One thing we have often found ourselves discussing here at Last Movie Outpost is the sheer cost of Hollywood movies. Budgets have skyrocketed well beyond the levels of inflation, and movies are finding it harder and harder to turn a profit. Movies can pull in half a billion dollars these days and still make a loss.
Even previous sure things such as the latest Marvel outing or a Mission: Impossible movie can’t make a profit. The occasional runaway success, such as Barbenheimer, is nothing more than a sticking plaster on the balance sheets of movie studios.
The issues are deep-rooted. The system is rotten and broken, and it is hard to see a way back for Hollywood. It just went on strike to give itself bigger budgets.
To illustrate just how far gone things are in Hollywood, some context was needed. That context arrived from Japan. Just like they embarrassed the US car industry by making better-made, more economical, more reliable cars at lower cost all those years ago, before doing the same with consumer electronics, they have now done it with a movie.
Toho’s Godzilla Minus One has scored stellar reviews. It rivals the biggest of Hollywood movies for how it looks. It has broken box-office records. It has done all this on a production budget of around $15 million.
By way of comparison, Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania was over $200 million.
Every year, the visual effects branch of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences holds a bake-off event where the great and the good of the industry sector gather. It was from here that even more embarrassment for Hollywood would arrive.
The team behind the work on Godzilla Minus One was present and there they revealed the film had a team of just 35 VFX artists. Again, by way of comparison, Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania had over 1000.
Could Hollywood be about to follow Detroit by making all the same kind of moves?
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