Independent NDM case study: Media Magazine research

MM50 – page 26

• In 2013 the biggest grossing movie in North America (which includes Canada) was The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which took $425m at the box office.
• In 2012 Lionsgate was the 5th top distributor (based on box office gross) in North America, putting it ahead of Hollywood major studios 20th Century Fox and Paramount Pictures. Does this mean we have a seventh major studio to consider?
• Lionsgate began in 1997 as a Canadian distribution company based in Vancouver and, according to the-numbers.com, has distributed 261 films since. Only 10 of these have exceeded $100m at the North American box office, the cut-off point for a film having ‘blockbuster’ status.
• The Walt Disney Company has five divisions that include a record label, television stations, videogames as well as theme parks.
• Lionsgate has four divisions,which include both the television and music industries, and even though it produces television programmes, such as Orange is the New Black for Netflix, and part-owns nine cable television channels, some of which do play the company’s films and television programmes, it is nevertheless a small company.
• Walt Disney’s market capitalisation calculated on number of shares x share price) was $155.33bn compared to Lionsgate’s $4.49bn.
• Anita Elberse (2013) has pointed out, the blockbuster strategy is the only one that is economically viable in the film industry
• In early 2012 Lionsgate bought the independent producer Summit Entertainment, and so inherited the Twilight franchise. Until then it had only released one $100m-plus film, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a documentary
• Warner Bros. spent around $100m producing The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002), which only took just over $7m worldwide at the box office.
• Fewer than 500,000 copies of the first The Hunger Games book had sold in 2009 when Lionsgate reportedly paid author Suzanne Collins $200,000 for the rights to the trilogy.
• Lionsgate increased The Hunger Games’ budget to $80 million
• Lionsgate hasstated it wants to increase the amount of money it makes from television programmes; but, at the time of writing, the amount of revenue that television brings in is only a small proportion of the total, and it remains reliant on its film division.

MM37 – page 14

• Budgets generally are getting both bigger and smaller at the same time. The major studios are driving budgets up in the hope of utilising new technologies to create a greater spectacle to induce audiences into 3D and IMAX screenings.
•  And what is the most successful film worldwide as I write? The King’s Speech had a production budget of $15 million and a worldwide gross of $400 million plus.
• Film budgets are usually expressed in terms of two sets of costs: above the line (ATL) and below the line (BTL).
• Above the line costs are ‘direct’ and largely fixed – in other words they must be paid irrespective of what happens during the production. They refer to the fees for all the principal creators of the film and the cost of acquiring the original intellectual property.
• Below the line costs are indirect and refer to the goods and services purchased/hired as required for production activities – the ‘running costs’ of the production.
•  The more that roles can be combined, the less expensive the production.
• Costumes and locations create major costs. Let’s take costumes first. The audience for a film like Atonement (UK/US 2007) expects authenticity in costumes, and the novel suggests two distinct periods that require research and re-creation. A well-off family in a 1930s country house wore various different types of costumes, ‘dressing’ for dinner, for sports, for dances etc.
• House interiors for the periodhad to be researched and recreated (partly from second-hand shops). Cast members had to get haircuts and appropriate costumes – and negotiations were necessary to acquire the rights for music (mostly reggae and ska) that fitted the time period.
• Gareth Edwards’ film Monsters has come to be seen as something of a ‘game changer’ in low budget production. The film was made for around $500,000 and yet it was presented in CinemaScope on multiplex screens across the UK and featured some beautiful CGI work.

MM30 – Page 52

• American Reality shows – they’re glossy, manipulative, and highly addictive. And they often open with the words: ‘Some scenes have been recreated for entertainment purposes’. So where exactly is the ‘reality’?
• Jean Baudrillard argues in his book Simulacra and simulation that: The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. This suggests that In contemporary society our system of representations, symbols and images has become so vital, it supersedes the truth it claims to signify to the extent where that truth fades into oblivion, or fails to exist at all.
• Baudrillard’s theory is particularly appropriate to the study of reality television and to the exploration of the idea that on TV, we rarely see a ‘true’ reality. Situations are manipulated, events are dramatised and incidents are staged and enhanced ‘for entertainment purposes’.
• Paradoxically, ‘reality’ is constructed within a genre that claims to give the audience the ‘truth’ as it actually happened. In other words, they create a ‘truth’ that never has, or arguably never would have existed in reality.

MM30 – Page 58

• Indeed, the history of media technology in the twentieth century was built on this premise: cinema, television, music video and computer games all invite the audience to suspend disbelief and inhabit a parallel fantasy world made possible only by successive advancements in technology.
• The last thirty years has seen a profusion of films, television and pop music that play with audience expectations in their use of intertextual references and self-reflexive allusions. However, perhaps what marks out the genuinely postmodern from ironic critique is the way in which audience appropriation of new media technologies is both naturalised and creative.
• Throughout the history of television and cinema, audiences have traditionally been very accepting of the ways in which media texts invite the viewer to confront their own perception of reality. As the silent movie era moved into that of the talking picture, for example, audiences did not recoil with incredulity that the image projected on to the screen was actually speaking, but accepted the concept as natural and unaffected.
• By the same token audiences have been extremely imaginative in the way in which new media technologies have been incorporated into their day-to-day existence.
• Of course the proliferation of the internet from the late 1990s onwards has accelerated and heightened people’s routine use of technology in their day-to-day engagement with society and culture. And, indeed, it is befitting that the proliferation of laptops, wireless and broadband technology in the Noughties has liberated people from viewing computer technology as fixed to work stations previously associated with word processing and gaming.
• The internet has infused contemporary civilisation with a new vitality that can be felt across various media forms including television, film, pop music and the press.
• Various theoreticians have argued that the appropriation of media texts is symptomatic of cultural malaise. Frankfurt School theorists like Theodore Adorno, for example, viewed the gramophone record and cinema as a means of distracting the working class from their disadvantaged social positions.