How much money do movie makers make

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 eo soar. The job of a grip is to build and oversee all the equipment needed to support cameras and lighting, including dollies, tripods, cranes, and. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person’s head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Login Subscribe. My Account.

“We’re going to need a bigger boat”

Movie business seems to be glamorous and dream world for us sitting here. Seeing our favorite stars and celebrity walking over the red carpet attending premiers and award functions like the iifa, Oscar etc. Every month with a new big movie launching and getting success. All the news and social media will come up with the facts and figures calculating that movie profit. But do you know what formula they use to calculate the actual profit gained by a movie? They generally target on the total budget of the movie and total net collection giving out the total profit but it is not exactly how do movies make money. When we delve into it further on how movie earn money is far more then we assume. People are cautious to know that how movies make money so they assume such approaches for their understanding. But mere, calculating the collections and budget is not enough to give the exact amount of earned money by a film.

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

Now producers are looking for more income sources and revenue finding new technique for how movies producers make money without depending on the success of the film. Now with the new business model of How do movie makers make money. The producers and filmmakers are avoiding the risk involved with the success of the film. Now with the new business model entertainment industries has showered with a lot more funding and investors options that were never seen before, because it has reduced the failure risk factor to near zero. It allows producers to pay back their loans to banks and investors prior to the film release as producer sells rights to distributors and promotion partners of the film. So this is how do cinemas make money prior to its release. When a movie is made it is the producer who tackles the expense of the movie on his shoulder including payment of the cast and crew, promotion expenses, and outdoor shooting expense as well as charges of the studios.

The Actual Ways Through Which Movie Industry Makes Money!

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 can. 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 actresses. Major studios and indie filmmakers alike now spend much of their days looking for 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 seems. Romantic comedies or some children’s films need to promote themselves via TV commercials and media advertisements, and those costs add up quickly. For any type of film, whether a blockbuster or an indie production, things like tax incentives and revenues from product placements can help pay down the budget. If they’re given an incentive to shoot a film in Canada or Louisiana or Georgia, producers will usually hustle to do so. Still, there are a few tried and true ways that films can attempt to make money. The percentage of revenues an exhibitor gets depends on the contract for each film.

Income Range

He’s not wrong ; industry-wide, we are struggling to finance our movies, let alone make ends meet in a market that is constantly in flux. So, what is a filmmaker to do? Zacuto ‘s five-part series has some answers. Watch all five videos and see below for the most important takeaways. The key to being marketable as a filmmaker, says Weiss, is to become a jack of all trades.

I was really interested in the DVD sales figures and the overseas theatrical markets as the advertising would be less. So the data may be skewed. For the longer answer, read on. You might have noticed that studios are pushing a lot harder lately to make a film as big a hit as possible in its opening weekend. 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. Stephen Follows January 29, at pm. 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. Collecting revenues abroad is a trickier proposition since the dollar fluctuates against foreign currencies. Both have a reasonable claim to be correct. Name required.

“We’re going to need a bigger boat”

Me too! You can read more about the enormous growth in the movie business in China here stephenfollows. Michael L Edwards Reply. It can be counted as either there is much debate but often the quoted budget mxke has already taken this dp account. Celebrities and producers glide down red carpets, clutch their Oscars and vacation in St. Glad you found it useful. Thank you for your info!!! Does this sort of thing effect the overall profitability of movies or just some areas like merchandising. I struggle to imagine a movie tripling production costs at the global box office and still losing money… Reply. Stephen Follows July 1, at am. And a similar thing happened with the previous Narnia movie, Prince Caspian.

1. Be a ‘predator’

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 shoot the film i. This includes…. Budgets have been rising in recent decades, well above inflation. In the following ten years this rose to 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 I studied, 14 generated a 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 their 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 US 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 country which studio execs actually live in and because the US is often the first place a movie is released and the media enjoy reporting on huge opening weekends and decrying massive flops.

Together, they mean that only 12 of my 29 movies 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 that 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 offer the full figures as a 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 as. 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 benefit from being open.

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 the 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?

This how much money do movie makers make 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 shoot the film i.

Average and Median Income

This includes…. Budgets have been rising in recent decades, well above inflation. In the following ten years this rose to 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 muvh 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 makera in making and hwo 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.