Kirk Hammett Has Learned Nothing About the Movie Business
Given that Through the Never was an unmitigated disaster which cost Metallica a lot of money, you would think that Kirk Hammett would either wanna stay far away from the movie business or, at the very least, would have learned a lot about his mistakes as a producer so he could do a better job next time.
Then again, you’re talking about the dude who helped make St. Anger AND Lulu, so maybe “learning from past mistakes” isn’t Hammett’s forté.
From a recent interview the guitarist gave to heavymetal.about.com:
“I definitely want to make a horror movie. I just have to find someone to pay for it. I have learned through making Some Kind of Monster and Through the Never with Metallica that movies are expensive. I think the most expensive thing you can ever get into is making movies, and that’s why a lot of times people find other people to pay for their movies, because it’s fucking expensive.”
So right off the bat: I do not understand how the fact that movies are expensive didn’t occur to Kirk before making Through the Never. Did no one present the band with a budget prior to the start of production? Kirk knows what a budget is, right? He remembers when Metallica used to have them, back in the Kill ‘Em All days? So did the band just hand the director their company credit card and say, “Do whatcha gotta do!”? Could they possibly be that careless with their money?
Hammett continues:
“I’d love to make a movie if someone else paid for it. I don’t want to have to finance another movie again. We’ve already financed two. I didn’t know the ins and outs of that, the ups and downs, the pros and cons. I would go more the Hollywood route, which is find an investor to invest in the movie and pay for it.”
Well, that’s not really the Hollywood route in the traditional sense — the Hollywood route in the traditional sense would involve pitching the project to a movie studio — but it’s a theoretically a sound idea so I’ll let it slide.
But this next bit, uh, not so much:
“Besides, the type of movie I want to make would probably be a period piece, and then probably be upwards of twenty to twenty-five million dollars, and that’s a figure that is for the experts, for the big boys.”
Well, Kirk, I hate to break your heart, buddy, but the chances of any investor with half a brain sinking money into a period horror piece right now is pretty slim. Why? Let’s look at some examples of the grosses for such films from the past five years, shall we?
The Wolfman (2010)
Production budget (without marketing): $150 million
Worldwide gross: $140 million
The Raven (2012)
Production budget (without marketing): $26 million
Worldwide gross: $29 million
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012)
Production budget (without marketing): $69 million
Worldwide gross: $116 million
Crimson Peak (2015)
Production budget (without marketing): $55 million
Worldwide gross to date: $49 million
And if you’re looking at some of those figures and thinking, “Hey, that’s not so bad,” keep in mind that marketing budgets these days generally equal the production budget itself, which is why the common thinking is that a movie has to make 2.5 times its production budget to actually be profitable. By those standards, none of the above movies got out of the red. And three of them had movie stars in the leads, all of them had directors of some note, and one of them was based on a best selling novel… which is to say, they had every advantage a movie could have, and every opportunity to do well. But none of them even had impressive opening weekends, which suggests that audiences never cared in the first place, which suggests that this trend is not going to change anytime soon.
So, there is a silver lining to Kirk’s failure to do any actual homework on the business of filmmaking: he’s not gonna lose any investor’s money on a period horror film, because he won’t be able to find investors for a period horror film. Three cheers for small victories.
[via Metal Insider]
