|
|
Movies on DVD
 |
| Duplicity | Michael Rechtshaffen
October 2009
Movie Entertainment
Already feeling the chill of the credit freeze, Hollywood motion picture financing has been taking another hit from its once-golden cash cow – DVDs.
With DVD sales for the first half of 2009 down more than 13 per cent from the same period last year and penny-pinching consumers slow to make the transition to those pricier Blu-ray discs, Hollywood has been watching its once-mighty revenue stream shrink faster than some Alaskan glaciers.
DVD sales and rentals in 2008 totalled $21.6 billion, which sounds impressive but was already an eight per cent drop from 2007, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.
Studios were once able to rely on DVDs to account for about 40 per cent of a new release’s revenues. But today, falling sales figures, combined with an international credit crunch that has resulted in many banks backing out of the film-financing business, are forcing Hollywood to rethink not only how movies get made, but also what movies get made.
Even those financiers who have stayed in the game, like JP Morgan, have been weighing the risk factor. Where they used to pony up a big chunk of money for a studio’s entire slate of movies, they’re now looking at investments on a project-by-project basis.
That should mean business as usual for proven performers like a Batman or Transformers franchise, as well as low-budget horror films and comedies. Less likely to get a green light are those trickier-to-market, mid-range, adult-skewing dramas and political thrillers.
Think Oscar off-season fare like Duplicity and State of Play, both of which performed disappointingly despite high-profile casts, or those once ubiquitous woman-in-peril movies (paging Ashley Judd), which lately have been taking up residence on cable.
Meanwhile, the stars of those movies are also beginning to get a taste of the new reality as that status symbol known as the $20-million paycheque is also disappearing from the bargaining table.
Denzel Washington made that discovery when he had to substantially lower his usual quote before 20th Century Fox agreed to make his new runaway train thriller, Unstoppable.
When Julia Roberts reportedly refused to come down on her asking price for The Proposal, Disney’s reduced pay proposal was subsequently accepted by Sandra Bullock.
Even star filmmakers aren’t immune. After deliberating between several big-ticket projects, including the sci-fi epic Interstellar and an Abraham Lincoln biopic that would star Liam Neeson, Steven Spielberg announced that his next directorial effort would be a remake of a quaint 1950 Jimmy Stewart movie. In Harvey, Stewart played a mild mannered tippler whose best buddy was an invisible giant rabbit.
Assuming Spielberg’s planning on remaining faithful to the original, nothing keeps an effects budget down quite like the word “invisible.”
Just ask the enterprising guy who thought of cloaking that Klingon ship for Star Trek IV.
|
|
|
|