Great films grounded in great insights can impact lives in significant, positive ways.

Returning to the STAR WARS (1977) intermittent conversation about motives and causes, Leia acknowledges Han’s change in focus to join their fight against dark forces for more than financial reasons with the words, “I knew there was more to you than money.”

Let’s assume as filmmakers you want your films to mean something, not just make money. To do this (and, as was discussed in our last post, to do both!), you need develop them on great insights.

Writer/director/producer George Lucas decided he wanted to make a film that was more hopeful and more positive than were many of the other films being made at the time; this led to the development of STAR WARS (Jones, 2016).

Lucas developed a story based on insights that address core universal human needs that appealed to a broad audience. Not only did that audience show up with their wallets to buy tickets and film-themed toys (economic return), they left changed for the better and created lives, in part, and communities with others similarly impacted based on ideas the film portrayed (human impact return) (Booker, 2002).

In health care, which is where much of my research experience is based, there is a metric called “Quality Adjusted Life Year” or “QALY”. Essentially QALYs are a way to quantify how much healthy life might be gained by intervening medically in various ways. The metric has been used, some would argue used incorrectly, to make determinations of how to allocate scarce or expensive medical resources to maximize the benefit to human life in terms of the amount of time lived and the quality of that time (after factoring in limitations due to health difficulties).

I would argue filmmaking might benefit from a QALY-like metric of human impact to consider in conjunction with more common financial return-on-investment (ROI) metrics like those tracked on sites such as Box Office Mojo and The Numbers (See example of the latter). We at Something Big and Important are in the process of creating such a metric.

If, as we’ve argued, films grounded in great insights can lead to substantial returns both financially and in human impact, how do we discover those insights?

We need to do our research! And we’ll begin to address this in our next post.

References

Brooker, W. (2002). Using the Force: creativity, community and Star Wars fans. Continuum.

Jones, B. J. (2016). George Lucas: a life. Little, Brown, and Company.

Weinstein, M. C., Torrance, G., & McGuire, A. (2009). QALYs: the basics. Value in health, 12, S5-S9.