Sheinen said:
So I went to see 'Despicable Me' the other day in the local Odeon.
£26 for 2 tickets, plus £1 each for the 3D Glasses, £8.20 for a popcorn and Coke and £4 for the parking.
£39.20 for 2 people to see a kids film on a Tuesday night 3 weeks after premier.
I could buy the Blu-Ray for £13.97 in a couple of months and watch it as many times as I like. Hell I'd even have enough money left over to buy a 24pack of coke, 10lbs of popcorn and another film!
What the hell is making it so damn expensive?!
My theory: They're spending waaaay too much. Did The Last Airbender REALLY need to cost $280million? Think about the number for a minute... go through how many million dollars you'll ever have... 280...? I reckon a better film could have been made for far less, like £2million...feck-it, even that's ridiculous, £500,000 is more than you should really need to make a movie! I'll give the, by now, trite example of Paranormal Activity: $15,000 to make, earned $197mill gross.
They probably could have stood to have made 100 or so million less on that, tickets could have been £4 and they'd have made a killing!
My point here is that I'm not going back. It's a financially dumb move and frankly encourages more of this idiocy.
I'm treasurer of a small film-making group at university, our president does the subject as his university course, and our secretary (my flatmate) has a father who works in the industry writing music and also wants to work in the industry herself when she graduates. And she's worked on several projects already as work experience thanks to contacts made through her dad.
So I know what I'm talking about when I say that yes, films do really need to cost massive amounts in order to get the sort of content they do. To be good they don't need to cost much, but nevertheless big budget films have a massive budget for a very good reason. The thing is, the only films that have low budgets are those that don't use any sort of special effects, visual effects, expensive shots like helicopter shots (you wouldn't believe how much it costs to hire a chopper for a few minutes of aerial footage, especially when only a few seconds of that will ever make it past editing...), and so on. To make something like Avatar or, as you say, The Last Airbender, those films really do need massive budgets, otherwise they'd have to have absolutely no effects or anything like that (and for films that are based around the effects, such as Avatar, that basically defeats the whole purpose of the film).
As treasurer of our society I know how much money has to go into our projects, and for a short ten-minute film like the ones we plan of making over the next year, we're looking at a budget of around £200 per film. That will only cover catering for cast and crew, and costs of props and getting equipment to the location, which will usually be local anyway. The equipment hire itself is free as we get it through the university. If we didn't have that, we'd be looking at several thousand pounds to hire equipment, as that is extremely expensive, and of course getting it to the location would cost even more. We don't pay our actors, they're usually friends or members of the university theatre group, if we paid for actors that would be another load of money to spend. Overall, we'd be looking at upwards of £5000 to film about two hours of footage, that would be edited down to a ten minute film, if we didn't have the benefits we do of being part of a university that teaches film-making as one of it's degree options.
Now if you consider all that, some of our newer members want to do projects that include special effects. With the software we have available we could do basic things like adding rain or fire effects in editing, or stuff like that, but again that all costs money, for the software to do it. And we're doing it ourselves, it would be even more money to hire specialists to do it, as most films do (like when producers turn to groups like Weta Workshop or Lucasarts; the film-makers in charge of groups like that simply benefit because they have those resources at their disposal already, like George Lucas or Peter Jackson, if they didn't then they'd be paying a hell of a lot of money to get those effects).
Look at any independent film that was done on a low budget. You'll notice that almost none of them have any sort of special effects, or if they do they're all very basic stuff or visual effects that were achieved on-set using props and plenty of creativity, like in Paranormal Activity. Easy and cheap to produce. For anything big budget, therefore, there is plenty of reason for them to cost so much.
And finally, regarding your views on cinemas, I agree that cinemas are overpriced. I plan on seeing the latest Harry Potter film on release on Friday night, and I expect to pay roughly £15, just under, for my ticket and a coke and popcorn. Regular size, by the way, it's another 35p for large (not too bad, considering...). And I get a cheaper ticket because I'm a student, by the way. Thing is, most of that isn't for the film studios or anything. They get a percentage, but the real reason cinemas charge so much is because they have high costs, and they try to have a massive profit margin. They could afford to make prices maybe a pound or two cheaper, definitely. But not too much, as whether we like it or not cinemas are also a very competitive market and any lower prices would start to infringe on the costs to run each cinema, thus making the branches actually lose money and have to go out of business. Sadly, it's a very fine line, and for the upkeep and running of places to see films, as well as funding future films, we cinema-goers have to, by circumstance, pay through the teeth.
Of course, there's nothing stopping any of us from just buying drinks and snacks outside and smuggling them in, as I've often done. We just don't bother, so that's our own fault rather than anyone else's...
