How much money does a movie director make

From a distance, the movie business might look pretty glamorous. Celebrities and producers glide down red carpets, clutch their Oscars and vacation in St. Barts…just because they. The public can be fickle, the industry is in flux, and just about any movie is an extremely risky investment, even a film starring big name actors and omney. Major studios and indie filmmakers alike now spend much of their days looking jake new sources of revenue, because ticket sales are no longer the be-all and end-all for films. This is in part because it costs far more to make and market a film than it .

Types of Directors

Generalizing about film director salaries is tricky because the range is huge. An average film director salary includes directors of big-budget Hollywood films and first-time directors shooting low-budget indies in Ohio. To explain what a director does, it helps to differentiate the roles of producer vs. The producer of a film hires the director. After studying the script, the director conducts auditions or screen tests and selects the cast, sometimes with the help of the producer. Rehearsals take place for many weeks, with the director advising actors on where to stand, how to deliver lines, and the mindset or emotions of their characters. Meanwhile, the director often consults with set designers, cinematographers and costume designers to make sure the set and costumes look as the director envisioned them. Directors may delegate tasks to one or more assistant directors, such as cueing the actors, reminding them when to go on set, and overseeing set changes.

What’s the average cost of making and selling a Hollywood blockbuster?

Although the producer is in charge of keeping the production on budget while the director handles the creative aspects of the film, in reality, the director must also be mindful of the budget and the importance of keeping the action moving. When filming has finished, the director works with the film editors to edit scenes and dialogue, add finishing touches such as sound effects and produce the final version of the film. Successful film directors have good leadership and communication skills as well as creativity. The job is more than ordering people to do things a certain way. Good leaders make people want to listen and take direction, to do their part to make the film one that they are all proud of and that the public wants to see. Whatever their salaries, directors work hard for the money. Days are long and can be stressful as directors work to stay on schedule and within budget. They often work evenings, weekends and holidays. Filming continues even when the set is outdoors in blazing heat or frigid cold. A movie director’s salary can increase with their experience.

Minimum Pay

Film directors are responsible for directing plays written for television and motion pictures. Salaries in the million dollar or higher range are not the norm for the average film director. In , the U. Bureau of Labor statistics reported there were , film directors working in the United States. The highest paid directors are the ones who have a high public demand. When there is a high public demand, directors can earn additional income from DVD sales and network airings of her movies. California is the entertainment mecca of the world. Therefore, it shouldn’t be shocking that the highest paid film directors live there.

Types of Directors

Thomas Edison and his assistant W. Dickson filmed «flickers» between and While this made Edison a household name, the income produced by these films pales when compared with the salaries earned by modern film directors. Modern directors, however, do work more hours creating feature films compared with early directors bound by time limitations. Thomas Edison felt audiences didn’t have the patience to watch films any longer than 10 minutes. Novice directors may defer compensation in hopes of making a successful film, but experienced directors are paid according to Directors Guild of America guidelines, and the best known directors can make impressively large salaries. Directors take the responsibility for organizing the workers involved in making a movie, including set designers, actors and camera operators, and post-production workers, such as editors and special-effects production. The job classification of director encompasses workers using various titles, including associate director and the primary director’s assistants taking formal titles as first, second and third assistant director. Directors earn salaries based on the type of work assigned during the film production. The main director earns the highest salary, while directors taking numbered positions sometimes work for an official title and for the experience. Film directors working in professional productions under the Directors Guild of America guidelines earn salaries based on the type of production and the number of weeks on the job.

“We’re going to need a bigger boat”

Assume a well done film project, what is the average production budget sweet spot for maximum profitability. That said, splitting a profit margin between income streams is tricky as there are lots of non-release based costs you need to assign somewhere, such as the production budget. Hi Joshua. And related to this can you demystify the roles, contributions and compensation for these various kinds of producers? The first huge cost — The budget The starting point for working out the final costs of releasing a movie is to look at how much it cost the studio to shoot the film i. As you can see, the majority of the money collected at the box office does indeed come from countries outside of the US and Canada.

Median Salary

This is an article I have wanted to research and write for a long, long time. I finally had a moment to sit down and crunch the numbers — I hope it helps in the understanding of Hollywood economics. Almost as long as there have been movies, Hollywood has relied on huge-scale productions to bring in the big bucks.

The Extra-Terrestrial As the films have grown, so too have the spoils on offer. The starting point for working out the final costs of releasing a movie is to look at how much it cost the studio to howw the film i. This includes…. Budgets have been rising in recent decades, well above diretcor. In the following ten years this rose x The information available online is normally a mix of true figures which have leaked and educated guesses by industry experts. The studios often try to hide the true cost of a movie, in order to make themselves seem thriftier, smarter or more in control than they actually are.

I performed a quick check for the 29 blockbusters I have inside data on compared with their budgets listed on Wikipedia.

Some of the other costs involved in making and releasing a film include…. To give you a little more detail and context, below are some notes on each of the main cost areas…. Judging the correct number of prints and units to manufacture is a key part of the planning done by the studios. If they order too few then cinemas and stores will have to turn away customers in the all-important first few weeks of release.

If they over-order then their costs increase and they are left with annoyed cinema owners and large quantities of unsold units. Giving these people a share of the income is a good way for the studio to hedge against poor box office performance and it also defers the moment they have to pay up.

On the flipside, studios have got rather good at using creative accounting techniques to show that they made a loss on paper in order to get out of paying such fees. Fortunately, Hollywood is rather good at squeezing every penny out of a movie, ensuring that the target customer is given many chances to pay to see it.

Movies may start in cinemas but they are far from the only place they earn money. Each stage at which a movie reaches a new type of platform i. Of the 29 Hollywood blockbuster movies Dirfctor studied, 14 generated mwke profit and 15 lost money. Note: The following discussion of profit uses this formula: all revenue received by the studios from a particular movie minus all costs they internally attribute to that production.

The smallest movies within my dataset i. Would you have made a smart investment? And I am sure this is a fairly low return for that kind of cash.

The only problem is — how do you spot the hits? Hollywood currently employs the smartest, best informed and most profit-focused people in an effort to exclusively make profitable movies and yet half of ohw movies lose money. In fact, their combined best efforts only produce a 3. Yes, but only by a very small margin. The average Metacritic score i. Similarly, IMDb audiences rated the profitable films an average of 6.

However, we can say that, yes, movies with the biggest marketing budgets do seem to gross the highest amounts at the box office. Added to this, studios are less likely to make missteps on their home turf as they can be on-hand to scrutinise everything to a greater extent.

Well, it depends on which part of the process you look at. Below you can see the origin of revenue and costs for the blockbusters in my dataset. As you can see, the majority of the money collected at the box office does indeed come from countries outside of the Difector and Canada.

However, studios spend a higher proportion of their marketing money in North America. This could be for a number of reasons including the higher cost of advertising in America, the temptation to spend more in the dieector which studio execs actually live in and because the US is often the first place a movie is released and the media muchh reporting on huge opening weekends and decrying massive flops. Together, they mean that only 12 of my 29 dirrector made money at the domestic box office, whereas 20 made money at the international box office.

Alongside this, the losses at the domestic theatrical market were much worse than internationally. So Hollywood looks to the international market with glee because….

Q4: Is there a rule of thumb for guessing which Hollywood blockbusters are in profit? They reached this conclusion by studying the full financial records of the movies they were involved with and also checking their hypothesis with independent professional film financiers.

Using this rule, I was able to correctly identify all of the profit-making films and correctly identify ten as loss-making, however, this system incorrectly marked five loss-making movies as being profitable. Not as reliable as one might have liked and way below the accuracy the BFI found when the rule is applied to smaller films but certainly interesting. So there you have it — a rather long sorry! The biggest question some readers may have at this stage is — how did he get this data?

I was also helped by a few well-placed friends in the industry who were able to fill in the blanks and confirm the veracity of some of the data points. I am completely confident moneu the information in this article is a true representation of how these Hollywood blockbusters make money.

The purpose of this site is educational and my sole intention is to help explain how our industry works. In the past, I have been contacted by lawyers for various companies, trying to prevent the sharing of key data points relating to their business.

So far, I have managed to avoid lawsuits and also to avoid having to take any articles down, but if I were to maake the full figures as mojey download or details of how to do the same piecing together I have then I suspect I would get the wrong kind of attention. So, if you want to know any more about these movies, please add your question in the comments. Very informative and great info mucn.

Thank you, Stephen for some scintillating reading. When is someone offering you a book deal? Great work Stephen — thank you. And related to this can you demystify the roles, contributions and compensation for these various kinds of producers?

Very helpful. Re the query on books sinceour volumes Global Hollywood and Global Hollywood 2 are more recent than the one. They are also available in Chinese, Turkish, and Spanish. Stephen, please, please put all of this marvellous stuff in a book. Thank you for this amazing work! Can you clarify here?

Thanks. Marketing and avertsing are not included, save maybe for the on-set photographer and a publicist who shows journalists around the set. This is particularly important for things like tax incentives, which almost never include publicity and distribution costs when calculating how big the budget is.

Both have a reasonable claim to be correct. The budget is a real document created in pre-production which covers the cost of physically making the film. Before internet streaming as we know it now, Pay Per View PPV was commonplace, in hotel rooms and on encrypted satellite and cable channels.

As VOD has grown up, the newer services have become their own new window but the old way of accounting for the older services were retained. So strictly, the idea of digital delivery of video on demand to the viewer appears within three windows! Just two questions about the average costs graph: 1. Instead of being included in costs? The opacity occurs for a number of reasons but most are to do with hiding embarrassing or unattractive practices, because they can and because there is no how much money does a movie director make from being doss.

Wow Stephen. Scary stuff. I want to break down the costs and show how they differ between products. Thank you Steve for your informative article.

The research that went into it must have been enormous as it covered so much of directoe movie business including distribution. I was really interested in the DVD sales figures and the overseas theatrical markets as the advertising would be. Thank you for your info!!! Michael L Edwards. Can you say the swing on that? Stephen, thank you for your informative detailed article. This is the sort of thing the internet would ideally be used for, instead of widespread trolling.

Keep up the good work. Thank you for the information and the analysis you have performed. The real numbers are never released, nor should. Nobody in the industry pays those numbers. At the end of the day, the important numbers and analyses come from what the windows revenue figures are and their relationships. As for profits… do magicians reveal their tricks?

Hey Adrian. Glad you found it useful. This allowed me to compare the true cost to that of the public figure in this case from Wikipedia. Hi Stephen, thanks for the excellent analysis. Do you have any data to support or contradict these numbers?

The Real Way Blockbusters Make Their Money — Cheddar Explains

Minimum Pay

Want to make money in Hollywood? But your chances are much better for finding work behind the camera, and even if these jobs don’t pay millions, you can still earn a decent living. So much do people working in the business really get paid? Producers behind monster box office hits can pull in tens of millions. The person whose job it is to hold the microphone above actors’ heads but out of the camera frame—a. But if you direct a big-time hit, your earnings can soar.

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