Mike Fleming Jr. has a really insightful interview with Steven Soderbergh at Deadline Hollywood. Among other things, the discussion covers the spiraling costs of launching a blockbuster film, which actually should have grown cheaper with so many new viral ways to reach audiences. I’ll guess the culprits are entrenched interests and insufficient data. An excerpt:

“Deadline Hollywood:

On global summer tentpoles, studios routinely use $125 million as the given in the mathematical theorem of what it costs to launch these films. Is there no way to bring down that massive number?  

Steven Soderbergh:

I know they’ve tried to figure this out because it’s killing them, but I haven’t seen a Nate Silver-like systemic analysis of what an ad dollar does, exactly.

Deadline Hollywood:

TV spends seem very inefficient for their high cost.

Steven Soderbergh:

Yeah, but nobody wants to be the first to challenge that, which is weird to me because it would be groundbreaking for somebody to be the one who goes, ‘I’m capping this at $15 million.’ They’re afraid, and yet they lose all the time, doing the thing they always do. It’s an extreme brand of loss aversion. It’s just frustrating because the trickle-down effect is, creatively, things are getting narrower. We did one bold thing on Magic Mike. I had this conversation with Danny Feldman at Warner Bros, when I asked things like, ‘On a $25 million spend, what does that last $8 million get you?” He says, ‘We don’t really know.’ But Danny said, and I’m sure people all over town who love this will be screaming, but Danny said, “I’ve never seen any evidence that outdoor does anything. How would you guys feel if we did no outdoor and took that $3 million and put it into more spots.” And we said, “Great.” We didn’t do any outdoor, at all.

Deadline Hollywood: 

It doesn’t seem to have hurt you at all. Didn’t you and Channing Tatum finance that movie by not taking your fees to become an investor like Todd Phillips did in The Hangover?

Steven Soderbergh:

I don’t know what Todd did exactly, but Channing and I split the negative 50-50. When he called me two years ago and said was I interested, I said there was only one way. You and I are going to pay for it, we’re not talking to anybody else, and we’re in preproduction tomorrow because we have to start shooting the day after Labor Day because that’s the slot that I’ve got and you’ve got. I flew to Cannes four weeks later and sold enough territories to cover us. Cash was coming out of our pocket, but at least on paper we were somewhat covered. That’s how we did it.

Deadline Hollywood:

Todd Phillips made one of the great director paydays on The Hangover. Is Magic Mike the most you’ve ever made on a film?

Steven Soderbergh: 

It will be, I think. It certainly ought to be.

Deadline Hollywood: 

What does that say about taking entrepreneurial risk when the business is shifting like it is?

Steven Soderbergh: 

It’s hard for me to use this as an example people should follow. I knew that as ideas go that this was Halley’s Comet. I just knew Channing in a stripper movie, that’s gold. I wouldn’t do that all the time. I had to borrow money from my accountant in the last month of post. To hold up my end, it took everything I had.”