[rockarage]

Hollywood losses are partly due to Hollywood accounting. The budgets for production are real cost. In these high budget movies, there are major expenses apart from just salary. In the Dark knight, the batmobile and other machines are real vehicles, the sets are made with real materials, live effects are not cheap, permits are not free, not everything is done on a computer. This only scratch the surface of the expense involved in making a big budget film.

[InclinedPlane]

Production budgets are inflated because the only way to get a share of the profit is to get a share of the gross. But that is not nearly as scalable so it is necessarily limited. This forces the remainder of returns to contributors to be in the form of direct payments. Thus, actors earn 10s of millions up front, for example. But that also extends to everyone down the line. Effects houses need to charge a lot for their services because they rarely get a cut. There are indeed very real major costs to making a movie but those costs are low compared to the effects I've outlined.

More so, the limits of independently funding a movie are not necassarily any lower than what Hollywood can provide. It's just that Hollywood has historically proven to be the easiest route so it has been popular, but who's to say what the limits of competition are? VCs have pumped more money into tech startups for less return than some hollywood big budget movies, for example.

[jordan0day]

I've heard of "hollywood accounting" and the like before, but this particular effect is something new to me.

The effect you mention with effects houses, big-name-actors, etc. charging lots of up-front fees to compensate for the fact that the studio would try to screw them out of their cut of the profits sounds surprisingly similar to the health care situation in the US. Hospitals charge patients that they know can pay (private or gov't insured) much higher fees, because they know there are many, many patients who will not. There's also different affects related to which insurers are willing to pay which rates, etc.

[Aqua_Geek]

> permits are not free

The permit process is absolutely ridiculous in some cities. Also, unless you're shooting on your backlot, location fees are getting astronomical. Everybody and their dog thinks that their property is worth thousands of dollars a day to film.

I think we'll start seeing more and more stuff being shot outside of the greater LA area.

[Keyframe]

Only a small example regarding Nolan/Batman. Bank robbery scene had more than 700kW lights running... that's almost a megawatt in electricity generators ON LOCATION (natural location, not set within a studio). Cost of running those lights and electricity alone for a few days of shooting (sans people and everything else) equals to the amount of an indie movie.