Continuing our look at comments made by Hollywood insider Edward jay Epstein at a recent seminar, let's search a little deeper into the state of Hollywood at this time.
One thing that Epstein does say about finding information on the motion picture industry is that it's so shrouded in secrecy that it's almost impossible to find out what's really happening behind the scenes. This includes all the six major studios that contol the industry: Disney (DIS) , Fox (NWS), Paramount (VIA), Sony (SNE), Universal and Warner Brothers (TWX).
Still, as far as the industry strategy goes, he said it's pretty much like this:
“You will always have movie theatres mainly because teenagers want to get out of the house, and they don’t have the money to go to see sports, or music. But the movie theatre has become a launching platform, a place where [studios] try to establish their movie so it is engrained in the public mind, so that the audience wants to see the movie on cable, DVD, video and pay-per-view.”
So when we talk about movie gross sales and rankings on the weekends, they have no basis in financial reality - as far as whether a show is really profitable or not. Just because we may see the amount of the budget contrasted against the gross ticket sales is meaningless; something I've known for a while.
The whole idea today is to make a movie and promote it so that the following offerings on DVD, video, cable and pay-per-view are able to take in the real money. The bottom line is that movies don't make money. The system and extraordinarily complex deals made to bring the film to production, makes it almost impossible to measure the success of a film standing on its own.
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