Film moves through a 35mm movie projector at a hair over 1 mph. Your average Hollywood feature film is about 2 hours long. That's 2 miles of film per print. There are between 1,500 and 2,000 prints of each movie made, depending on distribution. (i.e. A blockbuster might have 2,000 prints made but a small, arthouse/indie film might only have a few hundred made.)
There are as many as two or three movies released each week. That adds up to about 9,000 miles of film per week. The earth is 24,900 miles in diameter. That comes out to a little under once around in 3 weeks. Sometimes there are more than 3 movies released each week. Sometimes there aren't any. Let's just say two per week as an average.
From what I can gather, it costs about $2,000 to make one copy of a 35mm film print. I don't know, exactly. Many people won't tell. (Or they can't.) I've heard figures anywhere between $500 and $5,000. I just figure the median is $2,000.
So, we are making anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 (or more) film prints every week just to keep theaters stocked with new movies. That's as high as $10 million for ALL the movies made in a week. (Not including shipping, storage and logistics.) For one movie, that's about $3 million.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was paid about $30 million to star in "Terminator III." The movie grossed $400 million, worldwide.
Arnold got paid less than 10% of what the movie took in and the film cost less than 10% of what he got paid.
So, if the empty suits that run the movie studios could wave a magic wand and make all film disappear tomorrow, they wouldn't save enough money to hire The Governator to do another movie.
