Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevin_morrill | Hacker News Reader

I changed how I think think about movies after talking with a marketing rep at a studio. Imagine you were launching a new software startup every single week, and all the brand equity you built up before resets to zero each time. All of a sudden you'd throw out any film purist sense about you and be looking for tricks to prevent this, namely sequels, marketing on stars or director reputation, etc.

View on HN

It's even worse than that. Jon Rogers has an excellent summary of the problem space:

Movie executives do not lead happy lives. If you are an executive, this is your day: a scruffy man in a Hawaiian shirt walks into your office and says, "I need you to be personally responsible for giving me one hundred million dollars so I can go to Ireland and have people who pretend for a living act like they're fighting imaginary dragons."

"Will I get to see the dragons first?" you ask hopefully.

"Oh, no the dragons won't exist until after we're done shooting. The professional pretending people will be yelling at sticks. Occasionally, they will flee from a mop."

And your job, as the exec, is to write him the check.

http://kfmonkey.blogspot.co.uk/2005/02/writing-adaptation-pt...

That's a really good point I hadn't considered...with production costs easily breaking $100m, lots of the bigger fundraising news doesn't even reach this. Color for example raised ~$40m, which in movie terms isn't even a small romantic comedy. The Lord of the Rings trilogy had a budget of $281 million and in many ways was a big of a gamble as any Venture Backed Company.

I'd imagine that the methods to raise that kind of budget aren't all that dissimilar in truth.

"The Lord of the Rings trilogy had a budget of $281 million and in many ways was a big of a gamble as any Venture Backed Company."

Not really. Lord of the Rings was an established brand before the movies with a fervent fan base.

I don't think that's a good analogy. Film studios don't make films: directors and producers do.

If you want a more accurate analogy, there are places that fund a load of startups in a similar way to studios... ;-)

Film studios don't make films: directors and producers do.

The general public has, in general, no clue about how the movie industry actually works. That extends to random HN commenters.

In this case, though, you're right.

That's pretty much the videogames industry.

Or is it? At least, for videogames you can reuse big chunks of game engines and various networking code. You can't reuse footage that easily.

That's more akin to reusing props and cameras.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com