Independent Film vs Hollywood Film

Independent Film vs Hollywood Film

Independent Film:

An independent film is a film which is created without large media corporations becoming involved meaning things such as new innovative ideas and funding. A film cannot be classified as being an "Independent" film if it has had help from any outside large media corporations, it has to be solely funded, produced and distributed privately, perhaps through subsidiaries of major film studios. In today's film industry we do not see a lot of Independent Film's as movies nowadays are made from big Hollywood Production Companies. You can usually tell whether a film is Independent or not because you can distinguish them through their content and style and the way in which the filmmakers' personal artistic vision is put across to the audience.

More recently however the term "Independent Cinema" is referred to as more of a relative term and refers to a film which has very minuscule help from large media corporations, for example Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox and Paramount, than in a mainstream film.

Hollywood Film:

A big media corporation handles both the production and distribution for a Hollywood Film. They produce multiple films within a year and are major competitors in the box-office revenue market. In the movie history today the big Hollywood Productions are far more successful than Productions created else where, having big budgets and being able to handpick the most popular actors which help to make the movies these big Hollywood corporations produce become instant hits in cinemas. Money is key in the media industry, if a corporation has a lot of it then their options in terms of actors, props, locations and other key aspects are basically endless. A good example of this is Shutter Island. The Production Companies had a budget of $80 million, using this, the Producers had to create the illusion that the institution featured in the film was actually on an island separated from the outside world. So the money that went into locations, props and special effects must have been colossal. As you can see below a huge budget has been invested to provide a fitting film for audience entertainment.

Below is a table I created on Microsoft Word in image format, and it shows five well known Independent and Hollywood Films. As you can see the budgets definitely jump from an Independent Film to a Hollywood Film, with Reservoir Dogs having a budget of $1.2 Million and Fast Furious 6 having a budget of $160 Million - this is significantly higher and shows that without large media corporations a film is likely to have a very low budget. In term of the media industry $1.2 Million is a very low budget. As you can tell, whether a film is an Independent film or Hollywood film, this does not define whether the film will be of good quality or not, in fact, some Independent films are better than Hollywood film even though they had far less budget - it depends on how that budget is used.