Box Office Thread

I don't really care if a movie is original or not as long as it's good.

It does seem like at least three-quarters of the action movies that come out in a given year are superhero, and almost all are franchises. I'd like to see more non-franchise action movies, and there were more of them before the superhero movie craze took full hold.

Franchises don't have to be bad, but they tend to make studios lazy. MCU movies are cookie-cutter at this point.

"seems to be" are the important words here. We tend to talk about the Superhero and franchise movies more because they tend to have the highest box office numbers, but for one, the "smaller movies" often make a much higher revenue because they have lower production costs, and two, it is impossible to predict which kind of movies will be ahead of everyone else. Last year it was mostly animated movies which succeeded at the box office. This year the animated movies are terrible (honestly, if Coco is any good it will be the sure Oscar winner, unless a miracle happens and the voters actually watch the nominees, thus discovering a gem from the independent scene), instead horror movies (a genre I consider incredible boring) were the most reliable money makers.

there is no need to hate a particular genre. There is something for everyone out there.

edited 21st Nov '17 5:13:47 AM by Swanpride

Like I said earlier, there's always good films released every year that have no superheroes. Action films being too superhero-centered these days might be a good point though.

Taika Waititi predicted this◊.

edited 21st Nov '17 9:34:49 AM by comicwriter

Whedon: The DCEU...is dead! And it will be reborn in my image!

edited 21st Nov '17 9:28:27 PM by Mizerous

Coco is taking the top spot.

@Draghinazzo Let’s not forget that B v S also won several Razzie awards. Far from mixed reception.

edited 24th Nov '17 7:32:38 AM by ManOfSin

A good analysis on the current situation with blockbusters. The budgets have gotten out of control and the studios need to be more content with mid-level hits instead of swinging for the fences and thinking they're gonna get a billion.

A lot of the high profile flops this year actually pulled in enough money that they would've at least broken even or made a small profit if they weren't so comically expensive to produce.

well, except Disney. For them their investments tend to pay off big time.

Speaking of pay off, Ragnarok made it into the 800 million dollar club. Not bad for a 180 million budget.

I think the studios need to reconsider the worth of their various properties before deciding on a budget. Movies like Bladerunner or Valerian could have been financial hits on a more conservative budget.

Something Disney learned is the value of building up a brand. You can get a decent number of people to see a film just because it's a Marvel Studios film because Marvel Studios is associated with good films.

And they learned the hard way not to undermine a brand when they really damaged their animation studio with their direct to video cheapquels.

A good analogy is hitting in baseball. Everyone wants to hit home runs but you’re way more accurate if you’re not swinging for the fences all the time. Too many studios are just swinging for the fences.

I think a lot of it is due to the history of those studios. Currently there are six big film studios: Universal, Warner Bros, Paramount, Fox, Sony/Colombia Pictures and Disney. Of those six, five were part of the big leading studios during the Golden age at Hollywood, when the studio system controlled pretty much everything. Only Disney wasn't, the studio was around, but due to its focus on Animation it was more an independent entity (which is honestly kind of impressive if you look at the market back then...Disney was basically the underdog, this small film studio which often tethered on the brink of bankruptcy, but went from success to success often enough that it not only survived but eventually thrived). This is, btw, one of the reasons why I am not too hard on Disney's early live action movies, what they managed to do was quite impressive if you consider the circumstances.

I think this studio system thinking is something they never really got out of their system. Those studios are pretty much movie manufactories, which once a while tap the right director for something truly unusual. It's basically executives picking talents and then hoping that something good will come out of it.

Disney on the other hand was always about the vision, just not necessarily the vision of a director.

I think the idea is that, if you can get a billion dollar hit under your belt, then you can franchise that into numerous sequels and spinoffs that will rake in similar levels of money. In that context, it's worth making several box office bombs if that's what it takes to find the one movie that'll work and get a cash cow franchise going.

I don't think that it is truly worth it. It worked in the time of the big Hollywood epics, because back then the audience came just to see the scale. But nowadays the audience has seen all this stuff already, it is hard to impress it with size alone. Not impossible, but hard.

Really? 'Cause if you look at the ten highest grossing movies of the year, there's not much there except big budget spectacles.

Part of it is that mid-budget movies are a dying breed. We're rapidly approaching a market that is pretty much just low budget indie fare or huge blockbusters with 100 million dollar + budgets.

You shouldn't confuse overall box office with the actual revenue. I am pretty sure that Deadpool was last years most profitable movie, and that was mostly the case because it was done on a shoestring budget and with a very focussed viral marketing.

In numbers: Deadpool made worldwide (minus China) 783 million on a 58 million budget with a really reasonable marketing campaign. Civil War on the other hand made 1,1 billion (including China), but on a 250 million budget and with a bigger marketing campaign. So while Civil War had the better box office numbers, Deadpool actually made more money for the studio and the investors.

The Secret Life of Pets was even more profitable.

Those movies made much larger profits than the average high budget blockbuster, but it only to takes one The Avengers or Star Wars: The Force Awakens to eclipse those films' profits several times over.

Sure, but you have to consider the risk. There have been a couple of movies this year which did actually pretty well at the box office, but had a budget so high that they ended up loosing money.

It's a profit ratio, not about total profit. Movies like Get Out! was made on a 5 million dollar budget with a marketing campaign probably around 20 million. It made over 200 million, making a 175 million + net gain with a 8x multiplier. A huge surprise success, yes, but a movie that cost 250 million with 100 million dollar marketing makes 600 million, that's making 250 million at around 2x multiplier and that's a low ball amount expected for that type of movie. When you go mid-budget you're mixing the greater risk of a blockbuster with the limited appeal of a smaller film. Deadpool absolutely nailed that mid-budget success with about a 7x multiplier, the net gain was close to 650 million.

As far as keeping budget under control, apparently for Deadpool a lot of the fx work was done pro-bono because Tim Miller owned a fx company and put a lot of his own money into it off the books. So the film looks like it has a bigger budget not strictly because of good direction and a good accounting staff but because of a lot of volunteer work. That's not something you can just expect from all films, and can also be criticized because a lot of fx houses are going bankrupt because of being underpaid.

Numbers for Justice League's third weekend are in, and you can pretty much stick a fork in it, it's done folks. Down nearly 60 percent on last weekend's numbers, at the US domestic box office, and those were already pretty horrible.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=weekend&id=dcfilm1117.htm

If the film makes 300 million domestically I'll be surprised.

At this point we can safely say that Marvel managed to earn a higher box office on a lower budget with a movie which didn't even feature one of this three most popular team-ups than DC did with its top team. Who would have thought that a talking tree would beat Superman.