In the world of horse racing the handicappers look at how the racehorse has performed over the past season and then match that up with the track record of the jockey to determine if it is a winning combination.  They weigh that against all the other horses and jockeys in the race to determine if it is a good bet.  

When considering what films to make, producers have to make critical choices about selecting the genre, plot and the characters.  Due to marketing and financing considerations, it often comes down to a choice between betting on a genre specific project such as a thriller, scifi, action or horror movie, without any recognizable stars in it, or going with a bankable movie star and/or director.  So, do you bet on the horse (genre+plot+script) or the jockey (highly recognizable actor)? 

Distributors can sometimes establish a market value for genre films before they are completed, thus making the likelihood for pre-sales far greater than ‘execution-dependent’ films.  It is more difficult to assess the audience appeal of execution-dependent films based on the concept alone, as their success is contingent upon a number of unpredictable factors, such as reviews and release timing.  Such films have historically achieved lower pre-sales as the market tends to wait and see the finished product; hence, the need to rely on bankable stars and/or a name director to promote these films at the markets.

Unfortunately, this has also resulted in a glut of low-budget, genre driven movies; so much so that the distributors/foreign sales agents are now starting to reject these projects unless they also have a movie star attached in a lead role.  No longer will Eric Roberts or Gary Busey fit the bill.  An oversupply of low budget films has pushed down demand and allowed the international buyers to be more selective. 

I would have to also add that the person who bets on the horse and jockey also needs to consider what kinds of race they are running.  Is it a steeplechase, quarter horse, or thoroughbred race? Different races call for different kinds of horses and jockeys.  The bottom line is that money can be made in each kind of race, if you know what you're doing.1

Such is film.  The films sold at Cannes are vastly different from those sold at Fantastic Fest. Direct to video horror movies may surpass an Oscar nominee with a small theatrical release in earnings.  An Oscar winner may outpace the summer blockbuster over years of VOD and TV deals.  It's all relative as long as you position yourself well in the race of your choosing.  No matter what race you run, make sure you know what you are getting into.  That way you can increase your chances of winning every time.1

Investors often see genre driven films as low risk, quick turnaround opportunities, but they are also drawn to the higher quality projects with internationally bankable stars and directors with an attractive risk/return profile.  Everything depends on the distribution that the producers can line up.

So, do you bet on the horse or the jockey?  Increasingly, the answer is both.  Just like in horse racing, the handicappers are putting their money down on the combination of the two and comparing that to all the other horses and jockeys in the field.

Today, filmmakers run the risk of making that $250,000 scifi thriller, without finding any sales agent that will take it.  It’s kind of like building a mansion out of cardboard, just because you could do it, does it mean that you should?  That does not mean that a $100 million high concept film starring Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman is a sure bet either, just look at what a disaster Transcendence was for Warner Bros.  As Mark Lágrimas says, “…money can be made in each kind of race, if you know what you're doing.”

-----------------------------------------------------

1 Contributed by Mark Lágrimas, a former Disney, MGM & CBS film & television analyst.  Now an independent filmmaker with Best Served Cold Productions.

I was walking down King’s Road in London one day, dodging the throngs of people propelling themselves forward with their heads bent down over their phones; just wanting to shout out at the top of my lungs, “LOOK UP!” That would of course been both useless and embarrassing, but it did make me think about how our minds are being reprogrammed to see the world in terms of screens, not landscapes.   

The human race is quickly losing its ability to focus on any one thing for more than a few minutes (or seconds) at a time.  In fact, there have been numerous studies that have shown that the attention spans of children, adolescents and adults are getting shorter and shorter.  This is having a profound effect on how we consume education and entertainment.  No wonder that the publishing industry, which has relied for centuries on humans consuming their information in books over hours and hours of reading, has been in a deep decline.  People are simply losing their ability to read for long periods of time. 

The motion picture industry has been drastically impacted by this phenomenon in two ways: First, audiences are drawn to action, animation and horror films where the scene changes every 15 to 30 seconds, mitigating their attention deficit; and Second, movies about people are getting crowded out by comic book superheroes, creatures and cartoon characters: The top 10 box office performers this year have been: Transformers, X-Men, Maleficent, Captain America, Spider-Man, Godzilla, Planet of the Apes, Rio 2, How To Train Your Dragon and The Lego Movie. Compare that to the top 10 movies of 1990: Ghost, Back To The Future, Die Hard 2, Pretty Woman, Home Alone, Presumed Innocent, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Total Recall, Dances with Wolves and Kindergarten Cop.  Not one of the films from this year is arguably about a human being, whereas 8 of the 10 films in 1990 were stories about people.

It begs the question, “Are we losing touch with our humanity?”

Film producers, distributors, and everyone else in our industry have to be concerned over this shift in consciousness.  It is no wonder that high quality television series have seen such an explosion in popularity.  People do not have to sit in a movie theater for two hours to get their entertainment fix when they can flip on their 50 inch flat screen TV’s and watch a 55 minute episode of Game of Thrones or Breaking Bad.  How can stories about real people, real heroes and real events compete with flying creatures, supernatural beings and dystopian worlds? 

This radical shift in attention spans has happened over just the past generation or two.  The world's first known movable type printing technology was invented and developed in China by the Han Chinese printer Bi Sheng between the years 1041 and 1048. In Korea, the movable metal type printing technique was invented in the early thirteenth century during the Goryeo Dynasty.  In the West, the invention of an improved movable type mechanical printing technology has been credited to the German printer Johannes Gutenberg in 1450.  So, for approximately five centuries we have been consuming our entertainment and information from books.  Movies have been around for just about 100 years and television for less than 60. 

Emailing and texting has been with us for less than 20 years, but in that time we have been transformed.  Long-form entertainment and information consumption has been replaced with the staccato rhythm of Tweets, YouTube videos and Snapchats.  I myself am finding it harder and harder to sit down for two hours with a good book or a classic film without feeling the need to check my email or the 12 texts that came in on my phone. 

This affects every one of us in the entertainment and educational sectors.  People have changed the way they consume the content we create and we have had to change the way we make it, sell it, and ship it to them. 

And, this is just the beginning.