3. Mid-Budget Movies Are Easier To Get Made Than High-Budget Movies
On Saturday 27th May 2013, Steven Soderbergh, that starlet of independent cinema, gave an address to the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival. In this speech, he was very frank concerning the pitfalls of the studio system, and the death of the mid-budget film. Soderbergh is not alone in this; it is widely noted that the mid-budget drama/horror/comedy is not around anymore, and this is simply because studios are, as pointed out in the previous entry, so savvy, at least by their own reckoning. One of the urban myths concerning movies I was thinking of including on this list was that "originality is a valued commodity in Hollywood" and, in a rare moment of trenchant cynicism, I didn't include it, thinking that people would think I was being insane or just plain insane. The fact is, studios are looking for what has been successful before, and this is why franchise pictures are so much in vogue, to meet the apparent demand for more of the same. This is not merely hearsay; in January 2013 pwc.co.uk released a report entitled "The UK film, TV and Video Games Industries Today: Powering Ahead". The report considered the state of both the UK and US film industry, and contained a graph which charted the percentage of films in low, mid and high budget ranges. The list found that while in 2001 45% or so of films shown at 600 cinemas or more were budgeted between $30 and $99.9 million, in 2011 that number was down to only 33%, while the number of films budgeted at $100m+ doubled. And this trend looks set to continue, thus it is not necessarily easier to get a mid-budget movie financed than an FX extravaganza.