Category: Big Business

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What It Is: 10/5/09

What I’m reading: Early issues of my magazine, as I wrapped up the 10th anniversary ish. Boy, was that depressing. I also read the first 20 pages of George, Being George, which I’ll give some more time into this fall.

What I’m listening to: The bad new Zero 7 record, and the much better new Bebel Gilberto record.

What I’m watching: Charade, American Gangster, a little of Silent Movie, and a bunch of football.

What I’m drinking: Plymouth & tonic

What Rufus is up to: Being an Ambassadog at Warwick’s Applefest town fair (with pix by my beloved wife). He got to meet a bunch of greys, but one of the owners kept trying to convince us to adopt Dollar, one of the hounds they were fostering. One of the other owners sympathized with my take on why we’ve held off on grey #2: what if he or she isn’t as awesome as Rufus (as in, can’t handle 9 hours without a bathroom break, or likes to chew on stuff, or gives Ru bad ideas and the two of them spend all day smoking weed and goofing around on Playstation)?

Where I’m going: The 20-year reunion for the high school I left after my junior year. In November, I’ll go to the 20-year reunion for the high school from which I actually graduated. Don’t tell.

What I’m happy about: My pal Ian stopped in for a visit on Friday, giving us an excuse to go to Cafe Matisse for another fantastic meal.

What I’m sad about: 10 years spent on this magazine, 20 years since I graduated high school, and, um, 30 years since I saw The Fish that Saved Pittsburgh. The calendar really does kick you in the nuts.

What I’m worried about: That I’m forgetting something.

What I’m pondering: What I’ve learned in the past decade about the pharma/biopharma industry and the contract services sector.

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Inglourious ROI

With their “media empire” on the verge of collapse, the Weinstein brothers were pulling out all the stops to promote the opening of Inglourious Basterds last week. They’ve even played the contrition card in explaining to the NYTimes that they lost their focus after leaving Disney and starting their own company, using investor money to buy a fashion line, invest in a TV channel and a social networking site, and other activities that don’t qualify as making movies people would pay to see. (Here’s a fun takedown of that article, at the AV Club.)

So it must be gratifying to them that the new Tarantino movie was #1 at the box office this weekend, with nearly $38 million in tickets sold. The marketing is a bit misleading, since the Basterds — a squad of Jewish-American soldiers who ambush and scalp Nazis in occupied France — don’t actually get much screen time. But that’s a minor quibble. I still enjoyed the heck out of the film; it just wasn’t the movie it was marketed as. (I’m assuming the 4-hour DVD version will have plenty more carnage.)

Which leads me to this WSJ article about the movie’s performance and its marketing. It highlights the problems the Weinstein Co. still faces, but the article also seems to have buried the lede:

Part of the success of “Inglourious Basterds,” which was directed by Quentin Tarantino, comes from its $35 million marketing campaign, which Weinstein Co. executives say Harvey Weinstein approached with a renewed focus after missing the mark of previous campaigns. Last year for example, the company used stick figure drawings to sell Kevin Smith’s “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” which underperformed at the box office.

Let me see if I have this correct: the film grossed $38 million domestically and the marketing cost $35 million? With another $27 million in overseas sales, the movie made $65 million last weekend.

If that $35 mil. covers worldwide marketing, then they spent 54 cents for every dollar in ticket sales. If it was only for the domestic campaign, then it was almost 1 dollar spent for 1 dollar in sales (which are shared with the movie theaters).

Between this marketing campaign and the movie’s production cost of $65-70 million, that means this big success is still $35-40 million behind the 8-ball. Sure, there a lot of other revenue streams to help them close the gap, but this is probably not a good model for running a business.

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Left-Wing Nutjobbery

Another day, another pinko leftist newspaper railing about income inequality and how it demolishes the Social Security fund:

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration data — without counting billions of dollars more in pay that remains off federal radar screens that measure wages and salaries.

. . . The growing portion of pay that exceeds the maximum amount subject to payroll taxes has contributed to the weakening of the Social Security trust fund. In May, the government said the Social Security fund would be exhausted in 2037, four years earlier than was predicted in 2008.

I was going to go into a whole Colbertian ramble on the left-wing moonbats at the Wall Street Journal, but frankly it’s just a good article about the ramifications of executive pay scales. Give it a read.