Don’t Believe Hollywood’s Myth About Its Low Movie Profits

Never before have I read such pure propagandized dreck as that in “Lights, Camera, Money” (May 2). The stakes are high indeed for the major movie studios who have all invested so heavily in their summer-release films. Do we really need this annual, nonsensical fairy tale about how only one in every seven or eight films actually makes a profit?

An anonymous studio head is quoted as saying that “the big movies cost 10% to 20% more this year than last, and you can say the same for marketing costs . . . “

And from Twentieth Century Fox’s chairman, Peter Chernin: “The overall production cost of this summer’s slate is more expensive than last year’s . . . “

And: “The profit margin on movies is slim today--about 4%. . . . It is more and more difficult for companies to see their movies land in the black.”

Malarkey! These are Hollywood’s golden years. Never in their history have major studio films been so profitable.

I’ve been reading this same sob story from the studios for some 35 years now. Enough already!

The fact is, today they can spend $120 million on a “bomb” like “The Last Action Hero,” and while the domestic return at the box office is only about $35 million, the rest of that cost is made up in the sale of distribution rights to European and foreign film markets and the sale of the film to pay-per-view markets, the sale to cable TV, network television and other various special events markets. The icing on the cake is when that “bomb” gets to the videocassette market and starts making big money in sales and rentals.

The real fact is it’s damn near impossible to make a movie that doesn’t make a profit.

Please, please, stop perpetuating such a gross myth.

CRAIG R. RAICKE

Valencia