Last week, we had two posts so GITS readers could submit questions to Jason Scoggins:

Jason also has a great website called Life On The Bubble, which tracks movie box office and the spec script market.



GITS readers asked some good questions and Jason has responded with some valuable insight into screenwriting, the spec script market, and working in Hollywood. In Part 1 today, Jason provides his take on the current state of the movie business:

Given the success of movies like SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and DISTRICT 9, without stars or in some cases what many in the industry considers “commercial hooks,” can we expect to see changes in the industry re story and audience taste? — Joshua



I think the industry has a pretty good feel for its audience and, in general, what’s going to put butts in seats. I think the two films you mentioned are great examples of the system working correctly: The producers clearly asked themselves “Who are we making this movie for?,” made their films for budgets that were appropriate to the expected box office return, and let the filmmakers involved (all of whom had solid track records) do their things within those constraints. (Both also had fantastic marketing campaigns, but that’s another topic.)



It’s easy to look back at enormous hits and say “Hey, why don’t they do THAT more often?” But no one expected SLUMDOG to become the worldwide sensation it was, and I doubt even the producers of DISTRICT 9 thought it would perform as well as it has so far ($90m domestic after three weekends as I write this).



I do think box office failures are examined pretty closely for what went wrong, but I don’t think the question of audience taste is included in the analysis per se. As William Goldman famously wrote, “no one knows anything” when it comes to whether the audience will respond to a specific film.



There seems to have been a decline in small, interesting movies in favor of tentpoles. Is it too much to hope that more time / money / talent will be developed in that regard? — Joshua



Yes. (I was so tempted to leave it at that.) If you’re asking whether the studios themselves will develop more small, interesting movies in the near future, then I think the answer is no. There’s no reason they couldn’t (it’s a buyer’s market, after all), but they seem to be locked into the pursuit of pre-sold material and projects that can be nurtured into franchises (i.e., future pre-sold material). I read an interesting article a few months ago that suggested studios are most profitable when they make more, and more varied, movies, so in a vacuum you’d think they’d carve out a specific percentage of their development and marketing dollars in order to include smaller yet mainstream pictures on their slates.



Then again, it’s easy to Monday morning quarterback the studio chiefs; I know there are dozens of reasons it’s difficult to make that call, and the studios’ business models really do require feeding their pipelines with tentpoles and franchise-type product.



If the independent film market hadn’t collapsed in the past two years, this wouldn’t be all that big a deal. In any case, you go to war with the army you have.



Given the number of new media / opportunities to make money, does Hollywood risk losing its share of fresh talent and innovation by keeping itself closed off from original outside ideas? Could Hollywood become to motion pictures what IBM became to computers? — kgmadman



One could argue Hollywood already is the IBM of computers, in that IBM no longer makes computers, it sells computer- and computing-related services (and makes billions every quarter doing so), not unlike how Hollywood has shifted its focus away from the “making movies” part of the movie business. But I think you’re asking whether I think Hollywood is forcing new voices to go to different media to be heard and thus planting the seeds of its eventual destruction.



I don’t see it this way. I am troubled by how difficult it is to break in a new writer right now, how dead the spec market is, and how few of the projects getting set up these days start out as screenplays (as opposed to comic books or videogames or 70’s-era toys), but those concerns are specific to my own business model. There are plenty of original, outside ideas making their way into the system, and there’s no shortage of fresh talent nor innovation making its pilgrimage to Hollywood on a daily basis. Some may well start out in the new media hinterlands or wherever, and in fact I think that’s a great way to break in, especially for directors. But at the end of the day there really isn’t much money to be made out there yet, and the studios know this. I think the holy grail will remain making movies and television for the foreseeable future.