Do We Really Have To Set Film Budgets For "What The Market Tells Us"?

Or is the wisdom of our industry actually not wisdom at all -- but just us succumbing to the wrong incentives... again? And can you guess who suffers as a result?

we’ve always eaten our ownDo you

I get it. And yes, it is sort of complex. And sure, there are a lot of Catch-22’s in our business that may cause you to stumble. But let me be frank with you… there is also a great deal of “conventional wisdom” out there that you might want to take with a grain of salt too. It’s bunk. Garbage. And will cloud your good thinking.

Movies are a very expensive undertaking. Yup. That’s true and that’s where we get into trouble and start to dig our own graves. For years there have been people employed in our field who didn’t know what they are doing, or if they did, they weren’t very good at working here.

Too many of us have little experience actually making films. And many have no respect for those that do. They don’t have access to data, or when they do, they don’t know how to interpret it well. They don’t or didn’t try to define what good, or ever great, might be. They probably didn’t even have confidence in their own opinion when it came to art or entertainment… so they defaulted to those of others.

And yeah, the field is full of sharks who treat those with capital as “dumb money” and seek to only get it to line their pockets. And you know where this road leads, right? Practitioners best be cautious, and just manage risk. Too many got stuck singing this tune and they misread the notes to ever find harmony.

And of course as long as they keep spending money, there will be be money to be made. So when you tell them to keep doing what they’ve been doing, you will be preaching to the choir. Why complicate things by trying to make anything well or better?

Those that make their fees based on quantity or percentages won’t do as well on this year’s bottom line if we all take one of the smart pills, slow down and start to aim high. Who cares if with the way we work now, we are overloading the system with a bunch of crap? When it breaks under the weight, they will have gotten theirs. And probably some of yours too.

Let’s face it, you don’t care about sustainability and a merit-based system in cinemaland if your role is to extract value and not add value. Just getting more done is a game that ends when everyone — creators, audiences, and the industry — loses. That’s where the conventional wisdom leads us: game over.