How to make money in movie production

Unless movies make money, the money to make movies would dry up pretty quickly. But where does this money come from? It comes, almost entirely, from you and me and people like us. The real question should be how does this money get from our back pockets and into the coffers of the big movie studios. How to make money in movie production of the pathways are incredibly obvious, some perhaps a little less so. I had just started working in a cinema when Jurassic Park was released. We had over comfy chairs in that cinema, and there was still a scramble for the best ones. It almost makes me feel nostalgic to think of the fuss and fluster. The last time I went to the opening night of a new film and my screening prkduction packed full was Casino Royale, I think, and that was in one of those little box-rooms that make maake multiplexes .

“We’re going to need a bigger boat”

Movie business seems to be glamorous and dream world for us sitting here. Seeing our favorite stars and celebrity walking over the red carpet attending premiers and award functions like the iifa, Oscar etc. Every month with a new big movie launching and getting success. All the news and social media will come up with the facts and figures calculating that movie profit. But do you know what formula they use to calculate the actual profit gained by a movie? They generally target on the total budget of the movie and total net collection giving out the total profit but it is not exactly how do movies make money. When we delve into it further on how movie earn money is far more then we assume. People are cautious to know that how movies make money so they assume such approaches for their understanding. But mere, calculating the collections and budget is not enough to give the exact amount of earned money by a film. Now producers are looking for more income sources and revenue finding new technique for how movies producers make money without depending on the success of the film. Now with the new business model of How do movie makers make money. The producers and filmmakers are avoiding the risk involved with the success of the film.

What’s the average cost of making and selling a Hollywood blockbuster?

Now with the new business model entertainment industries has showered with a lot more funding and investors options that were never seen before, because it has reduced the failure risk factor to near zero. It allows producers to pay back their loans to banks and investors prior to the film release as producer sells rights to distributors and promotion partners of the film. So this is how do cinemas make money prior to its release. When a movie is made it is the producer who tackles the expense of the movie on his shoulder including payment of the cast and crew, promotion expenses, and outdoor shooting expense as well as charges of the studios. This is all about how much producers spend on a film. Now, coming back to how do filmmakers make money? There are many ways on how movie producers make money?

Rise Above The Noise

Download my filmmaker checklist so you can take action! The other night I puked a little in my mouth. It was just a little puke. That sort of crap is responsible for creating a horrible epidemic among indie filmmakers. The epidemic is this: Most filmmakers never take time to learn how to make money in filmmaking! You may have thought about making money in filmmaking. But the problem is, there are a TON of poorly produced backyard indies flooding the market each year. This makes it hard to find your movie. And this means you can no longer simply make a movie and wait.

How To Make Money In Filmmaking

So if I can do it you can too. In this podcast episode, I go into details on all the moneymaking ideas filmmakers can do to make money. I give examples, tell stories and show you how I and other filmmakers make money today. Here are a few things I go over in the episode. But how does a full-time filmmaker make a living? Or post to your blog and anywhere else you feel it would be a good fit.

The Actual Ways Through Which Movie Industry Makes Money!

Celebrities and producers glide down red carpets, clutch their Oscars and vacation in St. Name required. At one point, DVD sales accounted for a majority of movie earnings, and for years studios have been working to close the large gap between […]. InVOD consumers had to wait an average of 74 days after the DVD release but by this had fallen to just 14 days. Sometimes, a film can do well in its first weekend and then stumble in later weekends. Stephen Follows May 29, at pm. Local films rarely get an extra buzz after the initial release event. Thank you for the information and the analysis you have performed. This was fantastic and certainly the most systematic treatment of any small class of pictures I have ever seen. Stephen Follows July 13, at am. Adrian Bertino-Clarke December 8, at am. As such, international box office revenue is much less reliable than in North America. Many contracts are intended to help a theater hedge against films that flop at the box office by giving theaters a larger cut of ticket sales for such films, so a deal may have the studio getting a smaller percentage of a poorly performing film and a larger percentage of a hit film’s .

How to Make Money as a Filmmaker

This is an article I have wanted to research and write for a long, long time. I finally had a moment to sit down and crunch the numbers — I hope it helps in the understanding of Hollywood economics.

Almost omvie long as there have been movies, Hollywood has relied on huge-scale productions to bring in the big bucks. The Extra-Terrestrial As the films have grown, so too have the spoils on offer. The starting point for working out the final costs of releasing a movie is ot look at how much it cost the studio to shoot the film i.

This includes…. Budgets have been rising in recent decades, well above inflation. In the following ten years this rose to The information available online is normally a mix of true figures which have leaked and educated guesses by industry experts.

The studios often try to hide the true cost of a movie, in order to make themselves seem thriftier, smarter or more in control than they actually are. I performed a quick check for the 29 blockbusters I have inside omvie on compared with their budgets listed on Wikipedia. Some of the other costs involved in making and releasing a film include…. To give you a little more detail and context, below are some notes on each of the main cost areas….

Judging the correct number of prints and units to manufacture is a key part of the planning done by the studios. If they order too prdouction then cinemas and stores will have to turn away kn in the all-important first few weeks of release. If they over-order then their costs increase and they are left with annoyed cinema owners and large quantities of unsold units.

Giving these people a share of the income is a good way for the studio to hedge against poor box office performance and it also defers the moment they have to pay up. On the flipside, lroduction have got rather good at using creative accounting techniques to show that they made a loss on paper in order to get out of paying such fees. Fortunately, Hollywood is rather good at squeezing every penny out of a movie, ensuring that the target customer is given many chances to pay to see it.

Movies may movje in cinemas but they are far from the only place they earn money. Each stage at which a movie reaches a new type of platform i. Of the 29 Hollywood blockbuster movies I studied, 14 generated a profit and 15 lost money.

Note: The following discussion of profit uses this formula: all revenue received by the studios from a particular movie minus all costs they internally attribute to that production. The producttion movies profuction my dataset i. Would you have made a smart investment? And I am go this is a fairly low how to make money in movie production for that kind of cash. The only problem is — how do you spot the hits? Hollywood currently employs the smartest, best informed and most profit-focused people in an effort to exclusively make profitable movies and yet half of their movies lose money.

In fact, their combined best efforts only produce a 3. Yes, but only by a very small margin. The average Metacritic score i.

Similarly, IMDb audiences rated the profitable films an average of 6. Ohw, we can say that, yes, movies with the biggest marketing budgets do seem to gross the highest amounts at the box office. Added makee this, studios are less likely to make missteps on their home turf as they can be on-hand to scrutinise everything to a greater extent.

Well, it depends on which part of the process you look at. Below you can see the origin of revenue and costs for the blockbusters in my dataset. As you can see, the majority of the money collected at the box office does indeed come from countries outside of the US and Canada. However, studios spend a moviie proportion of their marketing money in North America. This could be for a number of reasons including the higher cost of advertising in America, the temptation to spend more in the country mvie studio execs actually live in and because the US is often the first place a movie is released and the media enjoy reporting on huge opening weekends and decrying massive flops.

Together, they mean that only 12 of my 29 movies made money at the domestic box office, whereas 20 made money at the international box office. Alongside this, the losses at the moviee theatrical market were much worse than internationally. So Hollywood looks to the international market with glee because…. Lroduction Is there a rule of thumb for guessing which Hollywood blockbusters are in profit?

They reached this conclusion by studying the full financial records of the movies they were involved with and also checking their hypothesis with independent professional film financiers. Using this rule, I was able to correctly identify all of the profit-making movoe and correctly identify ten as loss-making, however, this system incorrectly marked five loss-making movies as being profitable.

Not as reliable as mvie might have liked and way below the accuracy the BFI found when the rule is applied to smaller films but certainly interesting. So there you have it — a rather long sorry!

The biggest question some readers may have at this stage is — how did he get this data? I was also helped by a few well-placed friends in the industry who were able to fill in the blanks and confirm the veracity of some of the data points. I am completely confident that the information in this article is a true representation of pfoduction these Hollywood blockbusters make money. The purpose of this site is educational and my sole intention is to help explain how our industry works.

In the past, I have been contacted by lawyers for various companies, trying moviie prevent the sharing of key data points relating to their business. So far, I have managed to avoid lawsuits and also to avoid having to take any articles down, but if I were to offer the full figures as a download or details of how to do the same piecing together I have then I suspect I would get the wrong kind of attention.

So, if you want to know im more about these movies, please add your question in the productioh. Very informative and great info as. Thank you, Stephen for some scintillating reading. When is someone offering you a book deal? Great work Stephen — thank you. And related to this can you demystify the roles, contributions and produftion for these various kinds of producers? Very helpful. Re the query on books sinceour volumes Global Hollywood and Global Hollywood 2 are more recent than the one.

They are also available in Chinese, Turkish, and Spanish. Stephen, please, please put all of this marvellous stuff in a book. Thank you for this amazing work! Can you clarify here? Thanks. Marketing and avertsing are not included, save maybe for the on-set photographer and a publicist who shows journalists around the set. This is particularly important for things like tax incentives, which almost never include publicity and distribution costs when calculating how big the budget is. Both have a reasonable claim to be correct.

The budget is a real document created in pre-production which covers the cost of physically making the film. Before internet streaming as we know it now, Pay Per View PPV was commonplace, in hotel rooms and on encrypted satellite and cable channels. As VOD has grown up, the newer services have become their own new window but the old way of accounting for the older services were retained.

So strictly, the idea of digital delivery of video on demand maje the viewer appears within three windows! Just two questions about the average costs graph: 1. Instead of being included in costs? The opacity movje for a number of reasons but most are to do with hiding embarrassing or unattractive practices, because they can and because there is no benefit from being open.

Wow Stephen. Scary stuff. I want to prkduction down the costs and show how they differ between products. Thank you Steve for your informative article. The research that went into it must have been enormous as it covered so much of the movie business including distribution. I was really interested in the DVD sales figures and the overseas theatrical markets as the advertising would be.

Thank you for mae info!!! Michael L Edwards. Can you say the swing on that? Stephen, thank you for your informative detailed article. This is the sort of thing the internet would ideally be used for, instead moive widespread trolling. Keep up the good work. Thank you for the information and the analysis you have performed. The real numbers are never released, nor should. Nobody in the industry pays those numbers. At the end of the day, the important numbers and analyses come from move the windows revenue figures are and their relationships.

As for profits… do magicians reveal their tricks? Hey Adrian. Glad you found it useful. This allowed me to mmoney the true cost to that of the public figure in this case from Wikipedia. Hi Stephen, thanks for the excellent produxtion.

Do you have any data to support or contradict these numbers?

Even the most famous directors in Hollywood first made their money outside of the industry. So try not to get frustrated if your film career isn’t quite paying the bills just. The good news is, there are plenty of ways now to make money as a filmmaker, without having to leave the industry. As a filmmaker, chances are you learned more than a handful of skills that are valuable to people even outside the world of narrative filmmaking.

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So whether you use your filmmaking skills to build an audience that pays to support you, or you go freelance and rent out how to make money in movie production skills to commercial or private clients, there are many ways to make money with your filmmaking creativity. Get a distribution deal for your film 2. Self-distribute your films 3. Shoot corporate training videos 4. Make commercials 5. Teach filmmaking 7. Edit someone else’s film 8. Become a content creator on YouTube 9. Put your films out for free and ask for money through Patreon Embed your films on your own website and run Google Adsense ads Edit sports highlights reels