Kezrin Asfar
“The Business of Making” Movies Article Summary
The article, “The Business of Making Movies”, written by Mark Young, James Gong and Wima Vanderstede, describes the economical sides of making movies today. It is extremely informative and very interesting especially from the standpoint of a student accountant who loves to enjoy movies as entertainment.
It starts off by putting the industry in perspective and showing the reader how complex and important to our economy and culture the industry is. The movie making industry actually has a major influence on the United States Economy, at the very beginning the authors state the motion picture industry in the U.S. is ‘one of the country’s largest exporters and exerts cultural influence worldwide’. The industry is worldwide and very competitive. About 3,000 movies made it to theatres in 2006 in the U.S., but that is less than 1% of the entire amount of movies that made it film festivals alone. Predicting what movies are going to be successful is an extremely thorough process that does not allow many ideas or movies to ever make it. And even if they do make it, sometimes movie goers just don’t appeal to it as much.
There seems to be a group of major studios that have control of the market and which movies get to make into theatres. I never knew that DreamWorks, the studio that made movies like Shrek, was actually a subsidiary company from the larger studio of Paramount Pictures. These major studios seem to ultimately have control over which movies make it and which don’t ever get the chance. Once a producer has shown an appealing idea to a studio, then the real big costs begin.
A movie has many costs involved in production and to me it seems like an accountant’s nightmare (just kidding). The article describes the many components and processes that add up to form the cost of making the movies. Movie making