Cinema 2015: another good year
From China with fury
2015 was a great year for cinema. The receipts at the box office they are grown up compared to 2014, i profits of the studios have been good, not there have been catastrophic flops and above all he started to Pull, like a snowcat, the Chinese market which is starting to become the most important in the world. Maybe it will be right there China a to write il next chapter of this entertainment, leisure and culture industry. It will also happen that the capital of the movies will move to China. You could call it Oriental Movie Metropolis, a huge structure with 10 thousand square meters of posing studios (one underwater) theme parks that the richest man in China, Wang Jianlin, is building a Qingdao on the east coast of China. Aware of this role i Chinese they have already started doing Shopping a Hollywood. The Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda chaired by Wang Jianlin, who already owns the largest cinema chain in the world in China and the USA, recently vested for $ 3,5 billion Legendary Pictures, the film studio of Burbank which has co-product the super blockbuster Jurassic World, which has shattered 29 box-office records, and, among many others, also the least fortunate Steve Jobs which, however, won two Golden Globes.
Maybe it's also for this (but China is currently an El Dorado for studios, American films are like the iPhone), but it's above all for thearrival di competitors ruthless how Netflix ed Amazon who have started to produce original content intended for worldwide distribution in direct competition with those purchased by studios and traditional television channels, which the edginess in Hollywood is stellar.
Beyond the franchise obsession
There are also others signals that the health of thisindustry not it is so Florida as it would seem to look at some indicators. This signals are the reduction of the films produced,franchise obsession (i.e. creating a string of sequels preferably going to infinity) and the role increasingly determinant of the marketing in to determine il success of a cultural product such as a film. Shawn Levy, a Canadian producer who works with the film capital's biggest six studios, said the 90% ofcaution gods of these goes to projects that include a superhero or are they easily serizable. Now we no longer discuss the film itself, but its possibilities to start a franchise. Adam Fogelson, former president of Universal Studios, stated that the 75% of the success of a film not drift by its quality, but by the marketing and from his initial marketability. It is therefore no coincidence that in 2014 there were 29 sequels, many of them based on comic book characters. This creative crisis starts to worry savvy people in hollywood seeing in the principle to produce films”too huge to ignore" a risky formula.
There are also those who are looking for, like STX Entertainment, new business model that is not that of the franchises and superheroes that came out of the comics, but qualcosa less contrived than put thehuman experience at its center and that it can stare, including one or more stars, among the 20 and 80 millions of investment. STX has stated that this type of film can to produce profits higher than 30% compared to the prevailing Hollywood model. Naturally the scale of profits is different.
Also in this project there is zampino of the Chinese: the Chinese production house Huayi Bros. closed a agreement with STX for finance as of 2016 the production di 18 film which are added to the 15 films already planned by STX in the two-year period 2016-2017. This is the same amount of productions from the big studios.
Tad Friend on “The New Yorker” he dedicated a long article a discuss le strategy di STX and Adam Fogelson who recently joined the new film studio. From this long article titled The Mogul of the Middle. As the movie business founders, Adam Fogelson tries to reinvent the system we drew one excerpt who photographs well Hollywood situation at the beginning of 2016. Ilaria Amurri has translated this passage for our readers.
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The roller coaster of the film industry
La Story ofindustry film saw a great rise followed by a long decline. In 1927, when America had a third of its current population and a movie ticket cost 25 cents, the studios taped 780 million dollars in receipts at the box office, theequivalent today's 10,6 billioni.e. almost 300 million in more compared to the gain 2014. At the time each production house had i his cinemas e distributed to 200 films a year, knowing that people would go see anything. In the 2014 They have gone out 178 films in all and for each one, marketing had to be carefully done to attract people who then stayed at home anyway.
- teens, i.e. the spectators of the future, They go to the cinema on average six times a yearor, just that cinemas are no longer places to find ourselves, that's why there is television. Now we go there in the same spirit that the Romans went to the Colosseum: to laugh, shout and have fun. There comedy,horror and the triumph ofhumanity continue to be more effective al movies than at home, but of course there's nothing better than a cool space ship rocketing across the screen. Computerized and high-impact images are typical of those action movie that are create specially not to “need positive reviews”, that is, for not necessarily being beautiful. According to one manufacturer:
Cinema hasn't improved, but at least it's more satisfying. Until twenty or thirty years ago, producers made films they liked. Kramer versus Kramer it's great, but it's not good for a global audience, while Harry Potter or the trilogy de The Lord of the Rings they weren't great, yet they turned out great.
Director Billy Ray brings the phenomenon back to economic crisis of 2008 and decline of the market of the DVD:
From then on the fear of production houses has been transformed in panic. I've heard phrases like "don't bring me anything good because I'm tempted to buy it and I can't afford it".
Technology at the service of spectacularity
It is not the first time that the studios have fallen back on showmanship to nail a hungry audience to their seats. When television arrived, in the Years' 50, they replied with i blockbuster in CinemaScope like The tunic e Storms under the seas (Billy Wilder suggested that the twidescreen technology could work best to tell "a love story between two dachshunds"). The novelty is that today it is widening trust su sequel series calls "franchise”. Shawn Levy, director of A night at the museum says he has projects in the works "with six different production companies, but 90% of those that are selected talk about superheroes or clearly lend themselves to franchise. Every single pitch meeting I've attended over the past two years hasn't been about the film itself, but about its possible franchise.
In 2014 They have gone out 29 sequels, many of cartoonish mould. As a senior executive confesses
I'm not crazy about all these sequels, but we are forced to do justice to the shareholders, which makes it easier from a marketing point of view: Star Wars, but please!. The bottom line is that getting a film right is hard enough, so why not settle for making one that brings home $500 million?
… and then there were three of them
Il action cinema it's a fantastic business, as long as it works, and that's why the big groups keep buying the production companies. It's a pity that over time il business is becoming always less exciting, which is why the groups start reselling the studios. One producer put it plainly: “Ronald Emmerich's film cost hundreds of millions of dollars for 500 million in box office? His profit will only decrease from year to year ”. It is likely that the strategy di to produce less movies due to their margin of decline would not be la prescription of the success in the long run, also because competition is everywhere. An old executive once predicted this scenario:
As Google, Verizon, AT&T., Comcast, Hulu, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix get their hands on original content, not they will be more able to di to compete with the digital distribution. In three years Paramount will no longer exist, Sony will disappear, Fox will buy Warner Bros. and only Fox, Disney and Universal will remain. Yet the executives interviewed don't seem so intimidated. One of them nonchalantly stated:
Despite the current instability, the motion picture industry has been the strongest in US history. Today's six production studios have existed since the beginning, since the first half of the last century. Of course, one has to overcome many hurdles to enter the business.
If Hollywood has managed to resist it is because the bond with talented professionals, the sensitivity towards different categories of public and the ability to please everyone not they can be replicated very easily da a simple one startup.
Hollywood is not a place for startups
Among the various aspiring start-ups have been Orion, Hemdale, Artisan, Overture, Morgan Creek, Relativity Media and many others. Producer Joe Roth founded the Revolution Studios in 2000 with a billion dollars in funding and a very advantageous deal with Sony. “Our task was to cover a third of Sony productions with mid-level movie, the problem is that a minimum of good taste is needed”. The Revolution debuted with The crawlers, a total fiasco, then launched the tremendous Extreme love – Tough love. The production shut down in 2007. “Honestly, our movies just weren't good enough,” admits Roth himself.
It must be said, however, that good taste is not everything. Stacey Snider of Fox says:
At Universal, Adam fogelson [former chairman of Universal Pictures] found trump cards of category of the medium budget, but I bet he's not succeeding at STX Entertainment. STX is facing major challenges, as it clashes with the majors all the time. A strong brand often makes a difference and they don't have it. Their films also don't have great special effects, so they are of more domestic than global interest. If the domestic market is flat and if STX cannot afford to produce films to be launched in China as well, the flop is guaranteed.
According to an industry insider:
STX is fooling itself by trying to tear down studios that are already on the waning boulevard. Even if he could develop a franchise I don't know how it would survive in the long run. Every time I talk about it with someone, the memory of the golden times always hovers.
The golden times indeed, which are no more.
