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A friend who made a lot of money in videgame publishing recommended this to me once:
https://www.amazon.com/Blockbusters-Hit-making-Risk-taking-Business-Entertainment-ebook/dp/B00C74OXLO/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Basically it's a power-law problem. The vast majority of viewers will choose what to watch from the top 5 movies out at the moment because those are the ones they've heard of. From a producer's point of view you pay whatever you have to pay to get into the top 5 because otherwise you're dead in the water. Thus, blockbusters.
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It seems to me that naive economic thinking would be that JLaw's value is the one we should assume right? Since she almost certainly is getting paid via a share of the box office proceeds. If she isn't worth it her pay will drop, either directly or they'll stop offering her high guaranteed pay.
The fact that she's kept up her high pay for years now (off the back of multiple successful films) speaks in her favor.
Meanwhile, her union buddies (despite being less vocal and annoying) are the ones leeching off the SAG minimum that they didn't necessarily earn or make any sort of case for.
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A movie without a big star is risky, making it very difficult to get the right mix of stakeholders on board (director, financing, producers, executive producers, studio execs).
It is interesting that other mediums (eg TV, music) have gone somewhat the opposite direction. Reality TV is cheap to make. You just find some randos who are willing to whore themselves out for some fame and broadcast it. Sure, your audience might be less compared to a good TV show BUT the cost is so low you still come out ahead.
Streaming has allowed musicians to more easily “publish” their music. The labels are much less important.
One wonders why Hollywood has remained insulated from the above? Is the nature of movies just different? Is it union rules?
From what I understand there are two caveats to this so large as to destroy the point:
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The sound of freedom had a $15 million dollar budget, which is still very expensive even if not by movie standards. It’s probably just a medium that it’s hard to do cheap enough to be worth trying.
Counterpoints: The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity are two of the most profitable films ever made because their production costs were in the five to six figure range. These are particularly pronounced examples of the general tendency for horror films to be cheap as chips to make (audiences don't expect big stars, casts tend to be small, geographic isolation is usually a necessity for story reasons which limits the amount of locations you need to use etc.) - the most beloved slasher films from the 70s and 80s were made for small budgets. More recently, Unfriended was made for $1 million and shot entirely in the director's house. Blumhouse's entire business model is "find directors who seem creative and enthusiastic, give them $1-4 million, almost all of the resulting projects will break even and a few will be whales".
See also Kevin Smith, who launched a successful directing career by making an indie comedy, Clerks, for $27,000 (half of which went to licensing the soundtrack) which he funded by selling off his comic book collection. Or Shane Carruth, who created one of the most critically acclaimed sci-fi movies of this century (Primer) for $7,000. Or just take a look at this list: you may be surprised to find that at least one film you love cost less than a house (or even a new car) to make.
"Yeah, making a movie used to be cheap but now it's more expensive."
Bullshit. Digital cameras are the norm now, so you don't even need to pay for film stock (as at least 3 of the 5 examples above did). Non-specialist consumer electronics are good enough that at least two critically acclaimed and profitable movies that I know of (Tangerine and Unsane) were entirely shot on iPhones, and editing an entire feature film on a standard laptop is perfectly feasible (and you'll probably be using the exact same NLE that the editor for Marvel 36: Electric Boogaloo used).
Sound of Freedom is a poor example of how cheap movies can get insofar as a) it was filmed in two countries and b) it features a bankable movie star who probably was unwilling to work for scale. It would not surprise me one iota if Jim Caviezel's fee cost more than the rest of the production combined. This has precedent: Glass was a nominally $20 million film that looked like it cost one-tenth of that because it had Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson.
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I do wonder if a winning strategy is filming 10 movies with budgets if 15m hoping to find one hit. If 9 make 10m but one makes 100m you have a net profit of 40m.
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This is the received wisdom, but it seems like adding tens of millions to your budget in the hopes of drawing in JLaw fans is the bigger risk. Maybe it's a smaller risk only in the 'nobody gets fired for buying IBM' sense
It seems like JLaw adds some value. Query whether the marginal benefit is worth the marginal cost.
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