I was remarking to friends recently on the epic disaster of Disney's The Acolyte, and it occurred to me to look something up.
The Acolyte's budget (in 2024 dollars, I presume for this post) is reported to be $180 million.
So I looked up the budget for the original 1977 Star Wars film, without which the current show would not exist. It seems to have had a production budget of $11 million. If we use the handy-dandy US Inflation Calculator, that makes the budget $56,914,653.47 in 2024 dollars. Call it $57 million.
Wait, what? How is that possible, when even The Fall Guy, a movie with lots of stunts, but no space battles, cost $130 million?
That, my friends, is why Hollywood is doomed.
The difference is possible for too many reasons to list, but mention a few.
- Unions. Every union wants a piece of the pie, going and coming, and they keep forcing costs up. To even join the Screen Actors' Guild you had to have three or four screen credits and then pay close to ten thousand dollars for membership, and that's the last I know of, nearly fifteen years go. If SAG is gouging its new recruits, do you really think they're not adding every fee they can to studio compliance contracts?
- Insurance. This one is a broad umbrella, but more and more things need to be insured one way or another, and the organizations providing it charge ever more money. On the set of Heaven's Gate, supposedly a horse was killed, and that got widely reported. Ever since then, studios have demanded the ASPCA have someone on set to ensure they can claim "no animals were harmed during the making of this film". That got so insane that on the set of The Shawshank Redemption less than fifteen years later, director Frank Darabont had to find a dead meal worm for a crow to be fed on camera, because the ASPCA rep said if a live one was used, the seal would be revoked.
- Regulations. Hollywood is in California. Do you honestly think that regulations on the industry do not grow like kudzu every year?
- The bureaucratization of everything in Hollywood. The more button-pushers and form-fillers that have to be paid, the higher budgets have to go.
- CGI. Special effects made in the computer were supposed to reduce costs and production times, but that's not how it has worked in practice. To the point that CGI companies won't work with Disney, because Disney stiffs them to try to keep costs down.
- Graft. "Hollywood accounting" has been a joke since forever, but it's worse now than it ever has been. People who can line their pockets, are.
- Reputation. Hollywood executives stopped being people who cared about movies as movies, and got replaced with MBAs who view movies as widgets. One of the side-effects of this disconnect from the art form has been a constant game of one-upmanship in terms of budgets the execs can command. The higher the budget, the greater the prestige. There was a movie in the early 2000s that had a reported budget that was (and is) a flat-out lie, inflated by a factor of ten, because its making was so economical that it cost the studio a pittance. But reputations had to be preserved, so its reported budget was inflated, and remains its "official" budget to this day. More recently, it seems that only actual money thrown away means anything.
The fact that everything costs so damn much is part of why Hollywood is dying and needs to. This is good. It means that true independent cinema can arise.
I would, perhaps, lament the loss of theaters, which seems inevitable. However, the centralized theatrical chains are a part of the problem, more than they will accept. They want endless megabudget blockbusters taking up thousands of screens across the country. Why? Because if the blockbusters are hits, they win (though not much), and if they bomb, it's the studios' fault.
When there were independent movie theaters, drive-ins and otherwise, independent producers could put out films in competition with the studios. All that had to happen was to convince some of the owners to rent a film for a week or three. Now, there are, what? Three chains? Four? No independent programming there, only top-down executive decisions that, weirdly, almost always seem to favor studio crap.
Having too much money allows for laziness, what Robert Rodriguez terms "the money hose". Is there a problem during production? Turn the money hose on it! No creativity needed!
But when you have no money, you have to get creative. Which indie cinema will eventually learn. One hopes.