Our country is suffering from a crippling recession and one of our biggest problems keeping us from getting out of it is that we don’t really make things anymore.
Except movies. We make lots of movies. And they are BIG business. So riddle me this: Why is it that I swear at Hewlett Packard, curse the name Nike and grimace when I think of the Wal-Mart brand – but when Guillermo Del Toro goes over to Prague to spend $60 million making a Hellboy picture, we high-five him and refer to him as the second coming of the thrifty, fiscally responsible filmmaker? We’ve spent months celebrating Neill Blomkamp for making a $30 million film (District 9) while ignoring that he made it for that much because he shot in a poor country with effectively nonunion crew.
And it’s not like it is a one-way street. This isn’t just filmmakers bringing films in well under the budgets you think they need in order to make risky films profitable. Studios are also making tough decisions based upon cost versus shooting location. Just last year, Gore Verbinksi (Pirates of the Caribbean) walked away from the highly anticipated Bioshock film (which was poised to be the first truly great video game adaptation) because he wanted to shoot in the United States – but the studios balked at the cost and wanted the production to take place in Australia or New Zealand.
One of the things you have to keep in mind is that most of the money that gets spent making films ends up in the local economy. Local crews bring home paychecks funded by money outside of that economy; local businesses get an influx of business for lumber, set dressing and catering; visiting crews spend money on lodging, food, entertainment – hell, even condoms, beer and candy bars. You name it. When a movie production comes to town, millions upon millions of dollars get dumped into the local economy, making more work and more money for everyone. It is why a number of states have begun giving tax rebates to production companies. They figure, since all that money gets taxed a number of times as it changes hands, they can afford to give a chunk back to the movie people. But sadly, many states can’t keep up with what foreign countries have to offer in terms of rebates, cheap labor and sometimes lax local laws.
So this week when Sony announced that its multibillion-dollar Spider-Man franchise is being rebooted with Marc Webb ((500) Days of Summer) for a paltry $80 million, people understandably balked. After all, what is Spider-Man without huge action set pieces? A drama about a kid with a spider bite? The only way they could pull it off is to make the film smaller or by shooting the majority of the film overseas. Would they do that? Could they do that? It certainly wouldn’t be the first superhero film to do so. It wouldn’t even be the second. Canada, Australia and the Czech Republic have all been home to big-budget superhero films. But is that what this country needs? Is that the very best decision in times like these? Couldn’t a studio poised to make another $800 million worldwide in theatrical gross alone (before toy licensing, DVD and crossover promotions are figures in) spend another $50, $100, even $150 million to shoot a big-budget film here in the U.S. – especially when it means creating jobs and giving a much-needed boost to the arm of cities that can really use it?
Now, I mean no disrespect to the film communities and economies that have sprung up as a result of these practices; there are some great, highly trained, very effective crews out there in these countries. But one has to ask the question, especially when the companies making these films and spending all this money are enjoying the protections (both physical and legal) of this very country: Shouldn’t that money go here first?
