According to its website, Star Wreck took 7 years to create and involved more than 300 volunteers. If we assume that each volunteer contributed time worth $5000 per year to the project, that means that the labor cost of the project was about $10 million dollars. Alternatively, if only count the efforts of the ten principal crew members, and assume they each contributed $25,000 worth of ther time each year–far less than you’d have to pay to get a professional cameraman, to say nothing of a good director or producer–the movie still required about $2 million in labor costs alone.
Now, obviously, that’s not a problem if the participants enjoyed the project enough to do it as volunteers. Plenty of good software is produced that way. But it seems unlikely that you’d be able to get anywhere near enough volunteers to make the number and quality of movies that are on the market today. Moreover, we have to keep in mind that science fiction fans are (and I can say this because I am one) weird. A little bit obsessive, perhaps. These are people who sign up for Klingon language camps and go to conventions dressed up in funny costumes. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re not likely to inspire that kind of devotion in the creation of a typical romantic comedy.
Moreover, they acknowledge that the quality of their acting is sub-par:
The movie is being produced by a small team lead by Samuli Torssonen, supported by a large group of both amateur and professional volunteers interested in the project. As the production team is self taught, In the Pirkinning could be called an amateur movie – but we are aiming at professional standards in all aspects of the production (except acting, even though we do our best it is more or less impossible to find a cast of experienced actors for a project of this size and budget).
As Yochai Benkler argues in Coase’s Penguin, part of what makes peer production viable is granularity: the ability of individual volunteers to make small contributions to a much larger project. It seems to me that in most cases, a movie is insufficiently granular for peer production to be a viable option. You’ve gotta have at least a dozen people–the director, the producer, the principal actors, and the technical leads–working more or less full time over several months (or part time over several years). The number of people who are willing to devote seven years of their life to producing a single movie is probably rather small. In fact, it may be limited to the sort of people who can tell you, in great detail, the differences between a Ferengi and a Cardassian. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that (I can quote Ferengi “Rules of Acquisition” myself), but I doubt you can build an entire film industry on that kind of devotion.
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