‘Discuss the issues raised by media ownership in the production and exchange of media in your chosen media area’

‘Discuss the issues raised by media ownership in the production and exchange of media in your chosen media area’

In the film ‘kickass’, the film was financed by Marv (Matthew Vaughn) and Plan B entertainment (Brad Pitt). The film was fist financed personally by Matthew Vaughn and had a budget of only $10 million, but after pre-production started and the script for the film was written, Brad Pitt and his company Plan B entertainment became interested in the film and contributed a further $20 million to the project to make up the budget of around $30 million. Some issues that were raised were that they only had a relatively small budget to make the film, a budget of around $28 million. To make a film to the full potential and make it as good as possible you would need a much bigger budget that this one that they had. Because of this small budget they encountered a few problems when making the film. The first of these being that they couldn’t afford to higher lots of big name Hollywood actors, because of this they turned to a lot of British actors who had only been in small films and in small TV shows in the UK. The most notable actor in the film was Nicholas Cage, who has been in a lot of high budget Hollywood blockbusters. When making the film he wasn’t paid a lot of money like he usually is to be in a film but instead worked for the S.A.G actors minimum wage, this is the minimum amount of money that an actor can be paid to act in a film of a certain budget. The next biggest actor in the film was British actor Aaron Johnson. His most notable role previous to this one was playing a young John Lennon in the film ’Nowhere Boy’ which is about his early life. He was also in the chick flick aimed at teenage girls called ‘Angus thongs and perfect snogging’.

Apart from not being able to attract big name actors to star in the film another problem that they encountered was the amount of money they had to spend on special effects. This was a problem because the film is supposed to be a sort of action/comedy cross over and there are some scenes where special effects such as CGI would have been needed but they didn’t have the money to do a lot of this on computers.

Also there was a problem with the script. Because of the graphic nature of the story they had to distribute the film as a 15 age rating. As the film was about superheroes it would have attracted many people under this age but because of the rating the could not see it and so Marv and Plan B maybe couldn’t make the most money possible from the film because of the small audience they had to distribute to. The film then ended up as a cult film as it couldn’t be watched by the massive target audience that are interested in this type of film.

I think that if the film hadn’t had these issues and problems then the film and film makers may have made a lot more money as the film had a lot of potential and could have been much more successful than what it eventually was.