Qatar- Disney's Star Wars coup was pushing out Lucas

(MENAFN- The Peninsula) By Leonid Bershidsky and

March Champion

The record-breaking performance of The Force Awakens the new Star Wars sequel demonstrates marketing’s victory over creativity in the movie industry. Hollywood however isn’t to blame: Because of the way we watch movies the industry is increasingly dependent on a few enormous financial bets — and sequels are the safest.

The Force Awakens grossed $238m in the US alone on its opening weekend making it the fastest movie in history to make its first $100m $150m and $200m. Our family went of course and so probably did yours. Since Star Wars is a Disney franchise now acquired for $4bn and the result was designed to recoup a big part of the investment.

As with its acquisition of the Marvel comic book universe Disney’s goal was to awaken as little outrage as possible among Star Wars fans while at the same time driving merchandise sales with new characters such as the cute BB-8 robot. It’s a marketing feat for business school students to study: There’s a bigger story behind this calculated if somewhat uninspired success. In 1990-2000 there were by my count an average of 1.9 of sequels prequels and remakes among the industry’s top ten box office hits. In the following decade that figure increased to 4.5 out of 10 and in 2011-2015 to 7.4 out of 10. This trend has been bemoaned by writers for years. Even those of us who do not write for the movies cannot help but feel slighted by the sequel boom: The industry doesn’t appear to believe in original stories anymore.

In 1990 according to Box Office Mojo the average movie grossed $12.2m in the US. In 2015 before the arrival of The Force Awakens the average take was $15.4m — just 26 percent more even though ticket prices had roughly doubled in the 25 intervening years. However the average top-10 hit (again before the latest Star Wars installment) grossed $326.9m this year and $154.5m in 1990 an increase of 110 percent.

Making average movies is a business with declining returns. It makes sense: All traditional content industries have been battered by the technological revolution and Hollywood is no exception. Netflix made $6.4bn in revenue last year 62 percent of the total US theater gross. People would rather watch most movies at home or even on their mobile devices: If there are no spectacular visual effects a trip to a movie house has become redundant.

The production of top-10 hits is on the contrary an increasingly lucrative business. The gross ticket sales of blockbusters have actually overtaken ticket price inflation. That makes sense too: Movies such as the latest Star Wars offering are best seen on a big screen with 3D glasses. On a small screen much of the power of today’s box office hits is often lost.

It costs a lot to produce one of these technological juggernauts. The Force Awakens had a $200m budget. Blowing that kind of money on a dud can be painful something Disney knows all too well. Its 2013 movie The Lone Ranger starred Johnny Depp and cost $215m to make. It grossed only $89.3m in the US and $260m worldwide resulting in heavy losses (a movie generally needs to gross twice its budget to turn a profit). Drawn from an old radio series The Lone Ranger was neither sequel nor prequel and from a business point of view should never have been made.

Sequels prequels and remakes have been consistently shown to perform better than original movies. Using Box Office Mojo data from 2011 for his recent master’s thesis Catolica-Lisbon School of Business and Economics student David Polido determined that the average ratio of revenue to budget stood at 2.24 for sequels compared with 1.56 for non-sequels. Though revenues often decline as the number of movies in a franchise increases recent hits have proven that that’s not a universal law: Series such as the Harry Potter films and the movies based on J R R Tolkien’s books have not suffered from dwindling returns perhaps because their creators kept them coming at relatively short intervals: That’s known to be useful.

Disney having paid dearly for the Star Wars franchise is determined to make no marketing mistakes with it. Even George Lucas the creator of the Star Wars universe who had totally different ideas for the sequels says “the fans are going to love” The Force Awakens. A lot of effort must have gone into the focus groups.

As for those of us who would like a little more art and daring in our movies and perhaps a little less naked business calculation we have only ourselves and the technology that we find so life-changingly convenient to blame. Our altered viewing habits have pushed Hollywood to make bigger and thus necessarily safer bets.

Bloomberg