The
Hollywood Economist
The numbers behind the industry.
In
Hollywood, originality is anything but a virtue. Paramount
rejected a recent project that had attached stars, an approved
script, and a bankable director by telling the producer:
“It's a terrific idea, too bad it has not been made into
a movie already or we could have done the remake.” This
response, alas, is not untypical. Studios today, as a former
executive explained, tend to greenlight four types of movies
for wide openings: remakes (such as King Kong ),
sequels (such as Star Wars: Episode III ), television
spin-offs (such as Mission: Impossible ), or video
game extensions (such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider ).
Hollywood,
of course, still turns out original movies, but the number
is constantly shrinking. Studio executives don't lack imagination
nor do they find particular joy in mindlessly imitating
bygone successes, but they must take into account the underlying
reality of today's entertainment economy. Unlike in the
old days when the studios could rely on a vast habitual
herd of movie-goers to fill theaters, audiences must now
be created from scratch for each and every film. For the
studios, “audience creation,” for which they spent on average
over $30 million a film just in America in 2005, has become
just as important a creative product as the film itself.
The
key to a movie's success is the level of awareness that
exists for the project well in advance of the advertising
blitz that takes place in the week or so preceding the actual
release date. The studios carefully tracks this prior awareness
via the telephone polls supplied weekly by the National
Research Group (NRG), a part of Nielsen Media Research.
From this data, a studio can tell the extent to which different
segments of the movie-going population—divided by age and
sex into four “quadrants”—are aware of a particular upcoming
movie. The most important audiences are those in the under-25
males quadrant, since they are the easiest to turn out for
opening weekend. With franchises and remakes, the awareness
in the under-twenty-five male group approaches 100 percent;
with video-game and TV-based movies, it is often over 90
percent. But with original stories the awareness level,
even buoyed by well-planted gossip items in the entertainment
media, is usually not much more than 60 percent of the target
audience. Such an awareness gap means that a large proportion
of teen eyeballs, even if glued to their TV set, might not
recognize the fleeting ads as a go-message for a movie opening
that weekend. If so, the studio's multi-million dollar ad
campaign may miss its mark.
Consider,
for example, DreamWorks's 2005 science-fiction film, The
Island , an original story about clones who don't know
they are intended to be used for organ transplants for rich
“sponsors,” including movie stars, athletes, and Presidents.
As the summer release date approached, the NRG awareness
polls showed that a substantial part of the targeted audience
had not yet heard of the movie. Nevertheless, having already
spent $122.5 million on the production, DreamWorks decided
to open it wide on over 3,200 screens and spent $35 million
on buying action-laden ads (which had little relation to
the clone-plot or the ethical issues). From these ads, the
prospective audience had no way of knowing what the movie
was about—other than Scarlett Johannson and Ewan McGregor
being chased by bad guys—or even that there was no actual
island in The Island . The “teaser” trailers were
equally elusive. When D-Day came in July, there was no teen
stampede to the 3000 multiplexes—indeed, less than 3 million
people turned out for the opening weekend. The multiplex
chains, who depend on popcorn sales to survive, began pulling
The Island off their screens as fast as they could.
What
really failed here was not the directing, acting, or story
(which were all acceptable for a summer movie) but the marketing
campaign. Whatever other factors might have worked against
audience-creation—the mid-summer release date, the clutter
of competitive action films, the misleading title, etc.—
The Island had to overcome the competitive disadvantage
that it did not have the built-in awareness that comes from
being a sequel, a remake, a video game, a TV series spin-off,
or comic book adaptation. Of course, there are many original
movies that overcome the awareness handicap—and, in rare
cases, such as Universal's Cinderella Man , a box-office
flop will be re-released at a later date. But the lesson
for studios from such fiascos is that original movies are
a far more perilous enterprise than retreads of past successes.
[back
to archive]
|