TheBoost said:
zombie84 said:
Do you really think he will LOSE money? Really?
No, it's a matter of: I thought I would net 129 million from this, but with the extra expenses I will only net 27 million. Re-think it to be cheaper boys!
Sorry, I don't buy this "he's providing us with entertainment as his personal loss" bullshit. He just realised his profit margins weren't as big as he was used to. He's just cheap. He was the same way on the prequels. Think about how many people are going to CV this year. Every single one of those people will drop between $10-$100 on various products related to this thing. Plus you have all the other non-hardcores, plus all the advertising revenue and network purchasing that will likely pay for the show as it because it is freaking Star Wars.
When Lucas makes a product, its cuz he's a greedy money grubbing bastard. When he DOESN'T make a product, it's because he's a greedy money grubbing bastard.
Don't pull the Lucas Can't Win card, there is a difference here. He tried to make the product, but when he realized the profit margins weren't big enough he put it on hold until they could figure out how to make more money.
Money isn't an issue with Lucas. He's a billionaire. Can mere mortals like us even grasp what that means, how much money that is? But besides that, lets say he was just a regular producer. This is Star Wars. Its going to make its weight in gold. As for the technology--I know Lucas wants to make very high quality shows, technically speaking, so that its basically like an hourly feature film. Which would mean a lot of special effects. But look at the last two seasons of Battlestar Galactica. It's been done. Probably Star Wars would require more than that even, maybe, but the Star Wars audience is about five times the size of the Battlestar audience. Again: it's not about "can we do it". It can be done, and they can make a lot of money off of it. Its more about "can we do it for this amount of profit percentage".
See, if he really cared, it wouldn't matter if they only get $120 million in returns for every $100 million spent. But he wants to get $200 million returns for every $100 million spent. Why? There's no practical purpose since he's a freaking mulit-billionaire. It just becomes its own game. "How cheap can we make it? How much profit can we make?" Its the monopoly syndrome. I remember Lucas saying in 1998 or so that you can tell a director's talent by if he can make a $50 million movie look like a $200 million dollar movie. Not whether he can actually make a good movie. But this is what Lucas has come to value. Running a billion-dollar corporation for twenty years sorts of changes the way you think about everything.