In this edition of cinema issues we are talking about the issue with film budgets and how it is leading to more and more films flopping.
I am writing this after the first weekend of 28 Years Later The Bone Temple wherein the film has underperformed. The film was good, it had good reviews, what was the issue? The budget was 65 million, for reference the budget of the first film from back in the noughties was 8 million, even adjusted for inflation that wouldn’t be anywhere near close to 65 million dollars.
Now there may well be shared costs between this and 28 Years Later itself as the films shot back to back, but that aside why did a film of this scope have a budget of 63 million dollars.
Therein lies the issue, and it is one that is plaguing Hollywood. Budgets are too big and need to come down, the box office has contracted less and less people are going, you cannot still be making films for 250 million dollars or even 100 million dollars the days when large crowds would go and films could break even more easily is largely over it seems.
Somewhere around the late 2000s, early 2010s one man understood that to almost guarantee profitability even when a film is bad or poorly reviewed the film needed to be made for next to nothing. That man was Jason Blum. He was ahead of the curve and now Hollywood needs to take a page out of his book.
If 28 Years Later Bone Temple had been made for 20 million then it would be close to breaking even now.
CGI really is the thing that is draining budgets, and in a sense the wider implication of AI could bring that down, but so could a return to practical effects and more innovative film making.
Ultimately something needs to change, if studios don’t want to suffer flop after flop they need to get serious about the market for these films now and budget accordingly.
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