subject: Is Hollywood Getting Too Cheap To Invest Heavily In Some Movies [print this page] In the past nearly twenty years Hollywood has started to learn that you do not need hundreds of millions of dollars in order to get a box office return of hundreds of millions of dollars. There are different theories of when this shift towards lower budget film making, but perhaps the best example of when this started to happen was in 1991, when director Robert Rodriguez introduced his film El Mariachi. El Mariachi was a film that told the story of a guitarist in Mexico who is pursued by a gang of criminals. The film was made with a budget of $7,000, but was shot in such a way that many of the people who saw the movie thought it had been produced for a much higher budget.
Soon Rodriguez was a hot property, and was soon hired to direct a sequel to the film, for a multi-million dollar budget called Desperado. Rodriguez has moved on to directing films with multi-million dollar budgets, but is more renowned for making his films still on a low budget, at least by Hollywood standards. Many other filmmakers have followed Rodriguez's example and begun to create films with low budgets. As a result, Hollywood has begun to take note of the talent displayed by these directors.
For example, the 2009 horror film Paranormal Activity was released and made over $150,000,000, but the actual budget of the movie was a mere $15,000. As a result of this, Hollywood has begun turning to filmmakers who can shoot on the cheap, and they have applied the same principal with actors. Two years ago Sam Worthington was an unknown actor, but has since starred in Terminator Salvation, Avatar (the highest grossing film of all time), and the upcoming remake of Clash of the Titans.
While the economy has definitely been a factor in the resolution to take cheaper film making more seriously, it has not been the driving reason. As a result of the resolution, studios such as Paramount have started nationwide searches for lower budget films to distribute, and this is just a further testimony to the fact that budget does not always determine a film's worth at the box office. Could this mean a new era of film making, or is this simply a phase until the economy picks back up? Either answer is irrelevant, as there is most definitely a new breath of fresh air about to enter the lungs of Hollywood.
