(DISCLAIMER: This is an article about porn. You may not believe this, but I’m not a huge porn fan. I’m totally not.)
This is pretty much what happened to the porn industry in real life. Back when XXX films had to be seen in theaters, porn producers (or as I call them, “pornducers”) actually put effort into creating high-quality entertainment to lure in audiences. (“High-quality,” by the way, is relative. The very best of 1970’s porn was still worse than almost everything that was coming out of Hollywood – not that I’d know.) Once porn became available on video, people decided that enjoying it in private was the way to go, for obvious reasons. Since there’s a lot more room on video store shelves (behind those saloon doors) than in adult movie theaters, and since it’s a lot cheaper to make a video than a film, the market was glutted with product. Hot, hot product.
The biggest XXX film of the past 30 years.
Home video made adult films more popular than ever (raking in over $8 billion a year by the early 2000’s), but individual movies didn’t make much, and it didn’t make sense to sink a lot of money into any one production. Porn became a perfect example of what Chris Anderson recently coined “the Long Tail” (which sounds dirty in this context). The industry no longer chased after big hits like Debbie Does Dallas, The Devil In Miss Jones, or Deep Throat, but it made more money than ever before through lots and lots of cheap product. This article from 2000 quotes a Toronto porn executive (or as I call him, an “XXXecutive”) as saying, “A good porn movie takes one week to make and costs $25,000.” And by “good” porn movie, he means “big budget.” Twenty five grand won’t pay the catering on a Hollywood production.
According to post-70s conventional wisdom, the average porn customer doesn’t want production values. He (or she, to be fair) wants just enough movie magic to see the sex. Anything more just cuts into your bottom line (man, everything sounds dirty in this post). The Internet has turned conventional wisdom to borderline natural law. When the world gets more cheap/free porn at home than it could ever need, producing a feature-film quality adult film seems totally quixotic.
So I guess that makes Ari Joone the Man of La Mancha.
Insert your own booty joke here.
In 2005, Joone’s company, Digital Playground, produced Pirates for a staggering one million dollars. Once again, everything’s relative; in Hollywood, a million is a minuscule budget. But by XXX standards it was so huge that Variety reported on its premiere. Pirates even got written up in an issue of Newsweek, under the headline, “XXX Blue, Spending Green.” According to the article, “It features lavish special effects, epic sea battles and skillful swordplay.”
That is a lie. I saw Pirates last weekend, when I gave it to a friend as part of a bachelor party. It’s sort of a spoof/ripoff of Pirates of the Caribbean, and it’s pretty damn bad. The “lavish” special effects look like a video game from five years ago. Ditto the epic sea battles, which last two minutes tops. And the swordplay isn’t anything you can’t see in a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. By the standards of mainstream film and television, Pirates is weak sauce indeed. But there’s no denying Pirates is a big step above most porn (um, I’m told), and investing in quality seems to have paid off. According to adult film news site Fleshbot:
“Pirates” has reportedly sold over 100,000 copies, and Digital Playground is duplicating DVDs in 25,000 unit increments. On average, a standard, low-budget porn title is considered successful if it has a run of 5,000 copies.
When you consider that adult DVDs regularly sell for $50 or more, Pirates pulled in some serious doubloons. But that was just small potatoes compared with Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge, which was released last fall.
Ironically, I watched a pirated copy of this.
Pirates 2 had a budget of ten million dollars. That makes it more expensive than Juno or Little Miss Sunshine. I skimmed through it, and I must say it has a lot less to apologize for than Pirates 1. The special effects have risen to the level of a cheap made-for-TV movie, the cinematography actually looks a little cinematic, and the acting has been upgraded from “amateurish” to merely “bad.”
But by porn standards, Pirates 2 was Citizen Kane. It currently has an 8.3/10 on IMDB (which, sure enough, is within striking distance of Citizen Kane‘s 8.6/10). By comparison, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End only has a 7/10. Theoretically, that means that Pirates 2 is the better film. I think that’s comparing apples to, um, ripe, luscious melons. But that 8.3 definitely means is that the porn fans who vote on IMDB think Pirates 2 blows other porn out of the water (a metaphor which sounds both sexual and nautical).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6iZBi3Qneg
If the average skin flick costs $25,000 to produce, than Pirates 2 was 400 times above average. To put that in perspective, this PDF says the average Hollywood film costs $60 million. Pirates 2 would be as if Warner Brothers made a movie that cost $24 billion… and then doubled its money on opening weekend.
When Pirates 2 was released last fall, it sold 240,000 copies in its first week, at somewhere between $70 and $100 a copy. Most porn films don’t even sell 1,000 copies, period. Now keep in mind, that sales figure comes from Digital Playground itself, and I can’t seem to find a third-party report on how much the movie’s actually made in total. But it seems clear that Pirates 2 is a monster hit.
By porn standards, Pirates and Pirates 2 are something novel. But Hollywood has known for years that if you put giant stars in a film, add special effects, and market the hell out of it, you get buzz and business. What’s surprising is that until Joone came along, no one made it work with an adult film.
So why not? Big budget porn looks like a license to print money. How come we haven’t seen it since the 70’s? Well, I’m not a freakconomist, but…
1. Producers confused the best way with the only way. We all learned from Boogie Nights that big budget adult productions didn’t stand a chance against an avalanche of cheap videos. But we’ve learned from the YouTube era that it’s possible to carve out a niche even in a saturated market. Given the right value proposition, people will pay for Judd Apatow movies even when they get fewer laughs for the dollar than from cheap/free online comedy. The existence of large amounts of low budget content doesn’t mean people won’t pay for slicker, higher-quality content. It may even mean there’s a huge pent-up desire for slicker content. It’s the Grey Goose phenomenon, only with dirty pictures.
I’m betting a lot of Pirates copies were purchased by people who don’t usually buy adult films. By giving it a Hollywood sheen and a plot, they made it appeal to people who are curious about porn, but are turned off by videos that look like they were shot in someone’s condo. Pirates bridges the gap between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, thus pulling in a whole new audience.
Nevertheless…
2. The people producing low budget porn weren’t wrong. Low budget porn makes money. The same article that said a “good porn movie” costs $25,000 also said you can potentially make a million bucks off that investment. That’s a 40x return. Now, I’m not exactly sure how much the Pirates movies have made, but it’s a safe bet they haven’t grossed forty times their budgets. Looking at it that way, cheap porn seems like the way to go. You risk less, and you stand to gain a lot more (relative to your investment). So maybe people in the industry always knew you could do very well by producing big budget stuff – they just were doing even better with the low budget stuff.
Yes, they had a set with a greenscreen and everything.
3. Pirates wasn’t just expensive – it was a certain kind of expensive. Let’s say I came to you with a proposition. “Hey, I know what people are looking for in their pornography – animated skeletons and naval combat. All I need is a million bucks to make it happen. You want in?” This sounds strange, and it IS strange. If you’re in the mood for a sex scene, you don’t want to see a swordfight, and if you’re in a mood for a pirate adventure, you don’t want to sit through long sex scenes. Swashbuckling and hardcore sex are like steak and donuts: they’re both tasty, but they have no business sharing a plate. And yet, it’s exactly that combination that made Pirates a huge success.
Producers spend millions on movies about sex all the time. Nine and a Half Weeks had a budget of $17 million. But Pirates isn’t about sex, it’s “about” swashbuckling piracy. It’s an action-adventure movie with explicit sex in it – that’s much more innovative than your standard “erotic” studio fare or indie film. You could actually remove all the sex from Pirates and still have a feature length film. In fact, they did this, creating a pointless R-rated version.
Joone realized that spending millions on porn is bad business, and he didn’t spend millions on porn. He spent millions on special effects. If you just put the money towards nice sets and lights, all you’d have is a smutty independent film, and it’s not like Shortbus was a huge hit. You’ve got to buy yourself some crazy shots for a (clean) trailer you can put on YouTube. To make a porn blockbuster, you recreate a Hollywood blockbuster, and add sex. In other words, you make a tentpole film, in every sense of the phrase.
4. There’s a big difference between “expensive” and “most expensive.” A lot of the press about Pirates focused on its record-breaking budget. That was the story: “The biggest production in the history of adult films.” (But as Wikipedia points out, Caligula should probably hold this title.) Joone put so much money into the movie partly because he knew that would interest the mainstream press, which would do his advertising for him. The budget’s a publicity stunt. It certainly doesn’t follow that every expensive porn from now on will receive the same publicity. The next time someone makes a $1 million skin flick, it won’t be news. Nobody will write about it in Newsweek, and the movie won’t do nearly as well.
But once again, I’m not a porn expert, and it’s totally possible that a bunch of people HAVE produced million-dollar adult films in the wake of Pirates. If anyone’s reading this and knows, write about it in the comments. I’d love to know if a new era of big-budget skin flicks is dawning, and Jack Horner’s dream lives on.