Movies/shows/entertainment are fun. You know what makes them less fun? Learning how they’re made.
It’s actually the same concept as anything you buy. The studio/writer/producer reads the market, sees a potential gold mine, listens to some pitches, picks a few, asks for some demo reels, then they pick 1 or 2 to start production.
Now…the reading the market part is the most important. The studios are going to invest a lot of up front money so they really want to make sure there is a rather large group of potential movie-goers that will anxiously await the moment tickets are available. The greater the anticipation, the greater opening weekend will be followed by the plateau of ticket sales, then followed by their ebb.
Enter the hash tag. Or social media, or comment boxes…all the same thing. Trends and tendencies create metrics which studios gobble up like hungry hippos. These metrics show big-ticket items and if they are getting hotter or cooling off.
Now, the vast majority of the time, studios don’t invest in something controversial unless there is a very good chance of return on investment, and that chance depends on ensuring that movie-goers are either extreeeeemely dedicated to the movie’s concept or are very manipulatable by emotionally gripping advertising. And what is the most emotionally charged topic in the history of the human race?
Fear of death. Or of dying. Whichever.
Because no matter what you believe, the one thing that none of us knows is what happens after the ol’ ticker stops ticking. No matter that what happened BEFORE it started ticking doesn’t scare you at ALL, but for some reason we are all scared about the after part.
So the next time you feel those tugs on your emotional purse strings to slide money out of your pocket and into someone else’s bank account, just remember to ask: are you about to give your hard earned money to an entertainer/show/movie because you know it’s entertainment, or because you believe, deep down, that doing so just might, MAYBE, help you alleviate the fears you may have about The End; and maybe, just maybe, the fiction you’re about to hear has more than a 0.0000000001% chance of being real?
Enjoy the show. 🙂
Jacob Frasier 