kingmohd84 wrote:The second thing is that I saw Hercules by Disney today and they had producer names. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the producer the guy that pays the money and funds the movie and takes the risk to make the profit? If so, how come it is a Disney movie when some one else paid for it?
Well, once the producer pays Disney the money, Disney fires up its resources and makes the actual movie. So while the producer is covering a lot of the costs, they aren't having to construct the studios, hire the writers, get the actors on board, etc. Basically The producers provide the fuel which Disney uses to drive their truck, as they embark on a mutually beneficial road trip I think that may be one of the better analogies I've ever created...
kingmohd84 wrote:for workers, do you have to feed them when they pay you?
Companies don't give free lunch for employees in a company, or is the movie business different?
As I understand it the movies do have a large catering budget for their employees. It's easier to provide food than to allow the workers to swarm around a strange town (and there might not even be anything around).
Jreecee
What do you mean they don't care about budget, of course they do.
What is terrorizing is that some movies fail so miserably that they reach sales of $200,000 when they were made for few millions! So you never know, think of Psyconauts for a videogame example. "Tamara" is a movie example.
The movies have a much larger license to spend money, as the assumption is that if you throw more money in it means more people will see the movie and you get more money out of it.
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MrPopo wrote:As I understand it the movies do have a large catering budget for their employees. It's easier to provide food than to allow the workers to swarm around a strange town (and there might not even be anything around).
Yep. It's just one of those things, you don't want all your workers leaving the set for who knows how long to go get food, and that's if you're near restaurants. If you've got a crew in the australian outback you have to feed them.
MrPopo wrote:The movies have a much larger license to spend money, as the assumption is that if you throw more money in it means more people will see the movie and you get more money out of it.
Exactly. That's only part of it though. Watch robert rodriguez's making of feature on his first movie, el mariachi. You can see how so much care and effort was put into maintaining a budget, like for the whole movie he used one guitar case. On big movies there is so much going on it's nearly impossible to keep track of all those expenditures. I'd bet when he went to make desperado there were 20 duplicate guitar case props. It's not about not caring about the budget, it's about all the things that have to come together on a huge film that already has a release date. Most the time it's easier to just throw money at a project than to take more time to properly plan things.
I used to manage a movie theater in the summer and I do know that the theaters (large markets like NY excluded) barely make enough money from ticket sales to pay for the leasing of the physical film to show. They have to make all of their money to pay bills and profit off of concessions.
I think the moving making and movie showing industries may be similar. The overall cost of a movie is more than just actors and locations, there are lots of little things that are equivalent to raisinets - they seem trivial but they bring in money.
And to piggy back on another point that FastBilly said: My buddy worked in Cleveland where they shut down to film the chase scene for Spider-Man 3, he got paid days off and heard rumors that the company made a lot of money for shutting down during filming.
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*Disney(which is like bazillion dollar company) needs producer with a measly $50 million to provide work for their employees, and they won't share the profits of big motion pictures like Hercules and others?
I think you got it wrong, maybe the produce pays half or something like that.
*About budget, so in theory if my movie costs more, more people will watch it? I can lie and produce a movie for $20 then say it was $70 , how about that for marketing?
The way I see it , the more you spend the more you are likely to lose money if it flops which a lot do.
Business try to cut costs, in movies you try to increase them?
Actually it's not uncommon for movie budgeting to go beyond original estimates, and most producers justify overbudgeting by potential revenues from DVD and overseas sales.
kingmohd84 wrote:On wikipedia it says
budget: $175 million
gross: $264,218,220
kudos whoever invested so much money into that kind of movie specially in 1995
I'm sure someone else on the board knows better than I do, but I recall reading that a film needs to gross roughly double its production costs to break even.
I do not think that is factoring in marketing, though.
But if Water World ever broke even, it would have been through television screenings and DVD sales.
Usually the formula is budget = marketing. So if they spent $175 million to make it they spent $175 to market it. Even if they spent half that for marketing they wouldn't have made their money back.
Catering, aka Craft Services, is done on site because often the crew will not get the amount of time they necessary to eat. By law they are given one hour for eating, but when I have PA and even when I was an OP eating was really more like ten minutes, then rushing to finish things before work or trying to catch a short nap. OFFICIALLY filming is stopped for one hour, but when you are pulling 18+ hour days, four to six days a week you need the extra time to prep, since everyone gets sloppy after a while and when that lens you are handling cost more than your car, you have to do it right.
I dont care who you are, you pull five 18+ hours a day of hard work in every condition you can imagine for 6+ weeks in a row and you will get tired. Even the former marines on the last crew I was on got tired after slogging through a bog for a week.
