Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Tracy O.
It is abundantly obvious to anyone who goes to the movies, ever, that the budget of a movie has no particular relation to its actual quality, something that, as Jesse Alexander points out in a guest post at io9, is especially pronounced in science fiction movies. This is an obvious point, but the solution to it isn't. It would be lovely if every director, writer, and producer in the world simultaneously decided in the bestest instance of collusion of all time that they only wanted to make movies with nuanced plots, strong character development, nuanced effects, etc. That, however, is an unlikely scenario.
Because in my day job I spend a lot of time thinking about the best ways to motivate people to do their best work, and a lot of that thinking centers around compensation, Alexander's post got me thinking about pay for directors and producers, and what might be the best way to structure it to motivate them to make different kinds of movies. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, median earnings for salaried directors and producers in 2006 were $56,310, and the median 50 percent earned between $37,980 and $88,700. That's not a lot of money for most people, and the salaries are low enough that small increases--or decreases--might provide a powerful incentive to make different kinds of movies.
I can think of a couple of principles that might encourage more interesting movie-making if they were adopted in a professional salary formula. First, decouple salaries for directors and producers from the the dollar figures in budgets. If compensation is tied to total number of shooting days, or the size of a production staff, etc., bigger-budget productions still might end up producing higher salaries, but that would be because the project is genuinely larger, not simply because more money is being spent on it. If a director or a producer isn't directly involved in certain days or kinds of effects work, perhaps that shouldn't be figured directly into their compensation. But there should be a strong valuation of what a director and producers actually contribute to a production. That leads to a second principle: salaries based on the earnings of a movie are extremely tricky. They might appear to be a straightforward motivational tool, but it's not clear to me that they are. It's not entirely predictable what leads something to be a hit, and less clear how individual directors' work plays into the result, given the variables constituted by stars, release dates, advertising budgets, etc. In other words, tying compensation to profit may not make sense in a world where there isn't (for most directors and producers, anyway) a clear way to measure the connection between their work and ultimate profits. I'd be interested to see contract formulas that reward directors (and other participants in movies) for among other things, performance above financial expectations, critical reviews, academy awards, etc. In other words, a nuanced performance bonus system like the ones used for athletes might encourage actors and directors to pursue different kinds of projects.
Compensation, of course, isn't the only thing bloating movie budgets. But special effects don't just spring into being on their own (at least, not yet). People make the decision to make movies that rely on them, and that they need to be included in movies that don't rely on them. And people make decisions based on a complicated cocktail of factors, including creative vision, desire for fame, and money. There are purists out there. But money matters, and it's something that can be studied, and modified, and controlled.