When you’re trying to just make a predictable amount of money over a set amount of time, you have very precise formulas for what kind of product you can publish to get that number. You can publish a clone of Call of Duty every year and make a very predictable amount of profit on the license, but if you take the chance on an “experimental” game with unproven mechanics or other things that haven’t been market-tested, it has a much higher chance of deviating from that predictable profit curve, or flopping entirely.
When you have more than a hundred people working in a company, you absolutely have to secure regular profit levels to sustain the company, and this turns most creative works into slop-grinding and number-crunching.
With movies it’s the same, you can push out a hot video-game license movie with all the same standard jokes and action scenes and big-name stars or the same kind of action movie formula with the same explosions and same bad guys and so on, and you will make a predictable amount of money for your costs.
Even if the finished product is utterly mid and unoriginal, enough people can be pulled in with marketing and manufactured hype to guarantee a certain amount of return.
These studios also tend to gobble up rights for smaller licenses and either throws those licenses in the shredder despite being successful, or sits on them for decades to avoid having to compete with them, but also do not want to invest in those titles, because again, they simply have already done the math and know that such titles won’t hit those target profits the same way a new fifa or battlefield game will make.
Same with hollywood too.
When you’re trying to just make a predictable amount of money over a set amount of time, you have very precise formulas for what kind of product you can publish to get that number. You can publish a clone of Call of Duty every year and make a very predictable amount of profit on the license, but if you take the chance on an “experimental” game with unproven mechanics or other things that haven’t been market-tested, it has a much higher chance of deviating from that predictable profit curve, or flopping entirely.
When you have more than a hundred people working in a company, you absolutely have to secure regular profit levels to sustain the company, and this turns most creative works into slop-grinding and number-crunching.
With movies it’s the same, you can push out a hot video-game license movie with all the same standard jokes and action scenes and big-name stars or the same kind of action movie formula with the same explosions and same bad guys and so on, and you will make a predictable amount of money for your costs.
Even if the finished product is utterly mid and unoriginal, enough people can be pulled in with marketing and manufactured hype to guarantee a certain amount of return.
These studios also tend to gobble up rights for smaller licenses and either throws those licenses in the shredder despite being successful, or sits on them for decades to avoid having to compete with them, but also do not want to invest in those titles, because again, they simply have already done the math and know that such titles won’t hit those target profits the same way a new fifa or battlefield game will make.