Those Who Walk Away From Tinseltown

While the multi-union strike promises to halt Hollywood for months, a parallel story is emerging: the box-office success of Sound of Freedom. The true-ish story of Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad attracted massive advance buzz, and tapped into an already-popular theme to debut at #3, behind major-studio franchise giants. At this writing, it’s cleared six times its published budget, without major-studio backing or distribution.

Much coverage has focused on how accurate the movie is, or isn’t. But that’s another discussion. More interesting, the studio behind the project, Santa Fe Films, made the movie, found a distributor, then found another distributor after the first one bailed, and printed and shipped for under $25 million. In a movie landscape dominated by surefire blockbusters, where mainstream studios won’t dust their shelves for that money, the return on investment is huge.

Compare the major-studio blockbuster returns. Avatar: the Way of Water cleared over $2 billion for 20^th Century Fox, but on a budget of at least $350 million (reports differ) before distribution. That’s more absolute dollars, but largely the same rate. The latest Marvel movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, grossed $850 million on a $250 million budget, a narrow-enough rate to constitute a virtual loss. Disney executives have announced tightening Marvel and Star Wars releases behind dwindling returns.

The Big Five studio conglomerates rely on franchises to remain afloat. Sound of Freedom came third in its opening weekend box office; first and second were the fifth Indiana Jones movie and the seventh Mission Impossible. Conglomerates keep returning to franchises like the Transformers, John Wick, Fast and Furious, and James Bond. (Okay, James Bond is an MGM property and therefore not Big Five. Stick with me.)

Then there’s sequels that nobody actually wanted and fans despised, like a fourth Matrix movie, every attempted Predator sequel, and the entire Jurassic World trilogy. I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: the Hollywood mainstream is so creatively bereft that they can’t even breathe new life into existing successful properties. Only through constant saturation marketing have they persuaded audiences to view the pablum they keep dribbling out.

Meanwhile, Sound of Freedom is only the latest movie from Christian-themed indie production houses to draw returns well beyond its budget. Prior pious hits like Courageous, Fireproof, and Same Kind of Different as Me have attracted large audiences and robust returns despite their art-house budgets, narrow target audiences, and often unreliable distribution. They go outside the Hollywood mainstream for their funding and promotion, and audiences reward them for it.

Don’t misunderstand me. Several recent Christian mockbusters have been real stinkers, like the God’s Not Dead quartet, or Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. Kirk Cameron in particular needs to realize he’s outlived his Eighties sitcom popularity, and reconsider his life’s choices. And the Christian mockbuster industry leans heavily conservative, parroting the existing moral and religious views of its largely sectarian audience. My opinions here are not uncritical.

However, a certain subset of right-wing Christians have successfully reverse-engineered an alternative Hollywood structure to make, distribute, and showcase their artwork. Their smaller studios must compete for talent, and their margins are narrow enough that they can’t waste the audience’s time with piffle, meaning they have to know their audience, and both give them what they want, while also denying them what they think they want.

Mainstream Hollywood has become highly vertically integrated. As Giblin and Doctorow write, the major agencies, talent scouts, and studios have merged. Therefore making a mainstream movie pitch means entering with a screenwriter, star, director, and designer already signed. Without competition for talent and content, the resulting returns (such as they are) don’t roll into the next movie; they go into executives’ and shareholders’ bank accounts.

Hollywood has become an unfree market. Striking for better conditions and improved contracts will bandage the wound, but it won’t fix the underlying problem, that under the current system, prices don’t float, and the major studios are more likely to collude than compete. In this one circumstance, however, participants have a solution that other mistreated groups don’t share: they can walk away and build their own system.

Our society has other underlying problems which participants must work to fix; poverty, racism, and corruption come to mind. We can’t just walk away from these problems, because we have only one government, only one nation-state. In this unique case, however, walking away is possible. There’s already a model of how others have done it. Hollywood’s mistreated grunt laborers should grab their tools and go.