Ted Hope's Challenge: 5 Tenets for Running a Movie Studio

Musing Outloud about if I held the keys

Ted Hope

sent a challenge to various film writers and filmmakers on the platform to write about what five tenets they would follow if they inherited a film studio. In his initial Notes post before the article was published, I commented five things I would do, but I do have to alter them slightly because the actual article specifies:

I personally like the idea that we are taking over an existing studio, with some legacy businesses and a streaming arm. I know you’d do something different if we were a true start-up, but we can explore that later. For now, we’ve been given such a company.

This changes my accounting meaningfully. To be honest I think I would do better as a start-up than inheriting a studio with all of its various branding and subsidiary concerns, particularly the larger the studio. Inheriting Disney would mean I have some very big thinking to do about the role of family entertainment and how to create better, more dependable serialization; inheriting Warner Bros. would give me more space to fiddle but less direction to go; and let’s be clear, my actual interest in supporting and platforming artful movies full of personal expression means I probably should never be handed the keys to major conglomerate enterprises at all, but rather focus on little indie studios (ex: A24, Neon, Angel) or, at most, the mini-majors (ex: Lions Gate, Dreamworks, MGM) or “studio independent” arms (ex: Focus Features, Sony Picture Classics, Fox Searchlight).

I would also be uninterested in inheriting the studios that I think are actually the best format: stuff like Pixar, Blumhouse, or Angel that focus on one sort of movie (family, horror, and faith-based respectively) for a specific audience. I think those are the best studios to operate because you can focus your attention to providing the best quality within certain genre and audience parameters, which may not necessarily be easier but at least makes writing five tenets more specific and particular. However, I would like the capacity to tinker with genres and audiences and try new formats as well as new things.

So, with those caveats in mind, here are my five tenets:

1) Minimum 50% greenlit projects directed by women or trans people

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It’s completely insane that there’s gender disparity in directing. Directing is both a job where any sort of person can have the requisite skillset to do it, but also there is a wide variety of different ways to do it well.

This tenet would probably be the most controversial and, under the current administration, probably cause legal problems. However, the mere fact that we don’t currently have a roughly 50/50 distribution of male/female directors in movie production is pretty clear evidence that the system is unfairly weighted against women. It doesn’t have to be a written policy, all we would have to do is act on it.

This does raise the question about other potential DEI and demographics-oriented decisions, and each of them creates additional levels of complexity. DEI programs struggled to overcome the concept-vs-practice threshold on the back of things like pipeline problems and replacing the actual incentives to support and platform minorities with calling mission accomplished for just having the programs themselves (these two reasons are non-exhaustive).

I feel starting with gender disparities are the lowest-hanging fruit, and by seeing how it worked, we could move on and develop our learnings to support artists from all walks of life. To me this is common sense.

2) $25million maximum budget, $25million maximum marketing budget per movie

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

I think if Black Bag hadn’t happened, I would have set the budgets to $50million. However, seeing Black Bag do pretty okay on how it was received and talked about and recommended by the sorts of people who like indie filmmaking or sober, intelligent entertainment for adults, and yet still struggle to make its money back, I think $25million is really the amount of money that you can dependably make good movies while keeping your loss potential per movie low.

And when you consider that movies like Novocaine (profitable) and Death of a Unicorn (not yet profitable) have more ‘money on screen’ in the form of action, stunts, special effects, and other expensive visual technicals, and yet only cost $18m and $15m each, I think it’s pretty clear you can pretty much get most genre narrative films done for $25m or less.

I guess inflation would matter eventually, so maybe peg it to inflation. However, overall movies have needed increasingly less people and increasingly less equipment to make at a high quality, so there’s strong deflationary weight that could keep those budgets stable for a while.

Furthermore, maximum doesn’t imply every movie greenlit would reach that height. I really think a lot of movies, particularly comedies and dramas, can be made for $5-8million each, and more money is better spent on marketing.

In this paradigm, growth would equal more movies, not higher budgets. Hits would roll over revenue streams to supporting more movies being made until we could get some evidence that the releases are vampirizing each other. To be perfectly honest, the US might actually have too many movies released each year anyways. I attend cinemas once per week and STILL miss stuff I wanted to support, such as, most recently, Last Breath.

So my original idea behind this tenet was that as a start-up studio, I’d aim for 4 movies per year, two of them released during the summer months. However if I’m inheriting a studio I would start with 8, 3 released during the summer months, the other 5 released about once every 6 weeks, and go from there.

3) Long leaders and long tails

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My original #3 was this:

Steal from Hundreds of Beaver’s event-based distribution format, A24 's merchandising, and Angel Studio’s pay-it-forward format. Tour the movies around with Q&As and in-person events and merch tables, and enable fans to buy advanced tickets for their friends.

However, that’s mostly start-up studio talk. I think as a larger tenet, the approach I’m advocating for here is that each release be given its capacity to be known before it disappears, which means longer lead times in release, longer release windows in theatres, a commitment to hard-media (Blu-Ray) releases, and experimentation with various avenues for the audience to advocate for our work.

This also means that my original #4 was actually, functionally, still part of #3:

I don’t know how much studios or production companies do test screenings anymore, but I would definitely employ them as a tool; however an inside rule would be that if the audience seemed to viscerally hate the movie, there must be something there worth leaning into. It’s the middling responses we should avoid.

The point is to get people conversing about and anticipating the movie well in advance of its release (sort of like how Longlegs leaned into a full year’s worth of trailers, except using the “Ohh people at film festival X were very excited / upset about this movie!” format of peer-to-peer awareness), then try to make the movie more event-based by releasing in small batches of markets over time with in-person Q&As, merch tables, pay-it-forward ticket sales, localized events, and then eventually release to Blu-Ray.

Additional things I would add to this tenet is making sure our streaming channel had a “browse all” option (it still drives me absolutely nuts that this isn’t a thing on most mainstream streamers, and is about the clearest proof that those streamers are evil), auction 16mm and 35mm prints to wealthy collectors, and create a studio “movie club” where groups could pay a few hundred dollars for the public screening rights of each movie we released for about a month at a time, so that little towns and interested cinephiles in cinema deserts could gather some people together to watch the movies at a local community center or church or library or other public space. I would see this club as having two options, one where the members select which movie they are screening on a per-month basis and one where we simply send them a curated selection each month.

Also the Blu-Rays would never go OOP, but rather would revert to POD when and where they weren’t profitable to continue printing large batch. Whatever “vault” I inherited would immediately go on POD. There is no movie that shouldn’t be available for those who want to pay for a copy.

A last thing I don’t really know if studios do, would be to have regular debriefs over the performance of each individual movie to discuss what worked, what didn’t, what else to try, and what to stop doing.

4) Goofball three-jokes-per-page-minimum dumb comedies

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This is probably my most straightforward one, but I don’t think I feel a need as strongly as for the return of just laugh-a-minute riot cinema. Most comedies these days are hyphens: dark comedies or horror-comedies or romantic comedies or dramedies or whatever. Most comedians are no longer making the leap to film and television and just living the standup life. Much of what is left tries to stick to one sort of joke for one sort of crowd.

Comedies used to have some general rules-of-thumb and formats that understood that not every joke is going to land with every person every time, but if you keep firing them off and move the story along, you’ll land a enough jokes among enough people to keep the crowd laughing, and if you’re really good you’ll land enough jokes that people will laugh right through the flops and not notice them. Comedy is difficult — I don’t consider myself good at it — and comedy is very specific, people have just a wild range of senses of humor.

However, I think if we followed the principles of the comedic forebears and screen-tested these things across the nation with a variety of audiences, we could get a good footing on how to pump out at least one or two gutsplitters a year. And I really do mean just the stupid shit, stoner comedy, fart jokes, slapstick, screwball, sex comedies, parodies, dumb teenagers astonishing tight-assed adults, dumb adults astonishing sarcastic teens, and every now and then we could indulge in a nice bitter satire.

5) Something unsafe per year

Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

This one is for my own indulgence, but I don’t care.

There are movies out there that don’t have clear audiences, seem to live in the filmmaker’s own little weird world, and in many cases can’t even necessarily be called entertaining. Most of the time when we consider ‘indie,’ ‘art,’ or ‘prestige’ cinema we think of high concept dramas, but I much prefer the stuff that even struggles to find support in the public foundations of national cinema funds or the financial backing of even the weirdo indie studios.

It’s not always clear what that means because it always changes, and the real difficulty in upholding this tenet would be adapting as things shift over time. A24 these days regularly releases movies that in the 90s would be unheard of; in the 90s, Miramax was the one that did that; before that, you had John Cassavetes stomping theatre to theatre begging to get Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown screened somewhere.

But the problem is that the outsiders become institutionalized. Cassavetes literally hits the Criterion of film buffery, Miramax stopped supporting filmmakers like Lizzie Borden once Shakespeare in Love won awards and made bank, A24 still releases things like All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, but I hear very few people talking about those ones and I wonder how long that’ll last.

I would even love if I could release movies that were truly experimental. Non-narrative, uncompromising, specific attempts to countermand the language of cinema and audience’s own comfort with visuals and visual language.

“Truly experimental” gets me into weird territory because I am also cognizant of experimental film, the tradition, which is not the sort of thing I think an initiative like this would enable as often as I would like. Very little that is made deserves being included in the Anthology Film Archives or needs a better DVD release than what Index cinema in Austria offers. But I do want to grab onto things a little Quay, a little Chris Marker, the next Eraserhead, some early Buñuel subversiveness, some late Buñuel cheekiness, actually suffer a few Carruths to actually manage to get a Carruth-like movie, take the risky IP flex of The People’s Joker, or even I’m talking about things like Flow, a movie the Disneys and Dreamworks of the world would never touch.

The rules would be that the filmmaker needs to be clearly obsessed about something, and nobody on my team can really figure out what it is, but if the filmmaker is very clear in their communication, very visual in their ideas, and very driven, then my studio’s job would be to take the risk to make sure the damn thing gets completed and in budget.

Unsafe movies means unlikely to profit, unlikely to be liked, unlikely to be well-received or reviewed, and sometimes even raise the hackles and complaints of audiences; and if actual governments, billionaires, and politicians get pissy about it, all the better, we’ll definitely know we’re on the right track.

But let’s be clear: the content of the movie can be unsafe, but everyone working on it must be safe. I have exactly zero tolerance or chill for the “directors yelling at actors and crew” BTS shit. No “realism” is worth actual on-set weapons, molestation, or putting actors or crew in vulnerable or threatening situations. Will not support it.

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I know what movies I want to see in the world, and I know that’s not the same thing as running a successful movie production business. I’m willing to learn and adjust and pivot and rethink and tinker and experiment, but the only reason I’d do it is to try to get the movies I want to see in the world made.

I do believe profitability can be found with the tenets above by spending more time listening to filmmakers and audiences than metrics and investors. My five tenets will completely fail if I worried about KPIs and formulae for success, and then I think businesspeople (and some filmmakers) would learn the wrong lessons from my attempts.

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To read my previous film essays:

To watch some of my own movies: