The union would like performers “to share in the rewards of a successful show, without bearing any of the risk,” the group that lobbies for studios says.
The union would like performers “to share in the rewards of a successful show, without bearing any of the risk,” the group that lobbies for studios says.
“Risk” always means “we have all the goddamn money.”
If creative types could produce these works without you in the way - they would.
Cartoons are a fucking nightmare right now. Studios refuse to fund anything that isn’t already a billion-dollar household name, and then won’t do a second season unless a completely unrelated toy company makes more more than the animators.
Mid-budget movies are getting trapped in petit-monopoly silos. Meanwhile, theaters are sprinkled with two-hour advertisements that feel like we’re in another universe’s satire of 21st-century capitalism. They made a movie about a shoe and I thought the trailers were a joke.
Yeah. “We spent some money on something we assessed and determined to be a sure thing” is what they call risk. Meanwhile, opportunity costs for actors are never considered a valid concern. The risk of taking a bad gig over one that turns into a long term job exists for every everyone in the industry, and they’re not insured against lost income from taking the wrong job.
Meanwhile, studios never fail to consider the opportunity costs in finding projects. Are you profitable, but the studio thinks something else would be more profitable? Well, better hope there’s a project that’s actively losing money that they can cancel, or else you’ll be on the chopping block.
The latter point needs concise shorthand, because it’s about 90% of what’s wrong with capitalism. I am a shameless milquetoast liberal. I have no intense objections to private ownership or profit motive. Not per se.
But there’s no excusing anyone who sees a firehose of money and demands to know why it’s not two firehoses of money.
We need to start crowd funding directors, then the successful ones can endorse other directors and we can basically build an organic ecosystem that cuts out this nightmarish studio system that is basically just a hedge fund but with a lot more sexual assault.
Actors, writers and everything could take half comp in cash, the other half in profit sharing.