> One factor is that a capitalist business mindset is badly corrosive to an artistic temperament.
Not sure I agree. In fairly recent memory I can think of a number of artistic successes that were huge risks. It’s easy to forget that the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie scared the shit out of Sony, and with good reason. It had a blockbuster budget and starred a contentious, commercially unproven actor doing an incredibly risky performance. To this day I suspect that Johnny Depp fully expected the movie to tank, and would have been quite happy if that had happened.
Marvel’s investment in “Iron Man” wasn’t too far off that mark either. Its star had only recently been in the throes of drug problems so severe that at once point he wandered into a neighbor’s house and feel asleep naked in their bed. IIRD correctly the director’s biggest movie up to that time was “Swingers”.
To me there were a couple of watershed moments in hip-hop that could have destroyed the careers of the people who finally said “yes”. Rap before “Straight out of Compton” was pretty much just supercharged melodic R&B with talking. Whoever signed Eminem was taking a serious risk as being guilty of the next Vanilla Ice.
The XBox wasn’t greeted with any sense of inevitability. Microsoft had to deal with game developers in ways it had never worked with companies before. Its relationship to hardware was spotty (though I loved just about everything they tried). It was not at all clear that an accomplished systems/app company had any expertise at all in the Byzantine politics, personalities, and economics of the game world.
Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney film from a director with a record of past successes, a team of actors largely pulled from blockbusters, and an executive producer of some of the most memorable and (at the time) highest-grossing crossover blockbusters. It was not a risk to Disney at all.
Dr. Dre, one of the most successful rap producers of all time, signed Eminem after watching him perform. By then, Eminem was already well-known in local circles for his rap skills, and there was no risk of him being seen as Vanilla Ice (a joke, incidentally, which worked its way into 8 Mile, which was loosely based on the life of Marshall Mathers).
>Pirates of the Caribbean was a Disney film from a director with a record of past successes, a team of actors largely pulled from blockbusters, and an executive producer of some of the most memorable and (at the time) highest-grossing crossover blockbusters. It was not a risk to Disney at all.
It certainly was, the first PotC movie basically established pirate movies as a blockbuster genre. And while the Mouse was already rich back in 2003, even for them $143M budget is a risk.
Even movies that made them a small but solid profit like Tron Legacy (400M box office vs 170M budget) get chucked into the bin (most unfortunately, as I really liked the movie and had hoped for a sequel).
Tron Legacy was a gamble, as it (a) did not have an all-star cast, (b) a director with a string of successful movies, or (c) a popular IP (the first Tron was a box office failure, which is why it took several decades to make a sequel). Legacy did well on an absolute basis...but Disney barely made back its total budget. $170m was just the production budget; marketing was roughly another $150-$170m. While the movie did well-ish overseas, much of that revenue was split with theaters or local distribution partners, so from Disney's point of view, they barely broke even. (Dmoestically, studios only get the lion's share of ticket price for the first 2-3 weeks of ticket sales which is why they heavily front-load their advertising.)
PotC was most definitely not a gamble for Disney. PotC was always expected to be successful--it just turned out to be even more successful than they thought it would be.
Note: the same thing that happened to Legacy happened to the Solo movie. Solo more than made back its production budget but did not make back its total budget including marketing, which is why at first glance it looks silly than Disney killed the Star Wars Story franchise. Both Legacy and Solo actually ended up being decently profitable for Disney when partner tie-ins, DVD sales, and streaming rights are included, but those income streams aren't known until long after the movie is deemed a success or failure and for most box office "failures" these long-tail income streams don't usually bring the movie into the black.
TLDR: A movie has to make back more than its production and marketing budgets to be profitable to the studio, and since they split ticket sales with theaters and distribution partners, the movie has to do a lot better at the box office than just matching its budget.
The xbox itself was pretty uninspiring. It was an underpowered budget PC, but someone said, "hey, let's take this gamespy app that people use for matchmaking and put it on a game console..." and suddenly it was christmas morning when you unwrapped Mario64 all over again.
The xbox WAS xbox live matchmaking. It made online multiplayer on the console mainstream.
Not sure I agree. In fairly recent memory I can think of a number of artistic successes that were huge risks. It’s easy to forget that the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie scared the shit out of Sony, and with good reason. It had a blockbuster budget and starred a contentious, commercially unproven actor doing an incredibly risky performance. To this day I suspect that Johnny Depp fully expected the movie to tank, and would have been quite happy if that had happened.
Marvel’s investment in “Iron Man” wasn’t too far off that mark either. Its star had only recently been in the throes of drug problems so severe that at once point he wandered into a neighbor’s house and feel asleep naked in their bed. IIRD correctly the director’s biggest movie up to that time was “Swingers”.
To me there were a couple of watershed moments in hip-hop that could have destroyed the careers of the people who finally said “yes”. Rap before “Straight out of Compton” was pretty much just supercharged melodic R&B with talking. Whoever signed Eminem was taking a serious risk as being guilty of the next Vanilla Ice.
The XBox wasn’t greeted with any sense of inevitability. Microsoft had to deal with game developers in ways it had never worked with companies before. Its relationship to hardware was spotty (though I loved just about everything they tried). It was not at all clear that an accomplished systems/app company had any expertise at all in the Byzantine politics, personalities, and economics of the game world.