Well, this kind of stuff is over my head. Anyways, the powers that be allowed speculators to help bring the world economy to its knees with oil. Why shouldn't it allow them to muck around with the movie industry? But as they say, showbiz is a business. It's too difficult for me to wrap my brain around this, as it is, so maybe those of you who are made of brighter stuff can explain what this might mean for independent filmmaking, if such a thing became well established. That is, what would it mean for things like gettting financed?
Here's the best way (and others will get more detailed) I put it to myself:
In Futures, say you have corn. You can speculate how corn prices are going to go by things like Season conditions, current price, growing patterns-things you can calculate with numbers and can reasonably be predicted within a certain spectrum.
Movies are going to be based on things like script, director, and "word of mouth" (I can't believe they're allowing that). There are fewer unpredictable, finicky groups than film goers-they will go out and push critical busts like "Transformers Rise of the Fallen" to multi-hundred million earnings, but critical successes can bomb at the box office, but you can't trace these trends, because its subjective to opinion- I almost liken movie goers to chaos theory in action.
What does it mean for independents? It means unless your movie is following a certain trend at that particular moment-it means studios are far less likely to look at your work.
IE: Say Teletubbies Meets Spongebob does a MASSIVE 400 million box office haul-do you have something similar? Maybe Thomas the Tank meets Backyardigans? No? Sorry, we can't take a chance, but Teletubbies/Spongebob is the way to go.
Extreme? Absolutely, but think of all the movies you've watched that were horrible in your eyes, yet made 6 digit millions at the box office. Speculation suggests Hollywood would be more interested in putting out those.Now everyone will try and make 10 different versions of the same film (Avatar was a smash? How about Blue Aliens and Earth? The Forest People? Earth Vs ET?)-Oh wait, there's a new film it's about a dogs eating out of high tech food bowls! That just made 500 million! Get our those dogs and bowl films!
These are extreme examples, but you can see why a lot of people would be in an uproar int he film community....money, money, money(to the extreme in this case)
Now having said THAT: I'm thinking (someone comes and modifies my idea), but that the basic, basic gist.
