Yeah, fair point. I did swither over whether to mention it. An Oscar nod is prestige rather than the commercial pull I want to track, but he is a well-known face. You've tipped me the other way, and I took out that mention to avoid muddying that distinction. Thanks for raising it.
It is an edge case, as “Obsession” genuinely doesn’t have any star power (for now anyway, I’d say the actors in that film will be A Listers in a few years), and I’m sure there’s not as many people going to “Backrooms” just because of Chiwetel Ejiofor rather than the concept itself (although I’m sure there are many for whom it could tip them into seeing it). Enjoyed the article.
How do you balance the marketing spend that films with famous actors get vs films without them. Like Mamdani’s team figures out how to use all the great social creators and their shows to turn him from a city councilman into an international superstar. Smaller movies could do this with the right size budgets.
Hey Emily. The truth is, we can't. We can't build control groups that include films with a big star but no marketing, or films with no stars but a big marketing push. There are some odd films here and there, but they are rare and unrepresentative outliers (i.e. complete turkeys or films with another highly marketable element).
Which is a shame, as you're right to ask if we can disentangle the two factors of fame and marketing dollars. That said, they go together so frequently that in all practical terms, we don't need to separate them.
Talk about timing. I was about to write a similar themed post on my stack using the apparent appeal of Mark Wahlberg's power to get packaged for a movie seems geared for greenlighting, even when you look at his specific box office returns and most are well under the break even levels using broad measure calculations. It's almost like you'd want to try to cast him to get the financing to make the film, then recast his role as you go to shoot in order to avoid his cost and still make the film that can make money. I stopped myself going down that rabbit holw when I thought, "Is his story anomalous?" Are there a whole cadre of actors that are "salable" to financiers yet don't get the comperable audience draw? I ended up casually saying, I'll have to ask Steven Follows for the numbers."
Your numbers do lay out some argument groundrules for those approaching stars for their films, derived from your base numbers. Like, if you're trying to get a named star, don't commit more than 25% of your budget to land them, the return won't cover that spend. And if you go for two, they'll have to both be less than the 40% gain combined or its not worth it in returns.
You always give us lots to contemplate! Thanks for that.
I suspect this effect is dropping over time. also would be interesting to see how each actor's impact changes over time. most of them drop off...see clooney, roberts. etc
Where did you study statistics? Correlation is not causation. How did you contol for the possibility that “stars” have better access to better scripts and attach themselves to movies that are more likely to be good??
Now, now, there was a more polite way to express this than how you chose to. I'm all for challenges and follow-up questions, but let's be kind and courteous where we can.
Yes, quality was one of the factors I investigated during my research. When controlling for both audience and critic scores, the star premium barely moves (the like-for-like premium went from about 1.3x to 1.2x, and the over-time pattern was unchanged),
I left it out of the piece partly because it was a null result, but mainly because of a deeper problem with measuring quality independently of cast. A Metacritic or IMDb score isn't really a measure of "quality" in the abstract. It's more a measure of how much people liked the film, and how much people like a film is itself partly driven by who's in it.
So a chunk of the star's effect is already baked into those ratings. We can't cleanly "control for quality" when the thing you're controlling for is itself downstream of the star.
I'm going to write a new article in a few days that looks at quality in more detail, as a few people have also reached out privately to ask about it. I'm surprised that people feel that having a famous name in a film indicates that a film might be better than one starring non-famous people. I don't think that's true but I shall look into it in more detail and report back
I am curious how celebrity affects the marketing budget. I'd wager the bigger the name, the bigger and longer the ad spend, therefore granting an uptick in attendance. Which then of course skews the results. There have been a few star-powered films with marketing budgets tickling the $100M category, overshading the entire landscape of a good film, with no-name talent and a modest budget.
IMO, Obsession is a better barometer than Backrooms; it has 1/10 the production budget, no big-name actors. The Backrooms marketing budget is undisclosed, but let's face it, we all saw the hype and ads. And Backrooms has household name talent.
For Obsession, the marketing budget is stated as *$10M, if math serves, that is 1000% of the budget.
So, arguably, the marketing budget for Backrooms is probably close to $20M easily. And for reference: One Battle, a celebrity-driven film, was $70M!
BO results:
Obsession: $148m (td) 13x profit
Backrooms: $120m (td) 4x profit
One Battle: $150m budget $70m ad spend $213m (td) -10M+/- Loss
Star Wars Grogu: Budget: $165M- marketing $130M BO $250M -50M+/- Loss
Anyway, your math and analysis far eclipse anything I could muster. My point is: Celebrity plus Marketing spend are connected at the hip.
I find “Backrooms” an odd film to consider as evidence, given that its lead is an Oscar-nominated actor.
Yeah, fair point. I did swither over whether to mention it. An Oscar nod is prestige rather than the commercial pull I want to track, but he is a well-known face. You've tipped me the other way, and I took out that mention to avoid muddying that distinction. Thanks for raising it.
It is an edge case, as “Obsession” genuinely doesn’t have any star power (for now anyway, I’d say the actors in that film will be A Listers in a few years), and I’m sure there’s not as many people going to “Backrooms” just because of Chiwetel Ejiofor rather than the concept itself (although I’m sure there are many for whom it could tip them into seeing it). Enjoyed the article.
How do you balance the marketing spend that films with famous actors get vs films without them. Like Mamdani’s team figures out how to use all the great social creators and their shows to turn him from a city councilman into an international superstar. Smaller movies could do this with the right size budgets.
Hey Emily. The truth is, we can't. We can't build control groups that include films with a big star but no marketing, or films with no stars but a big marketing push. There are some odd films here and there, but they are rare and unrepresentative outliers (i.e. complete turkeys or films with another highly marketable element).
Which is a shame, as you're right to ask if we can disentangle the two factors of fame and marketing dollars. That said, they go together so frequently that in all practical terms, we don't need to separate them.
Talk about timing. I was about to write a similar themed post on my stack using the apparent appeal of Mark Wahlberg's power to get packaged for a movie seems geared for greenlighting, even when you look at his specific box office returns and most are well under the break even levels using broad measure calculations. It's almost like you'd want to try to cast him to get the financing to make the film, then recast his role as you go to shoot in order to avoid his cost and still make the film that can make money. I stopped myself going down that rabbit holw when I thought, "Is his story anomalous?" Are there a whole cadre of actors that are "salable" to financiers yet don't get the comperable audience draw? I ended up casually saying, I'll have to ask Steven Follows for the numbers."
Your numbers do lay out some argument groundrules for those approaching stars for their films, derived from your base numbers. Like, if you're trying to get a named star, don't commit more than 25% of your budget to land them, the return won't cover that spend. And if you go for two, they'll have to both be less than the 40% gain combined or its not worth it in returns.
You always give us lots to contemplate! Thanks for that.
I suspect this effect is dropping over time. also would be interesting to see how each actor's impact changes over time. most of them drop off...see clooney, roberts. etc
Great idea! I'll look into it
Where did you study statistics? Correlation is not causation. How did you contol for the possibility that “stars” have better access to better scripts and attach themselves to movies that are more likely to be good??
Now, now, there was a more polite way to express this than how you chose to. I'm all for challenges and follow-up questions, but let's be kind and courteous where we can.
Yes, quality was one of the factors I investigated during my research. When controlling for both audience and critic scores, the star premium barely moves (the like-for-like premium went from about 1.3x to 1.2x, and the over-time pattern was unchanged),
I left it out of the piece partly because it was a null result, but mainly because of a deeper problem with measuring quality independently of cast. A Metacritic or IMDb score isn't really a measure of "quality" in the abstract. It's more a measure of how much people liked the film, and how much people like a film is itself partly driven by who's in it.
So a chunk of the star's effect is already baked into those ratings. We can't cleanly "control for quality" when the thing you're controlling for is itself downstream of the star.
I'm going to write a new article in a few days that looks at quality in more detail, as a few people have also reached out privately to ask about it. I'm surprised that people feel that having a famous name in a film indicates that a film might be better than one starring non-famous people. I don't think that's true but I shall look into it in more detail and report back
I am curious how celebrity affects the marketing budget. I'd wager the bigger the name, the bigger and longer the ad spend, therefore granting an uptick in attendance. Which then of course skews the results. There have been a few star-powered films with marketing budgets tickling the $100M category, overshading the entire landscape of a good film, with no-name talent and a modest budget.
IMO, Obsession is a better barometer than Backrooms; it has 1/10 the production budget, no big-name actors. The Backrooms marketing budget is undisclosed, but let's face it, we all saw the hype and ads. And Backrooms has household name talent.
For Obsession, the marketing budget is stated as *$10M, if math serves, that is 1000% of the budget.
So, arguably, the marketing budget for Backrooms is probably close to $20M easily. And for reference: One Battle, a celebrity-driven film, was $70M!
BO results:
Obsession: $148m (td) 13x profit
Backrooms: $120m (td) 4x profit
One Battle: $150m budget $70m ad spend $213m (td) -10M+/- Loss
Star Wars Grogu: Budget: $165M- marketing $130M BO $250M -50M+/- Loss
Anyway, your math and analysis far eclipse anything I could muster. My point is: Celebrity plus Marketing spend are connected at the hip.