I'm having a similar issue. I believe marketing has the key factor to money now. Max "hype" seems to be 9999 and I usually max that with marketing before release of the movie.

1945+ is when that is unlockable.

Agreed. I'm following all the guides on line and optimizing the sliders and all my movies tank. This plus the bugs where actors don't show up to film make this game unplayable

I just started the 1940's and I'm not making any money on my movies either. The only reason I haven't gone bankrupt is because of the shares I bought in the other movie companies. I hope the marketing part helps.

Hey, the marketing aspect helps.
I finally make money when I make a film.
I started with the year 1950. :)

On my second attempt now. Went broke by 1950 first go. This time I'm heading for the same fate. Every movie I make I lose huge dollars, staff keep leaving because I can't afford pay rises. Is there a ticket price adjuster I'm not seeing here? It's impossible to stay afloat. What has happened?

I thought it would work like I wrote yesterday, but unfortunately it isn't.
Despite marketing, you simply earn far too little per film.
I almost think it's a bug. I can't imagine anything else.

Film cost of about $220,000, Day 1 at the cinema returns about 44k, day 2 about 6k and that's it. By day 3 it might return about $400. Steven Spielberg wouldn't stand for this.

Might just have to start in later years, when you can access marketing and spam movie campaigns (run multiple and gets 5000+ hype). They recently updated the revenue system. Previously, the opposite was the case and you would have billions of dollars by 1930. It went from what was an endless pool of money to a minute and finite pool of money, since they capped annual ticket sales. I'm sure it'll be patched at some point. I stopped playing because it just didn't make sense to me. Hoping it gets resolved soon.

Not to mention, the change in the revenue system essentially made fandom irrelevant, which is odd because fandom drives the entirety of the movie industry. so now, regardless of how many fans you accumulate, there's only a tiny, finite number of ticket sales per year and no actual incentive to do anything for fans, nothing that guides your decisions on film making. Here's hoping they figure out an alternate solution.

The fact that my employees constantly ask for raises well over 50% or more and I can't negotiate below their asking price really doesn't help with making any money. I ended up restarting and turning automatic raises and asking for raises off and it's been better. I occasionally check to see happiness and I'll give a raise if it's worth it, but if I didn't do that, then I'd have to fire everyone at a certain point in their career and start with new employees. I'd never be able to have anyone famous.

Yeh, this is all over the place. The clue is in the 'Produce Charts':
https://ibb.co/YpmcP6R

I am losing money whilst pumping out stacks of decent films.

I just hit 1930, having won a ton of awards - constant back to back best director, actor, actress, etc which is pushing my hype up.

My hype is huge compared to other studios but profits are astonishingly low.

A studio with 567 fans and 176 hype got $199K out of a film.
I had 3,100 fans and 1,661 hype and I got $17K

My films are being rated 80+ and making a fraction of the money that other studios films are making.

My last 6 films scored 81, 82, 82, 80, 83 and 83. One of those films final rank was Number 3 - it made a loss of $25.6K - my hype at the time was 696. The 3rd best film, which scored 82%, won awards, and it didn't make any money????

To make things worse - I forgot to mention I am playing on Easy difficulty which should be giving me an advantage. I believe the advantage is working for film-making, but not for profits.

I bought up 50% share stakes in all the other film companies from the start before making any films or hiring staff, so I get a nice $5 mil+ every quarter. All my films still tank but i'm the richest studio by a long shot

LOL, I picked this game up when it came out but it was ludicrously easy. I swung back to claim my Steam achievements... only to find out that it's now ludicrously hard. I'll guess I'll shelve it for another six months, and see what the patches bring.

Just had a movie with a Rating of 100 and 1400 hype!
Lost me 40000$

I keep on getting negative money how do I make money?