I’m a movie buff. I started my love affair with cinema many years ago, when VHS rentals first became available. I love really old movies, and really new ones. And honestly, a lot in between. I’ve become fairly picky in my movie watching, though. I think it’s because I’ve seen so many good ones that I tend to be disappointed by the lazy ones. I do think most movies are lazy. I don’t think they are any lazier than they were, but we tend to forget the really bad ones and remember the really good ones. But I’m getting off track already.
Those names and logos
Before the 1970s, union and guild rules required that practically all credits for a film went on the beginning. As movies started using more special effects, a lot of those credits moved to the back. And, if you watch movies from that era, you’ll see that they jump in almost immediately. Think about the experience of Star Wars or Back to the Future. Other than the name of the movie, you pretty much jump right in.
In the 1990s and 2000s, a funny thing started to happen. Traditional credit sequences started moving toward the end of the film. You see this a lot with Marvel movies for example, but it’s an industry-wide trend. Instead of movie titles, though, you start seeing a lot of animated logos for companies you’ve probably never heard of. You can see this in films like Pulp Fiction, which was one of Miramax’s early successes.
Today, I think it’s out of control. It seems like a lot of films will have over 2 minutes of animated logos before the film starts, and sometimes there’s no indication of what movie you’re actually watching until the end. These logos sometimes represent shopping web sites, national governments, and other weird organizations. Most often they’re just a bunch of companies you’ve never heard of.
It’s all about the money of course
As “movies” became “blockbusters” in the 1970s and 1980s, they became incredibly expensive. Film budgets ballooned and continue to balloon today. Look at it this way. The Godfather, considered by many to be the best film of all time, cost the equivalent of $40 million to make at the time. Top Gun Maverick, one of the highest profile films of the last year, cost $160 million. Avatar: The Way of Water cost $250 million to make. Getting that money isn’t easy, and it often comes with strings attached.
Starting in the 1980s, you’d see the name of investors in the credits. Watch many of the top performers of that age and you’ll see “In Association with Silver Screen Partners” in the credits… that’s one of the many successful limited partnerships formed to fund films.
Today, it’s common for a film to have three or four major funding sources. Generally these are investing groups with deep pockets, but sometimes they’re companies owned by celebrities. Plan B Entertainment, the production company started by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, has been financing about three films a year for the last 15 years.
Money = egos = logos
Most of the companies that fund movies don’t have a lot of control over them. They generally approve a script outline and some basic casting, if that. However, they all have the same demand: they want to see their name on the movie. At one time that just meant a quick name check. Today it’s generally a 20-30 second animation. Each major investor negotiates their space at the beginning of the film, with the biggest investor usually coming first. The releasing studio, generally the largest investor, comes first. One of these, Universal Studios, has penetrated our consciousness so much that you’re probably humming their tune already. Here’s a quick evolution of their ever-expanding opening credit:
In order to compete with something like that, every investor has created its own CGI at great expense. Some are classy, some are extravagant, and all of them will hold you hostage at the beginning of the film. Here are just a few:
The math
Let’s look at it this way. Here’s the logo for Alibaba Pictures. Alibaba is a very large e-commerce company in China. Movies aren’t their primary thing. But, they finance them just like Amazon finances movies in the US.
This is a 20-second-long logo. According to Wikipedia, this company financed Mission Impossible: Fallout. That’s a film that made about $800 million at the box office. If we assume that globally, tickets cost $8 (a fair guess), that means 100 million people saw this film in the theaters, where they couldn’t skip the credits. This means an astounding 33 million minutes (550,000 hours or 22,917 days or 62.78 years) of time were spent watching it. I know it’s absurd but think about it. Globally we spent almost one person’s entire adult life watching this studio logo on one movie. All because Alibaba execs wanted to see their names on the screen. I’d hate to be that person.
Likely to change?
The situation’s not likely to change unless movies change. I would like to think that movies couldn’t get more expensive. I’d like to think that small-budget movies could be made by independent folks. After all, even I as a modest blogger have enough computing power to make a decent special effects blockbuster. But it’s going to take a lot to get the movie industry to change. If people stop watching movies at the theater permanently, things might change. After all, we sort of stopped for about 18 months. We could stop forever. I’d hate to see that. But, that’s the kind of change it would take.
Good entertainment doesn’t have to cost much. In fact, some of the best movies are the way they are because they had to cut costs. Jaws, at $9 million, was one of the most expensive movies of the day. But even at that, Steven Spielberg thought the shark didn’t look great. So he created a lot of quick shots that only show you part of the shark. It’s a hallmark of moviemaking today, and it started because the budget was an issue. On the other hand, 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight had a production budget of $250 million and it kinda stank. I’m not the only one who thought so, since it apparently lost about $100 million for its investors.
In the meantime, if you watch movies from home, I encourage you to skip past these ego trips if you can. If you’re an investor who likes seeing them, that’s great. You do you. I’m glad you invested in the film so I could see it. Just don’t hold me hostage while you tell me about it.
