TheBoost said:
zombie84 said:
I guess the bottom line is that for a mulit-billionaire to be so concerned about profit when the show is guaranteed to be at least modestly profitable, it just smacks of unnecessary greed, and it frustrates me that this is really what the bottom line has come to mean for Lucas and his projects.
But what does Lucas see as the bottom line?
He said it in the article that this thread is based on: that the bottom line is that he wasn't going to make as much money as he thought he would. This has nothing to do with some philanthropic "sharing with the world to make filmmaking better for everyone." If that becomes a byproduct of the series, its secondary and incidental. What it came down to is if he made it now, he'd have a decent amount of money to add to his uncountable billions, but if he waited a few years he would have even more money to add to his uncountable billions.
I'm sorry, its just really sad to see a billionaire complaining that he doesn't think a hit TV show will make him as much money as he would like. What happened to Lucas? This was a guy who in his youth would have told the head of Warner Brothers to go fuck himself if he ever heard him say that.
He wants to make feature film quality "Star Wars" on a TV budget. That's his goal. Really it's been what he's been working on for decade. If his goal is to make something that's "literally Star Wars" for television, consequently opening doors and pushing boundaries for all filmmakers, is that so unworthy?
Yes, but he doesn't have to keep trying to make it cheaper, that's the point. He's not doing it for others, he's doing it for himself, because he wants to be able to spend the same amount of money as the competition. But why be so cheap? The guy has a billion dollars. He's acting as though he won't make a profit. Trust me, he will. In the end it comes down to greed: how can I make more than 200% profit on this? If its a show he believes in then why would he stall it because he would only make large amounts of money instead of huge amounts of money? That's what it comes down to. And for a guy that's a multi-billionaire, you would think that he wouldn't be concerned about that.
Yes, I do get that he has an interest in making technology more...efficient, let's say. But even that is just a way of expressing cost-to-quality ratios. He has an obsession with money, with doing things less expensively than his competition, but its pointless for a multi-billionaire who describes himself as an "abstract filmmaker auteur" to make this into his life. What is more important, the actual content, or the financial side? And Lucas, even though that doesn't mean the content is unimportant, has put his priority on the financial side.
If people like James Cameron had Lucas' mindset it would be another 10 years before he made Avatar. But you spend a little more money and develop technology that doesn't exist, that's how you push the envelope and advance the state of the art, and out of that experience you realize all the ways to make it cheaper the next go-round and you have all the prototypes sorted out, so that the technology becomes available sooner than if you had waited and just kept trying to get it there without actually making anything. But sitting around say, "oh, I don't know, we'd better wait for technology to catch up," you'll always be wainting. To literally make a 1-hour Star Wars film on a TV budget is impossible right now, and it won't be very much more advanced in another two years, even five, maybe even ten. Its way, way out there, you've got to actually spend money to make a product that is a stepping stone towards it and then maybe you can get it done in five years instead of ten.
It's like how Lucas wanted to make TPM for 75 million dollars. What was he smoking? Its the same as trying to make a 1-hour SW film on a TV budget. Even now you couldn't make TPM for 75 million, maybe 90 million, and only because Lucas owns ILM and Skywalker Sound so he doesn't have to pay for having to outsource it, anyone else trying to make TPM in 1999 would have had to spend at least $150 million. But instead of waiting for this technology to happen, he had to bit the bullet and just make the damn thing, and he got the price pretty low relatively speaking (but not anywhere near where he initially wanted) and because of that he got to make the two sequels much more advanced but for the same price. If he had waited for technology to become as cheap as he wanted it, he would probably be in pre-production still. But he really just wanted to make TPM because it was his 20-years-in-the-making return to directing.