Why are formulaic productions less likely to be the mega-hits than the high-risk productions?
The two most successful movies I can think of in the past few years are Avatar and Dark Knight. Avatar, as people have pointed out, is basically identical to Pocahontas or Fern Gully in space. Dark Knight is a standard, albeit very well done, Batman movie.
“High-risk, high-reward versus certainty of small reward” is a common payoff matrix, but it might not be the one at work in the movie industry.
The important rule is Goldman’s Law: “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody but nobody can accurately predict just how a movie will actually do before greenlighting the funding. Trying to do so has preoccupied executives since the movie industry moved to Hollywood. There are all sorts of hypotheses as to why this seems to hold.
Why are formulaic productions less likely to be the mega-hits than the high-risk productions?
The two most successful movies I can think of in the past few years are Avatar and Dark Knight. Avatar, as people have pointed out, is basically identical to Pocahontas or Fern Gully in space. Dark Knight is a standard, albeit very well done, Batman movie.
“High-risk, high-reward versus certainty of small reward” is a common payoff matrix, but it might not be the one at work in the movie industry.
The important rule is Goldman’s Law: “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody but nobody can accurately predict just how a movie will actually do before greenlighting the funding. Trying to do so has preoccupied executives since the movie industry moved to Hollywood. There are all sorts of hypotheses as to why this seems to hold.