Essay On Movie Sales

I know you’ll have noticed this by now, but it’s definitely called show business for a reason. Show art, show entertainment or even show exhibitionist impulse. Unless movies make money, the money to make movies would dry up pretty quickly. But where does this money come from?

Actually, that’s an easy one. It comes, almost entirely, from you and me and people like us. The real question should be how does this money get from our back pockets and into the coffers of the big movie studios.

Some of the pathways are incredibly obvious, some perhaps a little less so.

Ticket Sales

A movie’s distributor will typically still keep over half of the ticket price these days, but I doubt they’d get away with asking for the full amount, let alone an overage.

Movies are also licensed for those smudgy little panes on the back of airplane seats. It’s slightly less obvious than television, I guess, and the films tend to be rather newer. I’ve even seen some films on planes that had never played anywhere else.

Source: CNN.com

Novelisations, Books, and Video Games

Novelisations and video games are a specific kind of merchandise that become new media works in their own right. Not since GoldenEye have I been convinced that a movie-to-game translation was really worth my while but I do still, I think that if somebody really nails an adaptation, and it succeeds as a game as well as just being a tie-in, there’s going to be so much money to be made here that the original film itself could be pushed into the margin.

Marvel Comics are an interesting sidebar here, I think. Their movies have made their brand really quite attractive and well-known, and it surely must have driven a lot of sales of their comics.

Product Placement

It’s actually that product placement is used to offset expenditure rather than make money from a film, and sometimes the payment is ‘in kind’ with marketing for the film being provided instead of