ROIs have become a bureaucratic scam. The numbers have become pointless, except to demonstrate how good bureaucrats have gotten across the board at inflating ROIs.
The Gumboot friday estimate was the worst, but these arts funding ones are pretty much the same. Meaningless metric at this point.
Thanks Sapphi, this ROI scam is really distorting outcomes across all sectors. Gumboot Friday is troubling, as are a variety of other government grants to charities.
I did notice you didn’t include any of Taika Waititi’s films as having paid off their investment — I’d heard some years ago Boy broke even, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople was the only film that actually made a profit for NZFC in decades, making Taika Waititi our most successful director ever with two films that actually gave a ROI. Was that funded differently or did I hear wrong?
The NZFC hasn't reported them as paying back their investments. On the website database they mark all investments paid back with an * and grey out their cell. So, maybe they made money from Taika's films? If they have, it isn't in their database right now.
Lots of tiny script development investments are paid back, but almost never the big ones from feature film production investment.
That’s INCREDIBLY interesting, thanks for highlighting that. I went to film school in 2016 so that was right when Taika was taking off and NZFC and the rest of the industry tbh were BUZZING about the fact they finally had profitable films, and that hunt for the wilderpeople had been SO profitable it would actually fund more films. So it’s very weird to me that they don’t list what was our two most successful films of the century nearly 10 years later….
ROIs have become a bureaucratic scam. The numbers have become pointless, except to demonstrate how good bureaucrats have gotten across the board at inflating ROIs.
The Gumboot friday estimate was the worst, but these arts funding ones are pretty much the same. Meaningless metric at this point.
Thanks Sapphi, this ROI scam is really distorting outcomes across all sectors. Gumboot Friday is troubling, as are a variety of other government grants to charities.
I did notice you didn’t include any of Taika Waititi’s films as having paid off their investment — I’d heard some years ago Boy broke even, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople was the only film that actually made a profit for NZFC in decades, making Taika Waititi our most successful director ever with two films that actually gave a ROI. Was that funded differently or did I hear wrong?
The NZFC hasn't reported them as paying back their investments. On the website database they mark all investments paid back with an * and grey out their cell. So, maybe they made money from Taika's films? If they have, it isn't in their database right now.
Lots of tiny script development investments are paid back, but almost never the big ones from feature film production investment.
That’s INCREDIBLY interesting, thanks for highlighting that. I went to film school in 2016 so that was right when Taika was taking off and NZFC and the rest of the industry tbh were BUZZING about the fact they finally had profitable films, and that hunt for the wilderpeople had been SO profitable it would actually fund more films. So it’s very weird to me that they don’t list what was our two most successful films of the century nearly 10 years later….