Megan Ellison is Good for Movies, I Promise

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It’s well-known by this point how difficult it is to produce an original story with major movie studios. If it isn’t a sequel, a comic book, or part of a long standing franchise, they want no part. So why when a rich, ambitious, creative young producer with balls to spare comes along would someone criticize him/her for financing original, thought-provoking movies?

Sharon Waxman of the entertainment news site The Wrap wrote a very direct and rather outrageous piece entitled “Why Well-Meaning Billionaires Like Megan Ellison May Ruin The Movie Business.” Jesus. For any of you who don’t know, Megan Ellison, daughter of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, is a film producer and financier who has been making a serious splash on the Hollywood scene as of late. Her company, Annapurna Pictures, is still in its infancy, but it’s been putting out interesting fare thus far and has many new and exciting projects on the horizon from top-notch directors and writers.

Waxman seems to think, however, that Ellison’s funding of films like The Master  is bad idea. With a budget of $35 million, she writes that The Master will not make money and is therefore a failure. She similarly criticizes the approximately $45 million budget of the upcoming Kathryn Bigelow film Zero Dark Thirty, a portrayal of Osama Bin Laden’s assassination. “Spending so much on these arthouse films almost guarantees they will be money losers, and that is bad for the movie business altogether […] Certainly no established movie studio is going to choose to make movies with these filmmakers at those prices, which also is not a healthy