then the wall of figures, dozens upon dozens in the range, taking over the toy shop and the department store. Nobody is ever going to sell any Deconstructing Harry or The Squid And The Whale toys, so those depend on a sense of prestige and low scale of risk to convince their financiers.

T-shirts, lunchboxes, calendars and bedspreads are amongst the other, obvious mainstays of merchandising. Novelisations and video games are a specific kind of merchandise that become new media works in their own right.

Novelisations are so desired that I even see a lot of novels adapted from films that were themselves originally adapted from books.

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Marvel Comics are an interesting sidebar here, I think. Their movies have made their brand really quite attractive and well-known, and it surely must have driven a lot of sales of their comics. Consider a well-known car manufacturer, for example, and a race of little linguistically-spiteful blue creatures, three apples high.

Instead of the studio making money from the prominent appearance of certain vehicles in their movie, that car manufacturer instead agrees to provide an equivalent amount of marketing in their dealerships and TV commercials. Cast your mind back to Jurassic Park once again. During the making of that film, money was spent on developing the CG technology to render its special, animated dinosaurs.

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Once this technology existed, its proprietors - in this case, ILM - would be able to offer its services for hire elsewhere. Both Disney and Universal have their own parks, with plentiful movie tie-ins, and other movies have spawned rides and attractions everywhere from Alton Towers to Six Flags. The Halloween Horror Nights would be a subset of this, with their ridiculous, heart-rate battering spectacles more often than not based loosely on some existing horror movie franchise or another.

Money springs up around cinema because cineastes will indulge in their passion even when it costs them. That bar upstairs in your local pseudo-art house cinema could argue that some of its money comes from it being a bar in a cinema. And then there are magazines like Sight And Sound, Empire, SFX, turning reporting, criticism, PR and advertising into moolah.

The students are then tasked with drawing in arrows indicating the flow of money between these nodes, illustrating the flow of money in the movie biz. Show business is what we have, though, and it can work. It certainly puts a lot of bread onto a lot of tables, and that alone is a very good thing indeed. You can follow Brendon on Twitter. View the discussion thread.

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