Imperium (4 Stars)

How long will it take for people to stop associating Daniel Radcliffe with Harry Potter? It was the Harry Potter films that made him famous as a teenager, but he's made so many good films since then. "Imperium" is one of them. He plays a young FBI agent who infiltrates right extremist groups. I say that in the plural, because he uses the visible groups as stepping stones to make contact with the hidden, more serious groups. The skinheads are just loud-mouthed idiots who run around town beating up foreigners and getting themselves arrested. The higher groups are made up of fine, genteel people that might be sitting next to you in church. They're intellectuals who make plans to incite a race war that will eradicate everyone in America that they consider unworthy.

I've written about "Imperium" in the past. If you know how to use my alphabetical list of posts you can find the reviews. Today I want to talk about a (semi) off topic subject.

I'm sure that anyone who watches modern films has noticed the vignettes inserted at the beginning of films. In the past (pre-1990) there was just the name of one studio, like Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century Fox or Universal. Now several companies are listed, usually three or four per film. These are the production companies that invested in the film. Some of the bigger companies take an active role in the making of the film, looking over the producer and director's shoulders. The smaller companies just hand over their money and sit back, waiting to see what happens. Some production companies are formed just for one film. For instance, the film "Upside Down", which I watched two days ago, was supported by TMG (Tele München Group), Concorde and Upside Down Films.

The big blockbusters are still financed by a single studio. When it comes to smaller films, would-be directors and screenwriters run around trying to get support for their projects. As a rule of thumb, the more vignettes are shown at the beginning of a film, the less it was expected that a film would make money. No single production company expected the film to make a profit enough to finance the film, so several companies made a smaller donation to the budget. As I said above, three or four production companies is a usual number. But what's the film that used the most production companies?

I have two films in my Blu-ray collection which have a noticeably large number of production companies. "Imperium" is one of them. I'll watch the other tomorrow, so I can see which has the most. "Imperium" has seven production companies.

The order of the companies isn't random. The company that invests the most money is put first.

As a rule of thumb, a film has to earn double its budget at the box office to make a profit. That's the figure I use to calculate the Success Rate at the bottom of most of my film reviews. If the Success Rate is positive it's made a profit, if it's negative it's made a loss. If the Success Rate is missing from a post, it's either because it's a new film (still in the cinema) or I don't have the details.

One thing missing from my Success Rate is disc sales. Some films do badly in the cinema, but a large number of DVDs are sold. I can't use this in the calculation, because exact sales figures are rarely published. One example is "Donnie Darko", a box office flop with a Success Rate of -0.3. It became popular after being released on DVD, earning another $10 million (estimated), which would push its Success Rate up to 1.9.

I can't calculate the Success Rate for "Imperium" because I don't have the details. All I can say for certain is that it made a loss at the box office. Maybe it earned money from disc sales. I don't know.

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