[jamesgatz]

With the rather off-the-cuff operating strategy I outlined above, your annual operating budget (including staff and production costs) would be ~$14 million. Initial start up costs (focusing mainly on equipment buys) would be about $4 million. This would get you 75 feature length films a year.

In total, producing our studio's first 75 films would cost $5 million dollars LESS than the total production cost of just one of this weekend's wide release films (in this case, Haywire, made for $23 million). Go see Haywire, and think to yourself about a) whether that movie really needed to cost what it did (bear in mind that the majority of its costs were sunk into the logistics of shooting abroad in multiple Euro locations and filling out its secondary cast with A-list talent; were the locations and secondary cast essential?) and b) whether or not you might have been more interested in the film had it been produced w/o studio constraints (meaning more nudity and explicit violence; a "hard R" or NC-17 as opposed to the film's "soft R" rating).