There's a term bandied about in the entertainment industry for projects with exorbitant price tags and even loftier expectations: "Too big to fail."
As we've seen time and time again in the last few years, that mentality has proven to be quite faulty.
In fact, given the way 2023 has been for Hollywood, "too big to fail" really reads like "so big it'll fail," given that bloated price tags need bloated box office returns to be profitable.
You don't have to search that hard to find any number of costly blockbusters in recent years -- in virtually any medium -- and realize the pitfalls of the emergent two-class system in entertainment.
Those two classes:
- The wildly expensive AAA projects that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and need billion-dollar returns for profitability.
- The humbly small indie projects that cost a fraction of their AAA counterparts but also typically have a fraction of the workforce.
That middle ground had largely been squeezed out as entertainment increasingly fell into either just AAA or indie.
But the tides could be turning on that.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, there's a renewed "global appetite for star-driven, non-franchise titles in the $20 million to $50 million range" based on the feedback from Berlin's European Film Market.
The formula that seems to be capturing the most eyes is a pretty straightforward one: A big-name star, two max, and a grounded plot.
No bombastic, out-of-hand CGI, no absurd budgets, and no excess. Just a star and a story to tell.
(And to be clear, these are big-name stars like Will Smith, Margot Robbie and Dave Bautista being named as the feature acts.)
And, overall, movie fans should be ecstatic about that fantastic news.
Not to get too political, but everything -- everything \-- in this world could use a little more modesty in 2024.
That includes the size and scope of movies these days, and The Hollywood Reporter notes that buyers appear to agree.
“It was a really productive market,” one U.S.-based seller told THR. “There wasn’t that much presold [i.e. movies in preproduction] in Sundance and most of the deals there were for smaller films.
"In Berlin, we saw a real appetite for bigger-budgeted movies, the $20 million to $50 million films, which have been harder to presell domestically.”
One caveat: This appetite largely appears to be overseas.
“I feel like international is much more positive at this point,” Palisades Park Pictures CEO Tamara Birkemoe told THR. “International buyers were really willing to put their bets into the bigger projects.”
Hopefully, positive buzz abroad will bring a similar mentality stateside.
