Why the film industry needs disrupting

Why the film industry needs disrupting
filmschoolrejects.com

"6. Tricky Hollywood Accounting" - this is purely a contract negotiation issue, and it is is no way a hollywood-specific problem - in all lines of businesses you will find companies which try to setup "royalty fee" or similar buyer-controlled expenses to dry up profit to ensure as little is paid out as possible to the seller. A good negotiation team will prevent this, both in Hollywood and elsewhere.

"5. Extorting Theaters" - this is bullshit for 95% of theatres. The large movie theatre chains in North America have leverage over the studios, as while there is a large number of movies available at any given time, there are only a relatively small (fixed) number of theatre screens. The price and revenue split of a film in a theatre is based on supply and demand; movie theatres do not cut the exact same deal with studios for every single film, instead they negotiate based on the expected results of the film. In the cases where movie theatres don't think the film will do well, the studios basically get screwed into subsidizing the movie theatre to show the film. In cases where the movie is expected to do very well, the theatres end up giving up more for the right to have it on their screen. I'm sure small independent theatres are a different story, but in all businesses small players have less negotiation power, and therefore get worse deals.

"4. Fake Reviews" - this is just the work of dishonest marketers - I don't understand how it is a reason to justify disrupting the movie business.

"3. Copyright Bullshit" - this is a US specific problem, not a film business wide problem, as copyright laws change by country. It could also be viewed as a good thing for producers in the film business, as they can profit off their films longer.

"2. Strangling Consumer choice" - again, its a contract issue and has much in common with 6, Extorting Theaters, and the resulting supply and demand struggle. Theaters don't want to pay as high a price for a film if its available in other channels, as that means attendance/viewership will be lower. Same with TV stations, Pay-per-view, and so on. Therefore, if studios want to be able to actually pay for the film they produced, they have to be very careful as to where and in what order they show their content.

"1. Stealing Scripts" - This is just not a film business problem. People steal ideas everywhere, all the time. Stealing ideas is easy, creating a good product is hard.

(Edited after my morning coffee to clarify submitter's thesis versus articles thesis)

Tech- and entrepreneurial-minded folk like to look for disruption opportunities and while they may exist in theory, these are industries supported by mind-boggling displays of corruption. In this case, you couldn't touch any of the six points on that list without offering a billion dollars in campaign contributions to Congress yourself.

It makes me extremely sad about that state of affairs.

One rational accounting method would be to split the cost evenly between films (or perhaps you could divide it based on how many hours/days of filming was done in that location.) But film #1 (a) made a profit, (b) owes percentages of the profit to people who made the first film. Film #2 lost money and was made by people with less negotiating power than Keanu Reeves, so having it lose more money doesn't benefit the studio. Given this simple case, you'd want to allocate as much of the expense as possible to the first film, leading to court battles over exactly how the cost should be allocated. Was this set used for more hours for film #1? Was it more crucial to the plot for that film?

And okay, that might still be manageable. But what doesn't work is to leave the number of films to be shot there open-ended. If the freeway set stays up, the lawyers representing Keanu Reeves can reasonably argue that you intend to make one hundred films there, so the _Matrix Reloaded_ production should only get dinged for 1% of the cost rather than all of it or half of it.