erik lundegaard

Thursday March 12, 2009

Why a Film's Budget is Irrelevant

A few days ago, Patrick Goldstein of the L.A. Times blog, “The Big Picture,” credited both his own paper and The Wall Street Journal for getting the real story on the $56 million opening weekend box office of “Watchmen.” He then took Variety to task for same. What the L.A. Times and WSJ added, and Variety didn’t, was the budget of the picture, $150 million, and, as Goldstein states in his opening sentence, “A wise old Hollywood hand taught me ages ago that the only way you can even begin to figure out a film's profit potential on its opening weekend is by knowing how much it cost to make in the first place.”

Here’s the bigger question that Goldstein and that wise old Hollywood hand don’t address: Does anyone outside of L.A. care about a film’s profit potential?

Seriously. What’s the point of having box office numbers in most newspapers on Monday morning? Why does a CBS news anchor, giving a news brief during the Sunday night broadcast, always tell us the weekend’s box office champ and how much it “raked in”?

What does box office represent?

It represents popularity. The reason the figure is in most newspapers, the reason CBS news cares about it, is that box office gives us some indication of which movie, and thus what kind of story, our neighbors (near and far-flung) care most about. This weekend.

So does a film’s budget have anything to do with what box office represents? No.

In fact, if you were going to add other figures besides a film’s gross numbers to establish a film’s popularity, here’s what you would add before a film’s budget:
1. Its theater count
2. Its screen count
3. Its per-theater average
4. Its per-screen average
5. Its marketing budget
This last one is particularly relevant. In the old days, a film’s box office represented not only popularity but — because films didn’t advertise beyond trailers — some measure of its quality. Back then, pictures rose and fell on word-of-mouth. Now it’s marketing blitz, saturation, screens. Get into town, rake it in, vamoose before they know what hit them. Harold Hill stuff.

How much a picture cost isn’t relevant. But how much they spent to get our asses into the seats — versus how much it made — is. Hell, I’d love to see a ratio on this. Something like: box office minus marketing budget divided by screen count. But good luck getting the marketing budget from these guys.

I understand why Goldstein, and that old Hollywood hand, care about a film’s profitability. They’re industry people. The rest of us just want to know if the thing's any damn good.
Posted at 07:52 AM on Thursday March 12, 2009 in category Movies - Box Office  
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