The Last Gasp of the Big Budget Porno
https://archive.is/gLlgt
>In 2011, award winning porn director Axel Braun produced and directed Star Wars XXX; a glossy, expensive, and very hardcore take on the story of Luke Skywalker. Not surprisingly, the film proved popular, taking home 8 AVN Awards and—at least according to Braun—becoming the highest selling pornographic film in history. (Since few porn companies publicly release sales numbers, this claim is pretty hard to verify.)
>With The Force Awakens renewing Star Wars mania, Braun’s hoping to dust off the old lightsaber and give the world The Empire Strikes Back XXX. But there’s just one hitch: porn budgets have plummeted over the years, and getting together half a million bucks just to shoot a porn that’ll likely end up freely distributed on piracy-driven tube and torrent sites—well, it doesn’t make much financial sense.
tl-dr: Free Market is fixing porn degeneracy
>So instead of getting the backing of a studio like Vivid, which funded Star Wars XXX, or self funding the budget and hoping for the best, Braun’s decided to turn to his fan base to finance the film. Two weeks ago, Braun launched an Indiegogo campaign for The Empire Strikes Back XXX, asking fans to chip in $500k—and promising that, should the project be fully funded, the resulting film will be available for free forever.
>un reaches his target of half a million dollars, he’ll be making history. Though porn projects have turned to crowdfunding before, none have ever been quite as ambitious as Empire Strikes Back XXX. The only campaign to even come close received a mediocre reception, raising a mere 3 percent of its $250k goal. But with free porn de rigeur, and most consumers more interested in watching individual scenes than full-on features, it’s hard not to wonder whether the age of the big budget porno has passed. Even during porn’s most profitable eras, it was rare for filmmakers to devote six figures to a single porn flick. How could it possibly make economic sense to make one today?
>Though the Pirates flicks weren’t quite as expensive as advertised—Adella estimated that the budgets were about $400k and $800k for the original and the sequel, rather than the $1m and $8m commonly referenced online—they were still massively high budget for porn productions, which tend to max out around $50k per picture. And though the investment paid off—both films were wildly profitable enterprises—it wasn’t just a thirst for high-end hardcore that turned them into cash cows.
>The issue isn’t merely that no one pays for porn anymore. It’s that the entire media landscape that made high-end porn features economically viable has collapsed in on itself. Without a thriving video rental and pay-per-view market, it’s harder to make back millions on a Hollywood-quality porn movie—and without the potential for vast amounts of profit, it’s difficult to justify putting in the blood, sweat, and jizz required to realize this kind of artistic vision.