Box Office Thread

Let's be honest, whether we like it or not, box office is a crucial aspect in movie industry, if not the core itself.

Discuss box office here, current progress, old records, records getting broken, etc.

To start with, I would like to mention that 2015 is the year with biggest box office gross of all time, unadjusted for inflation. Granted, inflation being what it is, every new year the number is bound to be bigger, but there have been several years that showed less figure than previous year.

Also, this year has the highest number of movies that have grossed over $1 billion, with five. In addition, the same goes for movie that grossed $1.5 billion, with three, Furious 7, Jurassic World, and The Force Awakens. TFA in particular is looking to be the second movie to gross over $2 billion during its original theatric run.

Man, this year has been great for both film creators and audiences.

edited 7th Jan '16 8:55:26 AM by dRoy

Jurassic World wasn't even that good, how did it make so much money?

-shrugs- Transformers: Age of Extinction made over $1.1 billion, despite being one of the most critically panned movies in 2010s.

And hey, I absolutely loved the movie, despite its flaws.

edited 7th Jan '16 8:59:04 AM by dRoy

1) Nostalgia for the original movies. It's been a while since we got a Jurassic Park Movie, and those who were kids when the original came out are all adults now.

2) They successfully exploited the Nostalgia factor rather than simply trying to rely on the the name alone.

3) However good or bad it may have been, it was still an entertaining movie that found a way to hit the right beats.

It's not unlike how Force Awakens is making insane amounts of money. Regardless of what you think of the movie itself (I'm pretty sure I hate it myself), the fact is that they were able to do something right (very right, given the amount of money it's making), including tapping into existing nostalgia for the franchise as a whole and then creating something that didn't waste the resulting hype.

Also, one of the largest scale marketing for a movie of all time.

One thing that should be kept in mind when reading box office articles, especially all the articles that are coming out about The Force Awakens: those numbers usually aren't adjusted for inflation and don't account for the fact that it hasn't always cost $12 to buy a movie ticket. In fact, The Force Awakens is still only 20th on the all-time list.

Domestic Gross Adjusted for Inflation

The fact that it has made it all the way to 20th in only three weeks of release might mean that it will rise to the top, and maybe soon, but not yet. The all-time top ten are:

1. Gone with the Wind (still!)
2. Star Wars (Episode IV currently still has twice the gross of Episode VII)
3. The Sound of Music
4. ET The Extraterrestrial
5. Titanic
6. The Ten Commandments (1956)
7. Jaws
8. Doctor Zhivago (seriously?)
9. The Exorcist

...and this is my favorite, checking in at 10th, after all these decades have passed,

Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs

edited 7th Jan '16 3:28:40 PM by gallium

Star wars the Force awakens is about to move past the Lion king in the adjusted chart, actually.

edited 7th Jan '16 3:44:04 PM by Demongodofchaos2

Hey, it's a really good movie, with Omar Sharif (RIP) giving one amazing performance! Besides, back then, people were more interested in epics.

edited 7th Jan '16 3:49:01 PM by Quag15

Inflation-adjusted, The Force Awakens is likely to make at least about as much as The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi did, which is an impressive accomplishment. Currently, TFA is in 20th place.

For 2016, what I'm curious about is how well the 7 (seven!) comic-book superhero movies will be doing. At least some of them are going to be flops.

My guesses are (for domestic gross):

Captain America: Civil War: $300s to 400s million

Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice: $300s million

X-Men: Apocalypse: ~200 million if it's decent, less if it isn't

Doctor Strange: ~$120-200 million (200 if it's any good, but given that it's being directed by someone with only some crappy horror movies to his name...)

Deadpool: ~$100 million or a little more at most, given the recent top performances in the R-rated action-comedy genre (Kingsman and Spy)

Suicide Squad and Gambit: The most likely movies to be box-office flops, given the general weirdness (and less comedic elements than Deadpool) of the former, and the recent directoral changes of the latter.

However, last time I tried to guess which superhero movies would do well, all my guesses were wrong, so my track record is poor.

edited 7th Jan '16 4:03:37 PM by Galadriel

The thing about that list that jumps out at me is that nothing has cracked the top ten in 18 years. Not a one of the big comic book movies from Marvel or anyone else has cracked the top ten. In fact, the only film this century in the top twenty before TFA is Avatar. Jurassic World checks in at #24 and The Avengers is #29.

Surprised me quite a bit. When I first clicked on that link I thought E.T. and Gone with the Wind might be there but I thought I'd see more of our modern-day blockbusters as well. Nope.

Worth noting, though, is that Gone With the Wind had multiple releases as the years went on. Clark Gable attributed it to giving him a Career Resurrection every few years or so when everyone would flock to see it and remember him again. This was back before television screenings and home releases.

Star Wars IV probably has the re-release thing going for it as well.

It's worth remembering that back in the day, the movie theater was realistically the only place the movies were available to be seen. Titanic is the only movie on that top 10 list I see that looks like it's from an era after even VCR became a widespread technology.

The rest had the benefit of audiences having to pay for another ticket if they wanted to see it again. These days, movies have to overcome the little problem of competing against their eventual home disc releases that everyone knows will be out in less than a year. There's no need to buy a ticket to see it even once if you're patient enough to wait till you can rent the thing for a fraction of the price and watch it at home.

That right there is an obstacle that's going to take a very special movie at just the right time to overcome.

I think it'll honestly depend on how good they are and if they find an audience. Fant4stic didn't flop because it was a super hero movie, it flopped because it was a bad movie all around and the built-in audiences were driven away by the warning signs that kept popping up from behind-the-scenes news.

IIRC all three of the original trilogy Star Wars movies made a potload of money when they were re-released in George Lucas Altered Version in the 1990s. I believe that re-release is what moved Star Wars up to #2.

True! Gone With the Wind was helped at the box office because people couldn't buy the DVD or order it On Demand. On the other hand, there were quite a bit fewer Americans buying movie tickets in 1939. Maybe it evens out.

edited 8th Jan '16 5:52:52 AM by gallium

Also, movies from few decades ago tend to be stay on the box office records, because back in those days there were fewer competitions.

In 2010s and onwards, every year there are like at least a couple of movies that gross over $1 billion, and many more that surpasses $800 million marks and on.

Imagine if, let's say, Jurassic World was the only big movie coming out this year in that period, without competitions such as Furious 7 and Age of Ultron. I can say with fair confidence that it would have made into Top 10 highest grossing movies adjusted for inflation.

That's also true. The blockbuster age as we know it didn't start until around the mid-70s. Before then, the summer movies period was instead the porn movies season .

It was pretty odd reading Pauline Kael's I Lost It At The Movies and seeing just how different the cinema landscape was back then. Nowadays the average moviegoer stereotype is "mindless fanboy who only watches blockbusters". Back then in the 50s and 60s, the stereotype was "pretentious hipster who insists some No Budget B-Movie is actually a subversive masterpiece".

edited 9th Jan '16 1:32:55 PM by Tuckerscreator

I'm still baffled at how Furious 7, of all movies, managed to gross that much, almost over twice the second highest grossing movie in the franchise (Fast and Furious 6, $788 million).

I mean, somewhere around $1.1 billion, I wouldn't have been too surprised, but grossing $1.5 billion and outgrossing Age of Ultron? Goddamn. I thought it had to do with Paul Walker's death, but no disrespect to the man, he wasn't that big of an international star.

Just for fun, I decided to see how many films in the top 50 are wholly original products (i.e, no sequels, remakes, or adaptations). From that list we have: Inception (#49), Inside Out (#45), Finding Nemo (#33), The Lion King (#25), Titanic (#2), and Avatar (#1).

That's means that 12% of the highest-grossing films are original products. I don't want this thread to turn into a debate about originality in Hollywood, but it's just something I thought was interesting.

Nevermind, I'm assuming that list is non-adjusted for inflation.

edited 10th Jan '16 7:12:40 AM by TheFarmboy

I clearly have too much time on my hands, so I decided to analyse the Rotten Tomatoes scores of each film in the top 50. From the list, 12 films had rotten scores (below 60%) and 38 films had fresh ratings. That means that 76% of films have fresh ratings, and 24% had a rotten rating.

The top 5 highest scores were: The Dark Knight (94%), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (95%), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 & The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (96%), Inside Out (98%), and Finding Nemo & Toy Story 3 took the top spot (99%).

The top 5 lowest scores were: Ice Age: Continental Drift (37%), Transformers: Dark of the Moon (35%), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (33%), Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen (19%), and Transformers: Age of Extinction takes the lowest spot (18%).

So all in all, what was the average rating the top 50 highest-grossing movies? By adding the scores together and then dividing the sum by 50, the average rating comes around to... 74%. Not a bad rating, just pretty average really. I hope you've enjoyed today's edition of "Pointless Statistics" .

edited 10th Jan '16 8:37:25 AM by chasemaddigan

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is officially the highest grossing movie of 2015, as well as the highest domestically grossing movie of all time, unadjusted for inflation. Even with inflation adjusted, that still puts in impressive 15th.

Nice.

Hmm, it seems that the box office fever for TFA has died down significantly. I mean, yeah, it still already grossed $1.75 billion, making it the highest grossing movie of 2015 and gonna keep growing, but at this rate beating out Avatar's records seems impossible.

Oh, again, this is a massive number. It's just that it's not as massive as people predicted it to be. It will most definitely gross more than $2 billion, that's for sure.

Yes, adjusted for inflation, TFA is now 15th and is about to catch Avatar.

It is still less than halfway to Gone with the Wind.

There's a comment above re: original stories. Looking on the inflation-adjusted list...

• Star Wars (#2)
• E.T. (#4)
• Titanic (#5)
• The Ten Commandments (#6)
• Jaws (#7)
• Avatar (#14)
• The Lion King (#19)(but cribbed from Hamlet)
• The Sting (#20)
• Raiders of the Lost Ark (#21)
• The Graduate (#22)
• Fantasia (#23)

That's only from the top 25.

We would of course be remiss if we didn't mention the all-time bombs. The Other Wiki has a list of the films estimated to have lost the most dollars, adjusted for inflation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_box_office_bombs#Biggest_box_office_bombs_adjusted_for_inflation

So, based on worldwide gross, and with the caveat that this is all Hollywood Accounting so who knows, The 13th Warrior is the biggest bomb of all time.

I saw two of the films on the top 50 unadjusted list. Sahara sucked and deserves to be on that list. Kind of sad to see Hugo on there, although the concept seemed odd to me; it was like Scorsese was trying to convince little kids that 100-year old silent movies are really interesting and fun.

Box Office Mojo lists worst opening weekends.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/weekends/worstopenings.htm?page=WRSTOPN30&sort=opening&order=ASC&p=.htm

I saw exactly one film in the top 100. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists really did deserve better.

It seems that in few days, The Force Awakens will be the second movie to gross over $2 billion in its original theatric run, 3rd if we count re-release.

The Force Awakens is now 11th on the all-time list and appears likely to be the first film in 19 years to enter the top ten. It is however now making less than $20 million per week in 2016 money so it would seem like it's going to finish 9th or 10th.