Smaller movies better investment

By the end of this past weekend's box office Fruitvale Station made 6.3 million on a budget of 900 000

The Way Way Back made 8.9 on a budget of 4.6 million.

So that's a profit of approx 5 million on each of those movies and they risked very little money and their investment was returned 6 times for FS and twice for TWWB. Presumably not much was spent to market these films. Had they been flops, big deal, its small money.

I posted a thread here some time ago mentioning another article from THR where they talk about the budgets for recent blockbusters and there the return on investment seems often smaller while the risk is much higher (granted with Fruitvale Station and the Way Way Back I cherry picked two winners).

So why not do more smaller movies? I appreciate that a profit of 5 million is small for them, but if they were to produce more movies a year, as they once did, it could aggregate. Maybe my numbers are off. I wonder how it breaks down over the course of a year.

The way Hollywood works though is they see a big number and it must be better...

Make a film for 10k and it makes a million... it's made 100 times it's original cost...

If a movie makes a billion but was made on a budget of 3/4 of a billion... that's only a 33% mark up... yet they see it as "We made a Billion" ... which sounds bigger than "We made a Million".

I've mentioned a few times before... Avatar for instance is seen as one of the most successful films ever when it broke the Billion mark... but it was made on a budget of 237 million. Since then it's made near 3 Billion which is 12 times its cost.

Yet Paranormal Activity made a 193 Million altogether... made on a budget of 15k... that's 13,000 times its cost...

But in Hollywood terms, Avatar is more successful. Because it's "made Billions".

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As Rodent indicated, and as I've said before, the big Hollywood producers don't want to make $5m for an investment of $100,000, they want to make over a billion while risking $300m.

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The right way to measure if smaller movies are better investments is to look at all of them, not only the successful ones. The Way Way Back and Fruitvale Station seem to be the outliers.

It seems to me that the big studios like big budgets because like most business they like the tried and true. I would assume that their research tells them that the majority of the movie-going public will pay to see the big effects. Big effects cost big money. Throw in an overstated plot about good versus bad and some romance, and you have the formula that the studios go back to again and again.

Most of the movies I like don’t tend to make much at the box office. The money made off the big budget movies allows the studios to take a chance on smaller movies. So, I will not complain about how many more Fast and Furious movies they will make. By all means, I encourage all to go and see World War Z.

Exactly. What matters is total profit, the rate of return does not matter in this case.

However, one could argue that if you are going to invest 300 million dollars, making 100 movies for 3 million each is more rational than making 1 super blockbuster for 300 million, because the risk is spread out over many films so if some fail others will succeed and the chance of having to suffer a loss adding up all the films becomes small while a single superblockbuster can be seem as a very risky bet.

But the fact is that hollywood studios are large enough so that even those superblockbusters are small relative to their budgets.

there is a saturation point, you can't have six studios each making 100 films. people don't go to the theatre that often.

it's already an issue that there are like 5 or 6 huge blockbusters all aimed for the summer of 2015

But you don't need many people to make money off 3 million dollar films. So your argument is invalid. The total size of the market is assumed constant in my argument between making 100 cheap films or 1 super blockbuster.

I've seen the film biz go in cycles over the years. After "Pulp Fiction" shocked us with it's awesomeness (95'ish), indie films were all the hype. It was like the 70's was suddenly resurrected. Now-a-days, These super-budget movies are thrown together well from a technological standpoint, but not in terms of storytelling. Filmmakers seem to have forgotten how to do that.

Nah good director is a better investment. John Lennon "I'm an artist, give me tuba, I'll bring you something out of it"

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If you look at the aspect of spending vs. earning, sure, the smaller ones are more successful. Just take a look at Blair WItch. Their producers earn thousands of dollars and they are happy. But the producers of some massive movies with the budget worth millions consider themselves a failure if they make hundreds of thousands.

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While it’s pretty much impossible for low budget movies to lose money they’re not likely to make billions either. Studios know that for an Avatar/Titanic/Avengers level payoff then the movie pretty much has to have a big special effects budget and a huge marketing campaign. With smaller movies there isn’t a chance of a John Carter or Lone Ranger level bomb but the reverse holds true as well.

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Pulp Fiction was never an indie film.

These super-blockbusters are made for huge international audiences and so need to be very dumbed down in terms of plot for wider accessibility.

It did win four Independent Spirit Awards.

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