Guest Post: It’s Just Good Business

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**ORIGINAL ARTICLE FOLLOWS**

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I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who walks into Starbucks, looks over the menu, and then leaves because there’s nothing new to be had.  Even if they had their heart set on trying something “new” they probably walked out with the same cup of coffee 100 other people had ordered that day.  Starbucks knows what will sell and they will keep selling it until it doesnt sell anymore.  Based on the $13.29 billion revenue in 2012 and their steadily rising sales since, I think their strategy is working.

Why is it that we have such radically different expectations of Hollywood distribution companies?  Is it wrong to have those different expectations?

Sure, on the surface, Starbucks isn’t exactly a great comparison to the “Super Six” (Warner Brothers, Paramount, Fox, Sony/Viacom, Universal, and Disney), but let’s not mistake product differences for company differences.  Each of the Super Six has one goal: create profit.  It isn’t money grubbing; that’s a personal moral flaw.  A company cannot be accused of being – in and of itself – greedy.  It is just how business works.  Film distributors across the globe create a product in hopes that enough people will purchase it at a marked up price to not only cover the cost of production but also leave a little extra profit on top of expenses.  Hold on now, that’s just a long winded definition of a business…  That’s odd…

I would suggest that we expect more from the Super Six because when we purchase a product labeled “entertainment,” we can only hope that we are entertained.  The product of entertainment is not tangible and it has no physical use.  We cannot return it if it is defective and we cannot make do if it is less than we expected.  It simply is what it is and when we don’t get what we are promised we are left feeling cheated.

Before we judge them, let’s look at this dilemma from a studio’s perspective.  A studio turns out dozens of movies a year and purchases countless more from the independent sector.  They try to guess which ones will sell best and they invest more money into those productions.  But something terrible happens when you invest in the “John Carter” and “Adventures of Pluto Nash” films.  Films that were expected to be blockbusters have a hard time selling any tickets at all.  That means big losses financially for the studio.  Luckily their butts get saved by those silly, frivolous, un-special productions like the measly “Star Wars” franchise.  The dark-horse films bring in massive profits time and time again.  The result is that studios are very, very scared to guess at what is worth investing in.

How do you turn this utter lack of predictability into a feasible means of generating profit?  By using what has been mercilessly dubbed as a money train.  Iron Man boomed?  Make another.  And another and another and another until people stop buying tickets.  Then move on.  (People still haven’t stopped buying those tickets.)  Think success is broader than just that series?  Find another series of the same thing cough Guardians of the Galaxy cough.  People whine and complain about how Pirates of the Caribbean was ruined by the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th installments of the story.  In reality, Dead Man’s Chest and On Stranger Tides grossed over $1 billion each in the worldwide box office.  From Disney’s standpoint, those films were staggeringly successful.  Curse of the Black Pearl is by far the best film even in my own opinion, but it generated the lowest profit worldwide out of all 4 films so far.  Each film has made more money than the first.  In business terms, that means keep going.

Perhaps it is still fair to judge entertainment companies on a different plane than other businesses.  I believe that the motion picture industry is simply an industry and profit is objective number one.  I also don’t think that’s such a bad thing.  If you make billions of dollars because hundreds of millions of people bought your product, you deserve every penny.  Competition in every sector is too fierce these days to think any less.

We might be getting tired of the same old movies.  We might be exhausted with sequel after sequel and rebooted reboots but until the moviegoing public stops buying tickets, those movies will keep coming.

And yet, for a select few, movies are your lover, your mistress, or your child.  Profit is still priority number one, but the definition of profit changes just a little:

“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”
– Walt Disney

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Thank you for visiting Mr. and Mrs. at the Movies! We have discontinued this blog and have migrated over to our brand new site, Tarpley Movie Talk. If you would like more discussion of movie news, think pieces on hollywood trends and straight-forward film reviews. Please click on over to the new site and check it out.

You can also follow the blog on Facebook and follow Josh Tarpley on Twitter.