Question: Does a movie need to make 2.5x its budget in order to break even?

Question for the Emperor: Does a movie need to make 2.5x its budget in order to break even?


So marketing isn’t always all that big and doesn’t always scale. I mean, the average movie is probably paying 25 million in marketing, with the bigger going up to 40 million. The smaller movies may only pay 10 million or so. The blockbusters might hit around $100 million in marketing costs (or $150 for the mega blockbusters).

The real costs go to theaters and distribution (40-45% of gross).


2.5 times the production costs sounds about right, but the production costs and marketing costs are variable, and the distribution/theater costs are almost directly related to the gross. Some smaller movies might be closer to 2.1 times, while some extreme examples probably get even higher. Let’s look at an extreme example…




Sony’s Spider-Man 3 (effects by Sony Imageworks)



Production Budget: $258 million

Marketing Costs: about $150 million
http://www.moviemarketingmadness.com/blog/2007/05/01/movie-marketing-madness-spider-man-3/

Gross Worldwide Income: $890,871,626

Theater/Distribution Costs (based on 45%): $400,892,231

Total costs (Budget, Marketing, and Theater/Distribution): $808,892,231

2.5 x it’s Production Budget: $645 million

Total Box Office Profit (guesstimation): $82 million


So Spider-Man 3 actually had total costs that were about 3.1 times the original production budget.



So why do they make these films then?

- Promotions
- Toys
- Merchandise
- DVDs


Sometimes movies are expected to lose at the box office and gain all their profit from DVD sales. For example, Harold and Kumar was pitched as a movie that would break even in the box office and then make strong profits on DVD (that system worked so well that the sequel just came out; they wanted to do it again). Austin Powers made $67 million in the box office, and then after a strong DVD performance, the sequel made $312 million in the box office (with a low $33 million production budget).

- The Emperor

Question: Is there anything I can do to get featured on the front page of YouTube?

Question: Is there anything I can do to get featured on the front page of YouTube?

Nope. Make friends with partners and with people who are cool on YouTube. Try to make something you think will get featured. You really got to think outside the box to get featured, and the more often you think outside the box, the more often you get featured. Creative/entertaining songs and animations tend to do better, but they're much harder to do than a normal v-log.

The only vid we got featured was Fruits VS Bugs:



Check out the sequel if you haven't:



Our channel was also featured, on the day we released Episode 2.


- The Emperor

Question: What is a YouTube Partner and how do subscribers help you become a partner?

Question for the Emperor: What is a YouTube Partner?

A partner is someone selected by YouTube to be given tons of tiny priviledges that add up to coolness. For example, revenue sharing on ads (partners have more ads around their vids), autoplay on their channel, banners, and smaller features.

Question for the Emperor: How do subscribers help you to become a Partner?

Well, they subscribe and they watch your videos. The requirements include regularly making videos where thousands of people watch them. It's pretty vague, but basically you just build a case for having a strong, active audience that already goes to your channel. Plus, you won't get selected if you are just showing copyrighted images, music, clips that aren't yours, or clips of videogames. You've got to generate original content pretty regularly (like at least two videos a month).

Hope this helps! The only vid we got featured was Fruits VS Bugs:



Check out the sequel if you haven't:





- The Emperor

Question: Why do some animated movies flop?

Question for the Emperor: Why do some animated movies flop?

So, first thing about animated movies is that your target audience has to be the family. The latest person to make this mistake was Robert Zemeckis, who lost a ton of money on Beowulf. Even Disney has made this mistake with Treasure Planet (Atlantis barely survived the mark).


If you want to target adults, you need to make cheap anime and release it on DVD (the expense of 3D won't get you a return; only the really popular anime can touch 3D, and, even then, it's only used for effects). If you want to target boys with action (movie mistakes include Sinbad, Treasure Planet, Final Fantasy, Titan AE, etc.) you need to get it on TV. (For example, Osmosis Jones flopped in the theater but made a successful TV cartoon.)



So, why do family animated movies do well? Women. Women won't go see action movies, especially cartoon ones. They are the ones driving what the kids see, so only the die hard moms give in and take kids to see animated action movies. On top of that, all the children (sons and daughters) want to go see Finding Nemo, but only the son wants to see TMNT. So they skip TMNT because over half the people who would have to see it are... Women. That's vital. They need to be the primary market (even if the movie is about super heroes or cars - Pixar knows this very well).

On top of that, men won't go see animated action films; they'd rather see Die Hard 4 than Beowulf.



So, if you make an animated action movie, all you're left with is boys, aged 7-19. That's a small market when the mom controls most of that money. That market is confined to the TV set.

Even flops like Ant Bully, Doogal, and Barnyard are squarely aimed at young boys. The mom has no motivation to take kids to those. Check out the poster for Ant Bully. It even looks like an action animation:

Look at all those posters above. There is no motivation for women and girls to see any of those movies based on those posters (or the movies themselves).

Read more about this here:

http://cartoondisneypics.blogspot.com/2011/04/why-action-animated-films-dont-do-well.html

- The Emperor

Question: What do you do about light and background noise?

Question for the Emperor: What do you do about light and background noise?



Here's an example of a video made where the lighting didn't match...


InnerU



There are some editing programs that will up lighting for you. Or just crank it up always just to make sure; for example we carry around a hand-light and extension chord used by mechanics.

We had to use an editing program to crank up the lighting in Following Directions 2:




As far as background noise goes, usually better to go silent and then just tape some excess background noise and loop it onto both ends. Or play the same music under both to disguise it.

We had a unique problem in Mike Tyson Will Eat Your Children where we were using Mike Tyson's actual audio with background noise and had to come up with new background noise to blend it a little:





- The Emperor

Question: Why is Space Chimps getting a sequel?

Why is Space Chimps getting a sequel?



Space Chimps did $30,105,968 domestically.

That's pretty bad when compared to Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks, who typically get well over $100 million domestically (really depends on the films).

Now Space Chimps cost $37 million to make. So by our normal standards, that's a flop. But that budget is actually super cheap, considering that the big boys spend over $100 million on an animated film. If you keep your costs down, then you don't need as big of a profit to have a "success."

So the first saving grace was that Space Chimps made $34,682,011 in foreign markets, totaling $64,787,979.

That said, not all that goes to the studio (a lot of it goes to the theaters). However, adding DVD sales on top of that, then "Space Chimps" definitely made a healthy profit for the studio.

Plus if they had a sweet script for the sequel, a promise that they can make the effects look better, and point that Andy Samberg is even more popular now than before... then I think they could sell the idea to the studio executives.

================

I think the aliens stuff from the first film was a little too "home video worthy" for a theatrical release, so I hope they have a better script and better alien effects if they venture back out to an alien planet. (Obviously Zartog is back, but he could be invading Earth.)

I think they knew that the alien stuff was the weakness, because it didn't show up in the trailer at all. Just going by the trailer, you actually didn't know that 80% of the movie was on an alien planet.

So I hope they make the script and alien stuff a little more movie-worthy. As for me, I loved the movie, and I thought the actors really did a great job!

Enjoy!

The Emperor