Hollywood Babble On & On #837: New Theories Of Relativity

Oh that Ryan Kavanaugh, the ginger headed mini-mogul, can never be accused of being lazy.  His Relativity movie company is cutting back on acquiring movies, preferring instead to produce their own, and to take advantage of Chinese investments they're ordering movies in development to rewrite their scripts to include scenes to be filmed and set in China, whether it has anything to do with the story or not.

All this while their biggest investor Elliot Associates takes away the bountiful Beverly 2 film production fund that Relativity used to use to co-finance films with Universal Pictures. Elliot Associates is pulling out because Kavanaugh had Relativity releasing its own productions in direct competition with the films they were co-producing with Elliot Associates and Universal.

And let's not forget that Kavanaugh spent some major buckage buying Rogue Pictures from Universal to turn it into a "lifestyle brand."  I said nothing good was going to come from it, and guess what, I was right.

"What, me worry?"

Of course the people running Relativity, chiefly Kavanaugh are saying that everything is all hunky-dory slap on the rose-colored glasses because we are the champions.


Why are they saying that?


Because their last two releases, Limitless did okay at the box office, and their current release The Immortals had a pretty good opening weekend.


While that's all well and good, I can't help but worry.


You see major studios love to do what my grandpa called "poor mouthing." That means they like to claim that they're broke when they're actually flush with the moolah to hopefully avoid paying net points to people who made their profits possible.

When the opposite is being said, especially by an independent company, I start to worry. That's usually a sign that things are not as good as those in charge would like to admit.


Look at the histories of every independent producer and distributor that imploded, and there are many of them, there is usually a period of mad cheer-leading by the people running the company about how great things are.


I can't see how they can be great.  Sure Limitless did well and The Immortals did have a great opening weekend, but that's not a guaranteed that they will have a positive effect on the company's coffers.  There are literally a million things that can whittle down a movie's profits, especially when you drive away a major investor, waste money on a harebrained scheme to turn a mostly failed movie imprint into a "lifestyle brand," and desperately rewrite movies to qualify for investments from Maoist plutocrats.


I'd hate to see another independent company crash and burn, the ash-heap of independent film history is far too high already, but I don't like the signs I'm seeing.