Amph Summer Season Box Office

This is why Lucas and Spielberg were predicting a crash in the film market a few weeks ago.

 

If Lone Ranger would have done better I think I might have had a break down at work. I've never hit 10k people through my building in a single day but we came really close on Saturday. I did 1/3 of the budgeted monthly attendance for my theater in 4 days. It was awesome!

 

Okay, I was under the impression that the double-budget quota included the marketing costs, but I see now that theatrical exhibitors take some 50% of the box office sales (or more overseas), and that the marketing costs establish a separate quota that also has to be recouped. I follow you here, so thanks for clarifying (and this article helped, too).

With that in mind, Man of Steel is still a cash-drawing success for its makers, studios and stars. 225 x 2.5 = $563M, which is $5M less than the $568M the film has made to date. Another weekend in theaters will bring in additional millions. Also, why you refuse to factor in disc sales remains a mystery, since the above-linked article (which cites references and appears to be well-researched) avers:

And the studios get a much bigger cut of DVD revenues than they do of theatrical revenues, because the retailers aren't as "significant of a middle man" as the theater owners, according to Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com's Box Office division.​

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Those additional tens of millions the filmmakers will eventually net from disc sales are very much a factor in calculating financial success, whether you choose to acknowledge the fact or not. And again, I dispute your absurd contention that the millionaire investors, producers, stars et al. who made this film are in any way unhappy with the results, regardless of your low opinion of it.

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I don't know why you take this so personally. A sequel has already been greenlit, and compared to its contemporaries (Avengers, IM3, DKR) it's underperforming.

 

I'm refuting specific claims with links to referenced articles. I've acknowledged error when necessary, and thanked my interlocutor for providing me with new information. As to taking the matter personally, I dislike negative spin attached to a clear success. I don't dispute that MOS, the first film in an untried franchise, has underperformed compared to those sequels. Its performance is acceptably on-par with first-film installments such as Begins and IM.

 

I'm only pointing out that DVD/home video sales are generally considered to be a "different stream" -- a wildly profitable one for some ventures (see: Babylon 5, Firefly) and a wildly unprofitable one for others. Typically, and these problems are generally confined to television but not solely, there are massive increased production costs for home video, beyond the normal pressings of discs, marketing, etc. because of varying factors such as actor contracts and music rights (typically, though to be fair I'm not certain this is still the case, music rights have a different agreement for home video than for TV/movie broadcast -- it's inane).

So, generically, we will expect Man of Steel to do pretty gangbusters business on the home video sales -- but it won't be a factor in profitability for studio greenlighting of sequels, etc. in most cases. Generally studios want to avoid scenarios where they have to recoup costs on home video sales, because it means if something is expected to underperform in the BO and then it underperforms at home... they're screwed. So generally, and Jabba, Ramza or solojones can comment more, the vast majority of studio decisions regarding sequels are made on the box office revenue (or projected revenue) therein, rather than home video stuff. This also excludes all of the factors like additional normal cost to produce a home video release, all of the new marketing (P&A), etc.

I'm also ignoring the international revenue streams as taking more money than domestically -- I'm counting everything as 50/50 (this is in Man of Steel's favor).

Again, I'm not trying to be "negative" on the spin -- unless you say me pointing out that I suspect the movie is not as big a hit as the studio expected with their tracking is negative spin.

 

The major releases of the summer are behind us. The movies released in late July and August tend not to be the ones that are considered to have the most box office potential.

In terms of return on investment, the biggest hits of the summer are or are likely to be

The Purge
Despicable Me 2
Iron Man 3, the fifth most successful movie in history in unadjusted dollars.

Other clearly profitable films of the summer are

Fast & Furious 6
The Heat
The Hangover Part III
This is the End
The Great Gatsby

More marginal performers:

Man of Steel
Monsters University
Now You See Me

Underperformers relative to budget:

Epic
Oblivion
Star Trek into Darkness
World War Z

Flops or emerging flops

Pacific Rim (still early, but it opened with slightly half of World War Z's first weekend at the same published budget)
After Earth
The Internship
The Lone Ranger
White House Down

Although sci fi ex comic book superheroes has not fared very well this summer overall, the biggest flops are the Internship, Lone Ranger and White House Down.

The Lone Ranger is shaping up to be a much bigger box office disaster than John Carter and may finally spell the end of Johnny Depp In Drag movies. Disney has had a string of problems, so look for more executive/creative management churning. Pixar seems to be struggling creatively and at the box office. Oz the Great and Powerful was not very close to being a hit either, so Disney is a ways out from its last real box office smash.

 

PacRim should be able to earn foreign dollars to make up for lackluster domestic total.

 

I'll be very surprised if it earns more than $350 million worldwide.

 

Also, it's been clear for several years that the market for kiddie CG animated feature films is super-saturated and getting more crowded all the time. Do we really need five of these a summer? With Ice Age, Despicable Me, and Madagascar we have plenty of ongoing franchises, as well as several new entries and a guaranteed Pixar movie, plus straight Disney-branded features.

 

Isn't it possible After Earth could outperform Lone Ranger? Because it was expected to do poorly, I would think advertising was minimal. Yet, overseas business has been pretty strong, and is helping to recoup costs.

 

Pac Rim opened with just 37 million domestically. This sucks. Hope the foreign box office is better.

 

Edit, sorry. Yes. In absolute dollars and in terms of return on budget. After Earth is near 1.7 x, while Lone Ranger isn't going to earn back its budget at all. Lone Ranger won't hit $200 million worldwide at its current decline rate.

 

Full benefit of hindsight and revised appraisals in mind - this is probably the big surprise this summer.

 

Yes.

May this be a lesson to film studios about the box office power of Will Smith. Hopefully it can beat Pacific Rim, too.

 

Smith's movie may make as much money abroad as Pacific Rim, but its domestic total will be much lower. He's a giant global movie star, and foreign audiences seem to like that. Same with Bruce Willis. Even an aging Bruce Willis making increasingly worse versions of the same movie over and over again can make a killing in foreign box office. The trick is keeping the budget well under $100 million. Hard to do when you have a star as expensive as Will Smith.

For those who've been waiting for a big budget sci fi action version of Groundhog Day, Tom Cruise has yet another doomed early summer sci fi movie out next year, the movie adaptation of the Japanese young adult sci fi novel "All You Need is Kill."

 

About Super Hero films,

I did some digging and found these figures from BO Mojo.
I will give the film, the prod budget (not marketing), total WW gross and the mult, that is total gross/budget.

Film-----Budget -----Total gross ---Mult.

• Iron Man 140 M 585 M 4,2
• Thor 150 M 449 M 3
• Capt America 140 M 368 M 2,6
• Batman Begins 150 M 375 M 2,5
• Green Lantern 200 M 219 M 1,1
• Spiderman 1 139 M 821 M 6
• Am Spiderman 230 M 752 M 3,2
• FF 100 M 330 M 3,3
• Hulk 137 M 245 M 1,8

• MoS (thus far) 225 M 620 M 2,7

Hopefully they are mostly correct.

So yes MoS hasn't done as well as the first Spiderman or Iron Man but compared with other superhero films, many of which did get sequels, it has done quite good I think.
Esp considering Superman Returns, 270 M budget, 391 M total gross, mult 1,5.

Do not forget, Batman Begins came after a very badly received batman film and there hadn't been one for a while.
MoS is in much the same situation, the last Superman film did not do well and there hasn't been one for a while.
Amazing Spiderman came after a Spiderman film that did well but wasn't received quite as well.

Bye for now.
Blackboard Monitor

 

Well the Monday numbers didn't turn out any different than the weekend.

1. Despicable Me 2 $5,644,230
2. Grown Ups 2 $4,759,943
3. Pacific Rim $4,057,108

 

Jabbadabbado, were's Iron Man 3 on that list?

 

Clearly I'm lacking in reading comphrension tonight.

 

I honestly don't know what they were thinking with Lone Ranger.

I get the hope, the next POTC but really Pirates was such an unexpected/unlikely hit. Trying to replicate that seemed a bad bet from the start.

 

Especially when Depp's wacky schtick, which drove PotC's success, has worn thin with audiences by now.