The Future of a Blockbuster
Traditionally, the goal of media has always been to earn a seat at the big kids table. The reward for which was untold amounts of fame and fortune, the inability to become mainstream by aligning with a major media company meant obscurity and poverty -think dying alone and penniless in a dingy Vegas motel.
The technology-created revolution will fundamentally alter the idea of “success” in the media industry. Fortunately for lovers of TV and film this will mean the resurgence of film as a true art form rather than simply a mechanism for pumping out homogenized formulaic products.
The open availability of distribution will enable those who don’t wish to play by Hollywood’s rulebook to still achieve massive success even by traditional standards –millions of viewers worldwide and millions in revenue. But we will also need to learn to understand new definitions of “success”.
Before there was only one racetrack with one, socially agreed upon, finish line. Without the resources of a major media company, a film was limited in the scope of its potential impact it could have. But now films that cost virtually nothing to make and even less to distribute no longer face the same obligations to align with major media as a necessity for having massive international reach and impact.
This enables films to have different goals than struggling for acceptance by the status quo. The idea that a film needed to make hundreds of millions to be considered a success was based on the fact that it cost ten of millions of dollars to make and market. What do you say then to a film that costs $5,000 to make, had a built in audience so spent no money on marketing, and made $250,000? Traditionally a movie earning only $250,000 was cause for executives to jam short Japanese swords into their abdomen as an act of contrition. But in this instance $250,000 represents a 5,000% return on investment, a profit margin that would make even a seasoned con artist jealous.
Modern filmmaking will have to become more nuanced in its understanding of “success”. Box offices returns will need to be considered less in terms of gross revenue and more as a matter of a ratio. $100 million gross earnings are meaningless if it cost you $99.9 million to make and market the film. As a result this unrealistically tight margin means the high grossing film was in reality a flop, but also consider the opportunity cost of tying up that much capital in a single project, or the risk of betting that much money on a single endeavor.
In this way a $100 million project that brings in $200 million is less valuable than a $100,000 project that brings in $200,000. How much less will need to be decided by someone who has a firmer grasp on numbers than me- a person who generally requires a calculator to determine how much I need to tip.
The point is, evaluating the financial success of a film will become an increasingly nuanced proposition, and that is only concerning the financial results of a film. With highly diminished costs, the goal may not concern financial returns at all. We will also have to become cognizant of a whole host of other objectives for media and weigh its relative success accordingly. For instance, many videos may be created with the sole objective of raising awareness for a brand or cause, or perhaps the only goal was artistic fulfillment. Goals that would have been untenable with a multimillion budget are now perfectly acceptable goals for projects that cost little to nothing to bring to life.
Einstein once remarked that if you were to judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree you would deem it quite stupid. Similarly if you judge one of these new mirco-budget projections by its ability to measure up to outdated Hollywood box office standards you might deem it a total failure. But you may have totally missed the point, sooner or later we may have to consider whether the most successful film of 2012 was “The Avengers” or in fact something like “Kony 2012” (naked mental breakdowns from filmmakers notwithstanding).
