Evil ... or the Victim of Framing? Bad Guys in Science Fiction Film

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.For no particular reason, lately I've been thinking about that Internet picture of a depressed Star Wars stormtrooper, sitting on a hotel room bed, with the caption "I had friends on that Death Star." It's funny because Imperial Stormtroopers are meant to be remorseless and literally faceless bastards, and yet who can deny that even stormtroopers have friends? Heck, in the first Star Wars film, while Obi-Wan Kenobi is fiddling with the tractor beam, you can hear two stormtroopers talking about the latest models of speeders. These are normal dudes.

In the service of evil, yes, granted -- or should we grant that? It's well known that the Republic before the Empire was corrupt and stagnating, and that while the Jedi positioned themselves as the defenders of justice, the average citizen of the Republic could have just as easily seen them as an autocratic institution, answerable to no one, enforcing merely its own power. In which case the Emperor could be seen as a reformer: tough but fair, someone who streamlined the government and got things done. Is that evil? Really?

This got me thinking of the various adversaries of science fiction films, and about the fact that while we take it for granted that they are evil, a little bit of thought suggests that in at least some cases, you can make the argument they're not evil so much as the victim of the filmmaker's framing and our own biases. To make that point, let me offer three other famous science fiction film antagonists, and argue why from their point of view, they're the hero of the situation (or at least, the victim).

The Alien (from the Alien series)
Look, here's a simple fact: The alien didn't ask to be born. It didn't ask to have an evolutionary gestational strategy that relies partly on a third-party host. You can't in good conscience blame it for that. And when it is born, do humans gather 'round to appreciate the miracle of birth? They do not. They try to kill the alien. What choice does the alien have but to run and hide?

And then, naked, cold, hungry, and outnumbered, what choice does the alien have but to try to survive? The humans are the ones hunting it with shock prods and flamethrowers. Can it really be blamed for fighting back? If you were being hunted down by heavily armed superior forces, would you be thinking, Well, golly, I'll just let them burn me to death with a flamethrower, that seems fair? It is, in a word, doubtful. You'd do what the alien does: fight back.

The Matrix (from The Matrix)
If you've ever watched The Animatrix, the anime prequel to the Matrix trilogy, then you know that in point of fact, the humans were not just jerks to the robots they created -- they were actually evil, using them as slaves and then attempting robogenocide when the robots justifiably fought back. At one point the robots offered peace to the humans and the response was to laugh them out of the room. When the machines finally got the upper hand in the struggle, the human response was to initiate a global worldwide ecological catastrophe, making the entire surface of the planet useless for any living thing (i.e., themselves. They were idiots).

When the machines finally vanquished the humans, did they wipe them out? Not only did they not wipe them out, they generously gave every single one of them lifelong jobs, cradle-to-grave, including free room, board, and online access to a truly spectacular massively multiplayer online role playing game. If you think about it, that's a pretty sweet deal. And yet a tiny minority of humans want to ruin it for everyone else. That's awfully selfish if you give it any sort of thought at all.

The Predator (from the Predator series)
It's a well-known fact that any species that is given a chance will overpopulate its niche and trigger an ecological catastrophe, not just for itself but for other species. For the benefit of overall biological diversity, some species populations have to be culled. Now, take humans. You don't have to look very hard to see they've had a pretty serious negative impact on their niche. Time to take out some of them. And not just the weak and sick, but the strong, healthy ones, i.e., the ones mostly like to continue the problem by breeding.

But if you're going to do that, why not make it more fair to the prey? Give them a chance to prove their own fitness? You might say that the Predator's weapons give them a distinct advantage, but let's face it: Humans aren't exactly defenseless, are they? Not to mention that they can be pretty clever, for a prey species. And at the end of it, you treat them with respect, give them as quick and clean a death as you can manage. Because it's not just about the hunt. It's about being a responsible steward of the planet.

Now you feel guilty for rooting against them, don't you? You can admit it. It's OK.

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And Now for Some Real Science Fiction ... Studio Math!

John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.Today's question, about last week's unfortunately-not-big science fiction film:

I read that in order for John Carter to turn a profit, it would have to make something like $600 million at the box office. But the movie only cost $250 million to make. Why does it have to take in so much more to make money?

Leaving aside the amusing irony of the word "only" in regards to a film with a $250 million production budget, this is a fair question. To answer it, we need to follow the money. When you pay your $7.83 (on average in the U.S.) for your movie ticket to see a science fiction (or other type of) film, what happens to the money? Well:

1. Some of it stays with the theater -- although how much depends on what week it is. The first week a film comes out, a distributor will take up to 95% of the box office gross, minus a small flat fee to help cover the cost of running the theater. The second and additional weeks the theater is usually allowed to keep more of the ticket cost, but of course generally speaking each additional week a film is out, the less money comes through the door. That said, some rare films bring significant amounts of money week in and week out; it took Avatar nine weeks to take in less than $30 million a week at the box office.

For Hollywood, the perfect film would run one week in the theaters and makes $300 million; for theater owners, the perfect film would make the same amount of money over the course of three months. This slicing of first-weekend grosses explains a) why Hollywood spends so much to get you into the theater that very first week, and b) why movie concessions are so damn expensive -- because it's the popcorn and soda that keeps the theaters profitable, not the films.

2. After the theater takes its cut, you might think the rest of the money goes back to the film studio -- and sometimes it does, if the film studio is also the distributor of the film, i.e., the company that makes sure copies of the film get to the theater (and later, get out to physical and digital stores for home video sales). If the studio is not the distributor, however, the distributor gets a slice of the profits, the amount varying according to the deal the studio cuts with the distributor. For example, the studio behind the Star Wars prequel trilogy was LucasFilm; 20th Century Fox merely handled the distribution, for which it received a modest fee (relatively speaking).

To avoid this cut, most major studios also have distribution arms, particularly in the domestic market. They also often have international distribution companies, but that arena is complicated both by local laws (some countries require films to be distributed by local distributors) and by business -- studios might choose to sell distribution rights for upcoming films upfront in exchange for cash, which then gets funneled into the production cost. This lowers the studio's financial exposure but also means they'll lose out if the film is a big hit internationally.

3. In addition to the theaters and the distributors, studios also have to pay profit participants -- producers, directors, and actors whose payment is a percentage of the profit, not just a flat fee. This is sometimes "gross participation" -- in which payment is based on box office receipts, not what comes back to the studio -- but those deals are more rare today than they used to be. Nevertheless, these deals can scrape tens of millions off what the studio can claim for its own at the end of the day, particularly if a big star or director is involved. Steven Spielberg, for example, is rumored to have made a quarter billion dollars off of Jurassic Park, mostly through gross and profit participation.

Add it all up and movie studios, which bear most of the cost of producing a film, will see about half of the box office take come back to them, from which they will need to recoup production costs as well as marketing costs, which can run into the tens of millions of dollars. Bear in mind that the specific calculus on each film is going to be different -- the math on The Avengers, with its big budget, cast of stars, big-name director, and complicated back end (Marvel is owned by Disney), is going to be different than the math on The Hunger Games, which features no "A"-list stars or director, and a relatively modest $75 million budget -- but the studio getting half back is a decent rule of thumb.

Another decent rule of thumb: For a film to eventually be (financially) successful, it should probably make back its production cost in the domestic market, which will hopefully allow for the international markets (and then home video) to carry it into the black. This works especially well with science fiction and fantasy films, which now often make something like two-thirds of their box office overseas.

And now we see why $600 million is not actually an outrageous number for John Carter's profitability -- and won't be a bad number for The Avengers either, which apparently cost between $220 and $260 million. Those are crazy numbers, but when they pay off, they pay off big.

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