Laughing Owl Productions

Following on from my last post Are Stars in Movies Really Worth It, the Independent has an interesting autopsy on the split between Paramount and Tom Cruise. In short: you have to read the numbers, and the numbers show that Cruise was an expensive overhead, despite the billions of dollars his films have brought the company over the years. From the point of view of what he cost and what his potential was, he’d jumped the shark.

Tom Cruise is 44 years old…. In the history of Hollywood box office very few people - men or women - have had their best days still to come at the age of 44.

And

This is not to knock Tom Cruise. The wonder is that his miracle has lasted so long. And he has been very good for the movie business: his pictures have grossed somewhere in the region of $20billion. Paramount and Viacom have taken a good deal of that income, and been happy to do so. But they are behaving like businessmen in saying this could be the moment to cut and run.

A very interesting look at the money and numbers behind one of the biggest stars ever.

Via Screen Hub.

The NYT has an article on the economics of stars. A Big Star May Not a Profitable Movie Make argues that having stars in a film doesn’t really make that big of a difference in the end, and certainly not enough to justify the huge fees.

If you ask economists and other academics that study the movie industry, [Viacom’s] decision was, in financial terms, spot on. The best reason to get rid of Mr. Cruise or, for that matter, Mel Gibson, or Lindsay Lohan, is not their occasional aberrant behavior. They, like most marquee names in Hollywood, are simply not worth the expense.

And

“There is no statistical correlation between stars and success,” said S. Abraham Ravid, a professor of economics and finance at Rutgers University, who, in a 1999 study of almost 200 films released between 1991 and 1993, found that once one considered other factors influencing the success of a film, a star had no impact on its rate of return. Employing a star had virtually no discernible impact on the box office itself.

And

“Movies with stars are successful not because of the star, but because the star chooses projects that people tend to like,” said Arthur S. De Vany, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of California, Irvine, who has written extensively about the economics of moviemaking. “It’s a movie that makes a star.”

In other words, while a person will go to a Bruce Springsteen concert because the artist is, indeed, Bruce Springsteen, the success of “The Matrix” had to do with many things other than its star, Keanu Reeves.

This is particularly interesting to those of us trying to get films off the ground, especially without stars. We’re forever being told, mainly by people with money, that our movies need the big names. Despite the fact that many, many successful films have unknowns (”Whale Rider”, “Ten Canoes”, and “What the Bleep” spring to mind), investors seem to like the security blanket of a star. Maybe they need to rethink that one.
Via Boing Boing.