{"id":185207,"date":"2011-09-11T18:27:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-11T23:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/09\/11\/bummer-but-the-movies-are-a-business\/"},"modified":"2011-09-11T18:27:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-11T23:27:00","slug":"bummer-but-the-movies-are-a-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/09\/11\/bummer-but-the-movies-are-a-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Bummer, But the Movies are a Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

A movie based on HP Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness<\/i>, has been canceled<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The film-world was thrown into a frenzy yesterday regarding Universal’s cancellation of Guillermo del Toro’s personal passion project, a $150 million, R-rated adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness<\/i>. We live in an era where even the once-brave Warner Bros. has gone from the sort of studio that would roll the dice on The Matrix<\/i> to the kind of studio that will likely reboot\/remake The Matrix<\/i>, where Pixar seems content to become a sequel factory (Cars 2<\/i>, Monsters Inc 2<\/i>), where studios are so terrified of big-budget originality that they seem to merely be parading an never-ending stream of unwanted sequels (Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief: The Sea Monsters<\/i>), needless remakes (Total Recall<\/i>), and inexplicable ‘reboots’ (Tomb Raider<\/i>), the news was the film-news equivalent of us lefties hearing that President Obama had caved into GOP budget demands… again. There are plenty of reasons why executives are reluctant to spend blockbuster-dollars on original ideas. But the (temporary?) death of At the Mountain of Madness<\/i> isn’t quite representative of the end of original thought in Hollywood. But it is a good time to stop and ask why every major studio genre picture needs to cost to bloody much?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Film Blogger Scott Mendelson is right. When one considers the fact that this film would have to be almost exclusively CGI, and a decent Linux based server farm for the rendering would cost well under $50,000.00, the idea that you need spend $150M to make it is ludicrous.<\/p>\n

After all, the 6 minute long CGI extravaganza short subject The Raven<\/i> cost under $5000.00.<\/p>\n

Simply put, this film would not make money unless it shattered box office records for the R-Rated horror genre:<\/p>\n

The highest-grossing R-rated film of all-time is The Matrix Reloaded, at $742 million worldwide. After that, you get The Passion of the Christ ($611 million), Terminator 2: Judgment Day ($519 million), Troy ($497 million), Saving Private Ryan ($481 million), The Hangover ($467 million), The Matrix and Pretty Woman ( both $463 million), Gladiator ($457 million), The Last Samurai and 300 ( both $456 million), The Exorcist ($441 million), Terminator 3: Rise of the Machine ($433 million), The Matrix Revolutions ($427 million), Sex and the City ($411 million), and The Bodyguard ($410 million – which is arguably why that one is getting remade). That’s just sixteen films in all of modern-motion picture history that have grossed $400 million or more worldwide with an R-rating. The second-highest-grossing R-rated horror film (after The Exorcist) remains Hannibal, with $351 million. I can’t even think of an insanely successful R-rated supernatural horror picture off the top of my head… can you? Point being, even with the once-surefire Tom Cruise allegedly at the helm, an R-rated $150 million supernatural horror film would basically have to become the most successful supernatural R-rated horror film of all-time just to break even<\/b>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Emphasis mine.<\/i>)<\/p>\n

Could someone out in Hollywood explain to me why every film seems to have to cost something north of $100 million?<\/p>\n

Even with PR and distribution costs, it seems to me that this could be a $50 million movie, and given the relative cheapness of modern CGI this is very doable, and at that cost, you might clear a profit on the initial theatrical release.<\/p>\n

H\/t (unsurprisingly) Cthulhu at the Stellar Parthenon BBS<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A movie based on HP Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness, has been canceled: The film-world was thrown into a frenzy yesterday regarding Universal’s cancellation of Guillermo del Toro’s personal passion project, a $150 million, R-rated adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. We live in an era where even the once-brave …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1005,993,1175,1027],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-cinema","category-literature","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185207"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185207"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185207\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}