Brad Pitt: Softbank Sumo Wrestler!

OT
Harrison Ford got a %of the profits of Indy Jones last movie.
Indy Jones made 780 million world wide. Budget 185 mill

# 170 lylian @ 07/02/2009 at 10:51pm
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aj @ 07/02/2009 at 8:16 pm
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Hi aj, I’ve been following the exchange between yourself and PT. Thought you’d like to know that during the negotiations between the writers union and the studio (and also the actors union and the studio), the union reps and various writers claimed that studios make up to 90% of the DVD sale price. Then there’s TV licenses for re-runs on TV and of course, DVD rentals. TV license fees are pretty much 100% profit. I’m not even sure if you have to send a DVD over to the TV station anymore or just download everything on the internet!!
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Exactly. The talent - ie, writers, actors, directors, etc. - have had this same fight with the studios in the past. The studio’s hide profits like I’d hide the my jewels if Hoham was coming over. This has been an especially bitter battle for actors who are due residuals from TV shows. There’s a long list of actors who’ve had to sue for their fair share of the profits - including James Garner and Tom Selleck. By all accounts, two stand-up guys…yet the studio shafted both of them. They don’t care who you are…it’s all about their profit margin.
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As for the DVD sales - the scuttlebutt on that has always been that a DVD costs the studio around $3 to produce, the average price is $21.99…yet the studios kept saying they’re weren’t making a profit on them and everybody was going, “Why not?” In theory it sounds like an $18.99 profit, but in reality it’s probably more like $14-15…yet they were still shafting the talent on their residuals. Now they’ll just do it with “new media” for the next couple of years until the contracts have to be renegotiated. I thought about that today when I tried to watch Wimbledon on my computer at work. I was all hyped up because it was live…the office was totally dead (we have tomorrow off), nobody wanted anything, I had a computer I was rebuilding, but I could still look at the tennis at the same time…clicked on the LIVE COVERAGE link…and was asked for my credit card number! LOL! I was NOT amused. I later found NBC’s tape-delayed replay of the matches…FOR FREE. You had to pay if you wanted to see it live…but then they reshowed it for free. WTF? Just one example of how the studios & networks will be making money off “new media”, ie, live streaming video of everything from sports to downloadable movies…and no, they don’t want to share the money with the talent.

It’s from 2005 but it may further the discussion.
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http://www.slate.com/id/2118819/
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Gross Misunderstanding
Forget about the box office
By Edward Jay EpsteinPosted Monday, May 16, 2005
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The media, by treating the box-office grosses released on Sunday afternoons as if they were the results of a weekly horse race, further a misunderstanding about the New Hollywood. Once upon a time, when the studios owned the theaters and carted away locked boxes of cash from them, these box-office numbers meant something. But nowadays, as dazzling as the “boffo,” “socko,” and “near-record” figures may seem to the media and other number fetishists, they have little real significance other than to measure the effectiveness of the studios’ massive expenditures on ads.
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To begin with, the Sunday numbers are not actual ticket sales but “projections” furnished by Nielsen EDI, since the Sunday evening box office cannot be counted in time to meet the deadlines of the morning papers. Variety, to its credit, corrects the guess estimates on Monday with the actual weekend take. Yet even these accurate numbers leave in place four other confusions about who earns what.
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First, the reported “grosses” are not those of the studios but those of the movie houses. The movie houses take these sums and keep their share (or what they claim is their share)—which can amount to more than 50 percent of the original box-office total. Consider, for example, Touchstone’s Gone in 60 Seconds, which had a $242 million box-office gross. From this impressive haul, the theaters kept $129.8 million and remitted the balance to Disney’s distribution arm, Buena Vista. After paying mandatory trade dues to the MPAA, Buena Vista was left with $101.6 million. From this amount, it repaid the marketing expenses that had been advanced—$13 million for prints so the film could open in thousands of theatres; $10.2 million for the insurance, local taxes, custom clearances, and other logistical expenses; and $67.4 million for advertising. What remained of the nearly quarter-billion-dollar “gross” was a paltry $11 million. (And that figure does not account for the $103.3 million that Disney had paid to make the movie in the first place.)
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Second, box-office results reflect neither the appeal of the actual movies—nor their quality—but the number of screens on which they are playing and the efficacy of the marketing that drove an audience into the theaters. If a movie opens on 30 screens, like Sideways or Million Dollar Baby, there is obviously no way it can achieve the results of a movie opening on 3,000 screens. And how do studios motivate millions of moviegoers—mainly under 25—to go to the 3,000 screens on an opening weekend to see a film no one else has yet seen or recommended? With a successful advertising campaign.
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Studios spend $20 million to $40 million on TV ads because their market research shows that those ads are what can draw a movie’s crucial opening-weekend teenage audience. To do that, they typically blitz this audience, aiming to hit each viewer with between five to eight ads in the two weeks before a movie’s opening. The studios also spend a great deal of money testing the ads on focus groups, some of whom are wired up to measure their nonverbal responses. If the ads fail to trigger the right response, the film usually “bombs” in the media’s hyperbolic judgment. If the ads succeed, the film is rewarded with “boffo” box-office numbers.
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Third, the “news” of the weekend grosses confuses the feat of buying an audience with that of making a profit. The cost of prints and advertising for the opening of a studio film in America in 2003 totaled, on average, $39 million. That’s $18.4 million more per film than studios recovered from box-office receipts. In other words, it cost more in prints and ads—not even counting the actual costs of making the film—to lure an audience into theaters than the studio got back. So while a “boffo” box-office gross might look good in a Variety headline, it might also signify a boffo loss.
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Finally, and most important, the fixation on box-office grosses obscures the much more lucrative global home-entertainment business, which is the New Hollywood’s real profit center. The six major studios spoon-feed their box-office grosses to the media, but they go to great lengths to conceal the other components of their revenue streams from the public, as well as from the agents, stars, and writers who may profit from a movie.
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CONTINUED IN NEXT GC POST

congrats to these people who were invited to join the Academy:

In the Club, 134 Invited to Join Academy

Of course the actors are on top, but there are members invited from other branches, who “who have distinguished themselves by their contributions to theatrical motion pictures. Those who accept the invitation will be the only additions in 2009 to the Academy’s roster of voting members.”

The 2009 invitees are:

Actors
Casey Affleck
Emily Blunt
Michael Cera
Viola Davis
James Franco
Brendan Gleeson
Anne Hathaway
Taraji P. Henson
Emile Hirsch
Hugh Jackman
Melissa Leo
Jane Lynch
Eddie Marsan
James McAvoy
Seth Rogen
Paul Rudd
Amy Ryan
Michael Shannon
Michelle Williams
Jeffrey Wright

The rest
http://www.awardsdaily.com/?p=10570

Sell out. Why doesn’t he go home to his girlfriend and kids?

@liverwurst:

because she’s no longer his girlfriend and they actually are not his brood. he is just trapped. trapped with big T. there i said it. now attack me.