Hollywood is doomed, Part 3,302…

Updated on September 8, 2011 By Ken Begg 36 Comments

The movie studios probably are still better off than the TV networks, but that’s like saying America is in better financial shape than Europe. I was reading this story on show biz blog Deadline Hollywood last week, on Disney’s wrangling over the Johnny Depp prospective Lone Ranger movie. Well, Tonto movie, actually, since that’s what Depp would play.

Forced to the wall, the studios are starting to drop risky projects that cost too much, like Del Toro’s Lovecraft film, or this one. Basically, the projected budget of the Tonto film was TWO-HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-FIVE MILLION DOLLARS. Disney, being crazy Scrooges, wanted the budget down to $200 million, or at the most $220 million.

Yes, for a Tonto movie. I guess it will involved (obviously) all sorts of F/X and supernatural elements, like the Pirates franchise. For instance, I’ve heard there may be werewolves in it…because the Lone Ranger carries silver bullets, get it?

Anyway, all that aside (both sides are still trying to hammer out a compromise), this was a side sentence that really brought home how bad things are going to get for the movie business as currently constituted:

“The Lone Ranger already is a giant risk in the first place because Westerns don’t traditionally  perform well internationally. In a DVD-collapsed world, a $275M film needs to gross 3 times its budget to earn out, and that can’t be done without a big foreign reward.”

I’ve been talking for a while here in various posts about how the DVD monies have collapsed lately, and how much Hollywood has depended on them in the last ten years or so.  Still, I’ve yet been using the old formula of “the breakeven point equals box office revenues roughly double the film’s production costs.” This is the first time, and from a pretty credible source, that I’ve seen that formula changed to “three times as much,” rather than double.

I guess I knew this is where we were heading, but again, this is the first sign that we’ve arrived there, and to what extent. That is some seriously grim math there. Expect things to come to a head maybe sooner than you thought.

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  • Ericb

    Teh big question is … will Tonto be a sparkly vampire?

  • roger h

    What is the cost of distribution these days? Seems like that must skyrocketed as well.

  • RogerBW

    I think the collapse of Cowboys and Aliens may well be a cause here, at least a reason for the fight to have started just now – all of a sudden, Hollywood sheep will be saying “western with weird stuff = failure”.

  • alex

    How can a movie cost 200 million? Isn’t the equipment and technology today suppose to be more affordable and efficient? For example, wasn’t Sin City shot in an abandonned shopping mart with no standing sets? They were not sets build for the new Star Wars films either, how can it cost so much to make these things? It’s not like making Cleopatra in 1963 with thousands of extras.

    The movie industry needs to clone guys like Roger Corman and Mario Bava who could work miracles and knew how to use a camera.

  • JJ

    $275 million is insane for any sort of movie. That’s more than Avatar, for crying out loud.

    Unless you’re actively inventing new technology, there’s rarely any reason for it to soar much past 100. And even then, it’s a stretch. The Lord of the Rings films cost $93 million each. The new Planet of the Apes, where the main character is entirely (and impressively) computer-generated, cost the same.

    But of all the movies to be over the 200 mark, The Lone Ranger? What the hell?

  • John Campbell

    Hollywood has run out of ideas anyway. That alone should signal the death knell.

    Mind you some remakes have been good!

    Hey of Del Toro can’t do a lovecraft flick, tell him to get off his ass and make Hellboy III before Ron Pearlman looks like the Crypt Keeper…

    Priorities!!

  • jzimbert

    Unfortuantely, the Lone Ranger director insisted on realism, so they would have to use real silver bullets.

  • Ericb

    Hey guys, it’s not a Lone Ranger movie, it’s a TONTO movie. To bad Tom Laughlin is too old, he’d make a great Tonto.

  • “…all of a sudden, Hollywood sheep will be saying “western with weird stuff = failure.”

    Well, Westerns themselves are generally not a blockbuster genre anymore.

    I could also refute your theory by pointing to the amazing, zillion-dollar success of Johan Hex.

  • Alex–

    a) Tons o’ expensive computer effects, and
    b) Lead actors who pull 20 to 30 million right out of the gate, along with directors making five to ten million; and that’s just two guys out of literally hundreds who would work on a film of this nature.

    And that’s just the production budget, then there’s the tens of millions in marketing costs, the cost of striking 4,000 to 5,000 prints, etc.

  • Gamera

    Yeah, when I first saw this – $275 million!?! Seriously – WTH!?! Only movie I’ve seen this year is Captain America.
    I’m not a big fan of Corman but hell he could make fifty movies for the same amount- and they’d probably be better films.

  • Foywonder

    Been following the insanity of this story for a couple of weeks now. The Lone Ranger was scheduled to be Disney’s tentpole blockbuster for Christmas 2012. Jerry Bruckheimer, Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, Gore Verbinski, and Johnny Depp (aka the producer, writers, director, and star of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) were the creative forces behind the relaunch of the iconic masked crimefighting cowboy. Depp was slated to play the Lone Ranger’s Native American sidekick, Tonto, not the Lone Ranger himself; the title role was going to rising star Armie Hammer, whom you may recall for his dual role as the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network.

    So if you’re wondering how a Lone Ranger movie’s budget could get to be so astronomical it has to do with the creative forces behind the Pirates movie all getting their cut up front (said to eat up anywhere from $50-75 million of the budget right there) and the premise was to make it a special effects megablockbuster about the Lone Ranger and Tonto (or should I say Tonto and the Lone Ranger) battling werewolves in the Wild West. You know; the origin story as to why the Lone Ranger only shoots silver bullets. Here’s a quote from a screenwriter in the know:

    “It was going to be a Tonto show mainly. Tonto as the top dog and more dominant than the Lone Ranger. Tonto and the Indian spirits like Obi Wan Kenobi and the force. The driving engine was going to be Native American occult aspects worked in with werewolves and special effects. But flavored with doses of Native American spirituality in a serious way.”

    And here’s an even better quote from someone else summarizing this news:

    “The whole pitch – right down to Tonto being the ‘real’ badass, the “Indians know the REAL score, white man is clueless” and the shamanistic magic angle sound like they basically lifted the plot of “Brotherhood of The Wolf” – which VERY self-consciously borrowed the Ranger/Tonto setup for it’s white-hero/indian-sidekick guys – and reverse-engineered it BACK into a “Lone Ranger” script. Amazing.”

    Disney pulled the plug due to budgetary issues (something that has been happening a lot lately in Hollywood) because they couldn’t get the budget down to $200 million. Nevermind that $200 million is still an unfathomable price tag to make a Lone Ranger movie. And, yes, Disney’s cold feet can be attributed almost entirely to Cowboys & Aliens tanking it big time at the box office.

    The latest news on the project is that they’ve gone to a back-up script that drops all of the supernatural mumbo jumbo and strips the concept back down to being a traditional Wild West action adventure. But, once again, because super producers like Jerry Bruckheimer cannot it even sneeze without it costing at least $100 million the word is even with the new direction and the possible loss of director Gore Verbinski (he must have really had his heart set on Wild West werewolves) the budget will still be in the $200 million range. The new script is said to have three major action set pieces; the last already being touted as the biggest train sequence ever put to film.

    Back in 1993 the movie Tombtone only cost $25 million to make. Even when you adjust that for today’s prices it would still be barely a third what they want to spend on a big noisy Lone Ranger movie that odds are won’t even be a third as good.

  • Rock Baker

    I know this sounds like empty talk, but I could make a GOOD Lone Ranger movie (which I think we could all use these days) for about four million, tops.

    You’d think they would have learned from Superman Returns the valuable lessons of A) don’t spend more money on a film than you could possibly make back, B) don’t screw around with characters that are so deeply trenched in American culture that they reflect American ideals, and C) don’t make huge-budgeted stinkers that no one wants to watch.

  • Foywonder

    Rock, you think Hollywood execs can figure out something that simple? Your A & C alone would have stopped them from making a $200 million Green Lantern movie. One of the biggest box office bombs of the summer and what have Warner Brothers execs attributed the film’s failure to: not being darker in tone like The Dark Knight.

  • TROLLHUNTER cost 3 million dollars. It was rated 7.1 on IMDb

    THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS cost less than a half million dollars. It’s rated 7.3 on IMDb (admittedly, by only 65 people, so this could change a lot).

    SPIDERMAN 3 cost, what, $200 million and was rated 6.3 – presumably indicating that it provided less entertainment value than either of the previous two.

    I bet both Trollhunter and Whisperer make astronomically more profit per dollar invested.

    Obviously gigantic budgets are unnecessary.

  • fish eye no miko

    @Sandy Peterson: Wait, has Whisperer in the Darkness even been released yet? You are talking about the HPLHS film, right?

  • Rock Baker

    I don’t know how anyone in the business expects to stay working for very long. Sam Katzman managed to make quickies with low budgets (though admittedly, the crews that worked on those films were so practiced that the films shared a certain professional sheen one might not expect just looking at the numbers) that he could have on screens in time to take advantage of the latest craze (this man managed to get a film on the market quickly enough to make some coin on the calypso crase in the 50s!). It looks like the only sharp producers are the ones churning out pornos that can’t cost far north of $300. That’s just sad.

  • RogerBW

    fish eye no miko, The Whisperer in Darkness has played at several film festivals, but it’s not out yet on DVD.

  • fish eye no miko

    @RogerBW: Oh, ok. Thanks!

  • BeckoningChasm

    Lead actors who pull 20 to 30 million right out of the gate, along with directors making five to ten million; and that’s just two guys out of literally hundreds who would work on a film of this nature.

    Don’t forget the “Play or Pay” folks, who will get paid whether they work on the movie or not, or even if the movie gets made or not. I’m sure Gore Verbinski will pocket a nice paycheck for attending a few meetings.

  • Rock Baker

    Nice work if you can get it.

  • zombiewhacker

    Terry Rossio says that whole business about fighting werewolves was B.S.

    http://www.wordplayer.com/forums/scriptsarc14/index.cgi?read=183958

    “As is usual with Hollywood Reporting; that whole take had nothing to do with reality; there were no werewolves planned for Lone Ranger.

    “Not that it matters; the goal of Entertainment Reporting (and pretty much reporting in general these days) is to “get your click”. I do wonder whether anyone will notice how often film reports are wrong, and whether that will change behavior; whether an accurate reporting site would be more popular.

    “I doubt it; rumors are much more fun!”

  • zombiewhacker

    Though he does add:

    “And the film was shut down due to budget issues, not story issues, that much is clear.”

    http://www.wordplayer.com/forums/scriptsarc14/index.cgi?read=183988

  • zombiewhacker

    By the way, Tom Laughlin was already in the Legend of the Lone Ranger, back he was a much younger man, so I guess he missed his opportunity.

  • alex

    To Foywonder: Thanks for the details, I was under the impression that this was going to be a straight Western with mostly outdoor scenes that’s why I was wondering why the budget was so crazy.

    To Ken: It’s crazy that actors, producers and directors take so much money out of a budget. Don’t they realise they are killing the movie business? I also forgot that marketing costs sometimes almost equal a movie’s budget. I think that was the case for Superman Returns.

  • Alex — The biggest problem is that Hollywood hasn’t really caught up to the fact that actors generally aren’t worth salaries like that anymore. Depp is probably the closest thing we have to an exception, at least in these kinds of movies, but films just generally aren’t star-driven any longer…certainly not tentpole kinds of films.

    A name cast doesn’t hurt, but really, in 99% of cases, actors should not be making more than five or MAYBE ten million dollars a picture to star in it. Again, Depp in a rare exception for some films, most obviously when playing Jack Sparrow.

  • KeithB

    zombiewacker:

    Maybe he is being coy. I could easily believe that there might be some skin-walkers:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin-walker

    Which you could argue as to whether they are werewolves or not.

  • zombiewhacker

    Ken:

    Stars were never key to mega-tent pole success in the first place. At least not in the post Jaws era.

    Who was the big box office draw to Star Wars? E.T.? Even DiCraprio wasn’t a big name went he was signed for Titanic. Winslet still can’t draw flies even after Titanic.

    You hit it on the head, though, when you talk about the size of salaries. Stars do matter. Tom Cruise and Sandra Bullock can still put a few butts in the theater. It’s when actors insist on up front takes completely out of proportion with their box office appeal that things get out of hand.

    And the studios should just ban pay-or-play contracts completely.

  • zombiewhacker

    By the way, that was typo.

    I meant “DiCaprio.”

    :)

  • I present to you Matt Foyer as the new awesome action lead. I admit he looks like Wallace Shawn could beat him up in a pinch, but he has hidden steel.

    Also I recommend Barry Lynch as a heavy. He’s known to a select few as “The Man With The Creepiest Laugh Ever”.

  • Petoht

    “The new script is said to have three major action set pieces; the last already being touted as the biggest train sequence ever put to film.”

    Part of me is okay with this, provided it’s a real train. Train sequences are like pure, unadulterated adrenaline, and are some of the most exciting things out there. Provided they’re “real”. If it’s just everyone standing on a green riser in front of a green backdrop, then forget it.

    “Back in 1993 the movie Tombtone only cost $25 million to make.”

    And Tombstone got a lot of flak for all the behind-the-scenes issues it had (including cost overruns, I believe), and it had a pretty bad-ass cast, too. Hard to believe it was only 25M.

    Or that I can say “only twenty-five million” with a straight face. Damn, I’d love to have “only twenty-five million”.

  • alex

    One of the best cop movie of all time The French Connection (1971) was made for 1.8 million dollars. Even for that time it’s not much of a budget for a film made by a major studio (20th Century Fox) and yet it’s more impressive and exciting than any movie I’ve seen in God knows how long.

  • sandra

    I bet a lot of filmgoers are like me: I almost never go to the movies anymore, because they are just not churning out many movies I am willing to pay twelve bucks to see. Heck, most of them I don’t even watch on tv, for free. Plus, the Hollywood, the last remaining second-run theatre in town, recently went under. Its a great pity, as it had been by the same family since the 1930s. I paid full price to see Deathly Hallows 2 – NOT in 3-d, thank you very much, which was the first time I had been to a multiplex since DH 1. Hollywood has discovered that the audience for most movies consists of 14-year-old boys, so they make movies that appeal to them : CGI-fests with lots of things being blowed up real good. That leaves those of us who care about things like plot and acting out in the cold. The ridiculously inflated budgets go on the special effects and the stars’ salaries. Just how much does Depp make per film, anyway ?

  • Rock Baker

    I watched It Conquered The World again last night, and there’s a movie that delivers everything you could hope for. Great cast and fine acting, intelligent script, sharp editing, slick production values, etc. You’d never know the budget probably came it at (likely well under) $30,000. Adjusting for modern dollars, what would we have, about a million? If there is to be a motion picture industry in this country, its future belongs to the indepenent producers who can actually make a product under cost and on time. In a way, this could be good because it could lead to niche marketing and people could make the kind of films they’d actually like to see (like I’d enjoy seeing some more It Conquered The World-type fare). On the other hand, big movies are about the only common thread people have these days with mass media now more or less a thing of the past.

  • RogerBW

    I’ve been arguing for a while that the way to fix film-making is not to try to change the habits of Hollywood, but to encourage competition and let it wither and die. I’d like to see a lot more encouragement of new cast and crew, and a lot more love for over-the-net distribution, rather than expecting people to fight the dinosaurs of the movie-theatre system in order to get their films taken seriously.

  • tim

    I still think there’s some box office justice. that bucky larson movie didn’t even finish in the top 10. it had less than $1000/screen average. off the top of my head I can’t recall a movie with a fairly wide (1500 theaters) release doing so badly.