Skyfall and Jurassic World were early adopters of these metallic dragonflies; Time estimated in 2018 that the daily cost of using a drone in a film stood at between $4,500 and $13,000, compared to $20,000 to $40,000 for a helicopter. Now the airborne images seen in every YouTube travel video risk creating a homogenous style of cinematography. If any amateur can achieve that effect, how will movies set themselves apart?
Monday, August 31, 2020
CONVERGENCE drones replacing helicopter shots
See this article about Les Miserables (urban French thriller/drama, NOT the WT adaptation...).
Monday, August 24, 2020
Friday, August 21, 2020
WORKING TITLE The High Note 2020
8m trailer views just on the Focus Features channel alone by 26.8.20:
- $20m production; limited cinema release - $19.99 PVOD (NBCU keep higher % than box office)
- Co-production: WT/Perfect World - a Chinese co
- Leads aren't A-listers yet but features Ice Cube as antagonist
- Unfortunate hero's journey? White Dakota Johnson seeks to push out Ice Cube
- Zeitgeist/generic: riding on success of many recent music biz hits (Yesterday! A Star is Born)
- Real-world singer (like Yesterday) used on OST; vinyl release
- Feelgood ending/American dream (Billy Elliot...) - note the prominent Vogue quote: "perfect entertainment"
Scroll to the bottom for some sample paragraphs employing a range of terminology ... which will help with the crossword I've done on this film...
LINKS:
INDIEWIRE ANALYSE PVOD ECONOMICS
BOXOFFICEMOJO
WIKI
Official Website
WT page
Thursday, August 13, 2020
A-LIST 20 million fees often from Netflix, The Rock biggest star
I've frequently cited the rough figure of $20m to hire a true A-lister to star in a movie, and figures just released bear this out. Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds and Adam Wahlberg all hit this mark recently.
The big surprise comes from who's paying these fees - yes, Disney's name pops up but it's Netflix which is responsible for around 25% of the fees recorded in the annual Forbes report.
Note that they issue separate reports, a week apart, for male and female stars. This article therefore only considers the male stars.
The Adam Sandler case shows the rise of the exclusive production contract too - a throwback to the era when studios controlled stars under exclusive contracts, but with the power reversed. Also comparable with the Vegas residencies by the likes of Britney Spears in the music industry.
$250m for four Adam Sandler movies, in a world where Ed Sheeran is of equivalent standing in the music industry - we live in truly dark times. But I commend reading this short article to grow your grasp of the film biz and it's warped star economics!
Monday, August 10, 2020
WORKING TITLE Yesterday 2019 10m on Beatles rights alone
BASICS:
BOX OFFICE + HOME MEDIA REVENUE $26m budget
$73m USA, RoW $80m (incl UK $18m), total $153m. 3rd biggest hit on its release in the US, 2nd in the UK (Toy Story 4 the tentpole ahead in both territories).
It added $80m in DVD, TV + streaming (home media) ... so far.
LEGENDARY/MARKETABLE writer and director: Richard Curtis, Danny Boyle. Its actually based on a 2012 screenplay by Jack Barth, a 1st-time writer! But Curtis took all the credit (and money for that)
MUSIC STAR CAMEO PUSHED IN TRAILER:
Ed Sheeran had an important role (Coldplay's Chris Martin turned it down)
NOTABLE PRODUCTION COSTS, MARKETING SPEND...RELEASE STRATEGY:
$10m on getting rights to Beatles songs from Apple/Sony.
$75m marketing spend. Lucked into a lucrative summer holiday release to avoid a rights case with Paul McCartney (music rights reverting). See the explanation of how writer etc get ripped off on net points.
NARRATIVE TWEAK AFTER TEST SCREENING:
Love triangle plot was cut with the other love interest after hostile test audience responses (this made Patel less sympathetic)
TYPICAL LOW AGE RATING:
PG-13; BBFC 12 ('infrequent strong language, drug references, moderate sex references'). Summer holidays release.
Wiki snippet on the release date strategy - put into the more lucrative, high profile summer season to avoid paying out to Beatle Paul McCartney ...
Yesterday was initially set for a September 2019 release, but was moved up to 28 June 2019, largely as a result of a copyright suit filed by Paul McCartney. The rights to some of the earlier Beatles songs used in the film would revert to McCartney in the autumn of 2019, and Sony Music wanted to get ahead of it.
The first official trailer of the film was released on 12 February 2019. The film had its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on 4 May 2019
It would be the 3rd biggest hit on its release in the US, and 2nd in the UK (Toy Story 4 the tentpole ahead in both territories).
From the Wiki (based on the Deadline article linked below):
As of May 2020, it has been estimated that the film will have generated $68 million in global television revenue, in addition to $10.4 million in net revenue for home video and streaming. This adds up to a total estimated home media revenue of $78.4 million.
DEADLINE ANALYSIS: How studios appear to rip off cast/crew with NET points
Lot of good financial insight - the budget is $26m, but for those seeking a share of profits its listed as $41m ... the difference is the large ($15m!!) tax credit from the UK government, which remains counted as a cost for calculating net profits.
To put even a mid-budget WT film into perspective, the $10m they spent to get rights to use some Beatles songs is more than the full budget of almost all non-WT UK film company productions in any year.
$4m was spent on prints; $23m on distribution fees, and a whopping $75m on marketing spend.
Indiewire noted:
In the end, Boyle used 17 Beatles songs — and contracted with Apple for rights to use 15-18, without having to specify which ones.
BOX OFFICE SUMMARY (BoM)
Until you begin to consider the hidden costs, it looks really good...
Of the $26m budget a $73m USA take and $80 RoW (rest of the world) for a $153m total. Peaked at 2,755 theaters in the US, a sizeable but not top line hit.
Released June 28th (USA), running to Sept 5th, so out for the summer holiday months.
The movie is marketed, and credited, as written by Richard Curtis, whose name sells given his links to multiple major rom-coms with WT. However, the original screenplay dates to 2012, and, as Uproxx note, the writer Jack Barth is furious at how Curtis and WT squeezed him out, ensuring he didn't profit from this major hit.
his script, Cover Version, was acquired by Working Title Films and eventually became Yesterday, from legendary British filmmakers Richard Curtis (Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary) and Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire, Steve Jobs, 28 Days Later).
“I wrote the first treatment in 2012 and in 2013 and I gave it to my agent. She gave it to a producer named Matt Wilkinson,” Barth says, of his script’s initial journey. “Matt tried to get it going as a project that we would fund for maybe $10 million, a low budget film, plus whatever it cost to clear the Beatles rights, which would’ve been a lot. [Wilkinson] got a guy named Nick Angel at Working Title, who’s a professional music clearance guy, working on the Beatles clearances. In the course of doing that, years later, he mentioned it to Richard Curtis because they’re friendly. Richard said, ‘That’s a great idea, I want to do it’ because he had a deal with Working Title/Universal to make a couple of films. He wanted [Cover Version] to be one of the films that he made.”
The article picks up on the theme of net profit points, quoting an entertainment lawyer as saying that in 28 years of working he only knew of 3 movies to show a net profit (ie, after all expenses are deducted). Net points are essentially worthless. Gross points (which disregard expenses), can be lucrative. But Barth just wasn't considered beneficial to the marketing, and so the credit all went to Curtis.
“I contacted Universal Publicity and said, ‘Look, I’ve done some research and I don’t think there’s ever been a screenwriter who sold his first screenplay at my age,'” Barth says. “It’s an interesting angle, almost inspirational. I think it’s a great story. But Universal didn’t want it, they kind of had their marching orders — that it was ‘Richard Curtis and Danny Boyle, two great British filmmakers working together at last.’ I understand that in terms of cleaning up the marketing.”
THE ROLE OF TEST SCREENINGS
Great example here - a character and sub-plot (another relationship for the protagonist) were cut as test screenings showed the audience felt this made Patel a less sympathetic lead. (Cinemablend)
there was one subplot containing an entire character who was cut from the film, despite staying in Richard Curtis’ script and even remaining in the trailer for Yesterday’s theatrical release. It’s her picture you see at the very head of this story, and her name is Roxanne, played by Blade Runner 2049’s Ana De Armas..
Originally, Roxanne would have been the third point of the typical love triangle you’d see in a romantic comedy like Yesterday, coming between the romance of Lily James’ Ellie and Himesh Patel’s Jack Malik
INDIE NETFLIX REALITY upfront fee for loss of rights. Michaela Cole's story
POINTS, REFLECTIONS FROM VULTURE'S* FEATURE ON WRITER/ACTOR/FILMMAKER/PRODUCER MICHAELA COLE (*RE-PRINT from NEW YORK MAGAZINE)
It tackles in depth the angst and challenges of writing, creative projects and negotiating seeing these get to an audience, all within a detailed look at how race and class operate to set limits.
It's an account of a woman prepared to ask uncomfortable questions to challenge the but this is just how it's done mode who went on to become the first woman of colour to give the prestigious annual MacTaggart lecture (in Edinburgh to a who's who of the media industries) - previous alumni include the likes of James Murdoch.
So - well worth the longer read, but here's a particularly focused section on her experience dealing with film rights and fees, plus creative control. Given their amazing back catalogue, I'd say be grateful that the likes of Warp routinely co-produce with BBC/Film4 and only sell on ancillary rights later to, typically, a mix of streaming outlets.
-----
The MacTaggart Lecture became a blueprint for how she went on to conduct business. This time around, she wanted transparency from her collaborators. She learned the power of saying no. She declined to do a third season of Chewing Gum and an offer to have a production company under the now-defunct Retort. (“Something about it didn’t feel clean.”) When she first began pitching the concept for I May Destroy You in spring 2017, Netflix offered her $1 million upfront — $1 million! But when she learned they wouldn’t allow her to retain any percentage of the copyright, she said no. No amount was worth that. She fired CAA, her agency in the U.S., too, when it tried to push her to take the deal after she learned it would be making an undisclosed amount on the back end. Throughout the fallout with Netflix and CAA, Coel asked questions relentlessly. She is eager, almost giddy, to say she doesn’t know something (even if she may have an inkling) because of the way it forces someone else to explain it to her. She has discovered that the explanation is where people begin to falter and the fissures of conventional wisdom crack wider. It may be business as usual, but is it right? Is it good?
Coel recalls one clarifying moment when she spoke with a senior-level development executive at Netflix and asked if she could retain at least 5 percent of her rights. “There was just silence on the phone,” she says. “And she said, ‘It’s not how we do things here. Nobody does that, it’s not a big deal.’ I said, ‘If it’s not a big deal, then I’d really like to have 5 percent of my rights.’ ” Silence. She bargained down to 2 percent, one percent, and finally 0.5 percent. The woman said she’d have to run it up the chain. Then she paused and said, “Michaela? I just want you to know I’m really proud of you. You’re doing the right thing.” And she hung up.
“I remember thinking, I’ve been going down rabbit holes in my head, like people thinking I’m paranoid, I’m acting sketchy, I’m killing off all my agents,” Coel says. “And then she said those words to me, and I finally realized — I’m not crazy. This is crazy.”
In fall 2017, she pitched I May Destroy You to Wenger at the BBC, and he replied with an email the next day saying she would have everything she wanted: a seat at the table on the production side, full creative control, and the rights to the work. (HBO came on as a co-producer during development.) Coel was stunned. “I’d been so untrustworthy of the industry that I looked at the email and I thought, I need a day. I wasn’t happy,” she says. She took a beat. Then she went with it. “It’s an amazing email.”
Wednesday, August 05, 2020
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