Hollywood: Risky in all the Wrong Ways

              It is a tumultuous time to be in the movie industry. On the one hand, movies are big and more profitable than ever. In this past year alone, the top 100 grossing movies generated nearly $8 billion in total revenue with Iron Man 3 and Despicable Me 2. Last year, a handful of movies including Skyfall, The Avengers, and The Hobbit: An Unexpectedly Journey even broke the billion-dollar barrier exceeding $1 billion in total revenues. Yet movie-related investments have grown increasingly risky. The now-infamous bomb, 2012’s John Carter, forced Disney to swallow a $200 million loss in development and marketing costs. Moreover John Carter is one of many in a trend of increasingly devastating movie bombs.

              This trend is comes as no surprise to many movie-industry insiders with notable directors such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg concerned about the future of the industry and the longevity of the current system. In addition to Hollywood’s internal weakness, there are a number of external factors that are pressuring the industry to improve. A renaissance in the television industry that some are calling “The New Golden Age of Television” has caused many consumers to question movies as the golden standard of quality programming. Highly acclaimed television series such as Breaking Bad, Homeland, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones have in some ways driven consumers out of theaters to their television sets and computers instead. Digital streaming has also contributed to this trend by providing a convenient and cost-effective medium for consumers to watch high-quality programming, therefore marginalizing the movie industry even further.

              So with movies that are “too big to fail” and aggressive digital and television-driven competition, what is the movie industry to do? Surprisingly, the industry should take more risks. Yet, not the same types of risks that it has been taking. As of late, the risks that Hollywood has been taking is with its budgets rather than the types of movies it has been doing. Every summer features a wave of superhero flicks, rom-coms, and Oscar-bait dramas. Yet where are the real risks? Rather than toying with the budgets of their movies, producers should be more concerned with casting risky new talents or different, interesting scripts. 

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