PT the box office of the prequels.

why did the prequels fluctuate so much in $?

i mean, they all did fantastic to their budgets, and based on how utterly brilliant the films look, i was surprised the budgets were as low as they were. i expected like something in the 200 million range per film! i guess blue screen saves lots of $!

but the films arent consistent money wise.... why?

they all made over 300 million domestically, which prove that star wars is a force to be reckoned with in the U.S but worldwide they tip around.

TPM made $924,317,558 (surprised it didn't make 1 billion)
AOTC made $649,398,328 (what a drop )
ROTS made $848,998,815 (why didn't outgross TPM?)

i feel like the star wars films have made a very conservative amount of $ compared to all these new films! Its as if GL missed the super duper jackpot by 3 years or something!

Left and right these films keep making 1 billion dollars, two pirates of the Caribbean films, the third transformers film, Harry potter and the deathly hallows part 2.....why are they making so much more?

why did AOTC drop off so much? I honestly expected ROTS to blow away TPM, but it didn't.

basically when you look at all these really big blockbusters lately, when they hit it big, they REALLY hit it big... why has star wars been been in the middle?

 

I think AOTC was doomed from the start to be the worst box office grossing film of the PT. TPM was verrryyy highly anticipated because it was the first SW film in 20 years. ROTS was also highly anticipated because we would finally see things comes full circle: Empire's foundation, Anakin becoming Vader, the end of the Jedi order, etc. AOTC was simply in the middle. It didn't benefit from the enormous hype that TPM and ROTS had. Also, you have to take into account inflation and stuff like that. (The 1999 economy was different from the 2005 economy).

 

The culture of moviegoing has changed in the past ten years, partly due to the Prequels. Back then, they were pretty much among the only midnight screenings. Now, every movie has them. Ticket prices have gone up, both in regular and 3D & Imax screenings. That also leads to more screens per movie. And yeah, inflation has gone up. This is why you keep seeing all these mediocre blcokbusters keep getting huge revenues. It's gotten to the point where, mathematically, the records become meaningless at how often they're going to be broken. Frankly I wish they'd just keep it at tickets-sold instead of dollars earned, which changes all the time.

 

That's not at all true, but anyway I think a big factor between I-III and the billion dollar club is Lucas never went for the widest possible saturation booking the way those other movies did. Significantly fewer theaters (because LFL had higher minimum quality standards for the places that would get them. )

 

George Lucas owns ILM. I guess he only convered the expenses.


I think "space movies" have still a more limited audience than other film genres. Not to mention 3D. Ticket sales would be much more interessting.
Or it's just Star Wars logic. ANH was much more successful than TESB and ROTJ.

 

Just FYI - AOTC is the only SW film (the TCW release aside) that wasn't the highest grossing film of its year.

 

i mean, they all did fantastic to their budgets, and based on how utterly brilliant the films look, i was surprised the budgets were as low as they were. i expected like something in the 200 million range per film! i guess blue screen saves lots of $! -Lucas has the ability to finance alot of his stuff in-house and has a consistent staff in house as well. He doesn't have to commission projects especially for these films. He already has the talent and the technology

but the films arent consistent money wise.... why?

they all made over 300 million domestically, which prove that star wars is a force to be reckoned with in the U.S but worldwide they tip around. Not all that much when you really look at it. I guess it depends on your point of view of the dollar as it pertains to the movie industry. The figures you have below are the totals worldwide, not just domestic. They also include foreign take in.

TPM made $924,317,558 (surprised it didn't make 1 billion) The foreign take in was 493,229,257
AOTC made $649,398,328 (what a drop ) Foreign 338,721,588
ROTS made $848,998,815 (why didn't outgross TPM?) foreign 468,484,191

i feel like the star wars films have made a very conservative amount of $ compared to all these new films! Its as if GL missed the super duper jackpot by 3 years or something!

Left and right these films keep making 1 billion dollars, two pirates of the Caribbean films, the third transformers film, Harry potter and the deathly hallows part 2.....why are they making so much more?

This really depends on your point of view I guess as well as some cultural things. for the amount of money the SW moveis did rake in remember this is a 30 plus year old franchise that is still pulling down this kind of cash. Also, SW has always reached a certain segment of the population whereas the Pirates movies specifically are made to reach out to everyone. Also you need to take into account things like the difference in the price of movie tickets and if you look at the adjusted gross based on inflation you'll find some surprises. Then there is also the 3D gimmick

 

im certain that while ROTS beat Harry potter and the goblet of fire domestically, the foreign take made goblet more money overall.

SO yes, i hate to bring this...but Harry Potter.... and to a point the last two lord of the rings films. They did so well, though LOTR deserved the boxoffice due to the quality (harry potter not so much)

Why wasn't ROTS utterly devouring the boxoffice the way Deathly Hallows part 2 is?

 

There's also the psychological narrative thing. ROTS is about the Jedi dying, Anakin falling to the dark side, and the rise of the Empire. DH2 is just a big long movie about Harry finally beating Voldemort. So in the end, it's an upper, instead of depressing.

 

meh Deathly Hallows part 1 was much better, Hallows 2 feels like it got hacked to pieces in the editing room. a great ending no less, though utterly disappointing unless you lower expectations.

But idk i feel like ROTS was the big star wars movie everyone was waiting for, the birth of darth vader, and the mask going over his face was cinema gold.

why do you think ROTS didn't overtake TPM?

 

One thing that affected Attack of the Clones, at least domestically, was that it came out just after release of the first Spider-Man film, which was doing tremendously well. Neither TPM nor RotS (nor ANH, ESB, or RotJ, for that matter) had anything quite like that to compete against, at least not in the vital first few weeks.

 

And despite the loss of a parental figure and the guy winning the girl's heart (ostensibly, at least) in both movies, "Spider-Man" and AOTC are quite different in look and tone: of the two, "Spider-Man" was, and is, a considerably lighter and more "feel good" film than AOTC. There was also a big push by Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Entertainment to get the film noticed and talked about (remember -- *gulp* -- the Nickelback single?). My understanding is that Lucas opted for a lower-key approach to the marketing for AOTC (which was still, nonetheless, quite extensive/aggressive). Then, finally, there were the reviews: the critical response to the Sam Raimi picture was overwhelmingly positive, while appraisals for AOTC were decidedly more mixed (RT ratings stand at 89% and 67% respectively; and I certainly remember the raving around SM, while encountering more cynical and negative reviews and remarks for AOTC). Let's also not underestimate the power of boobies. Okay, so AOTC has Natalie Portman in some pretty nice dresses, and her flat tummy being exposed (go on, then), but SM has/had the much-talked-about "Kirsten Dunst in the rain" moment. Now, remember where SM was made: in a nation where a certain "wardrobe malfunction" at a certain football event caused an epic stir two years later. "You don't know the power of the mammary gland!" So, all told, I think AOTC did very well, and ROTS, obviously, did even better.

 

He must have. I didn't see a single trailer for the film prior to release.

 

Yeah. Now that I think about it, I think I saw "Forbidden Love" or "Breathing", like, once. The pre-release material certainly didn't impact me like all the stuff for TPM did. That's not to say that what Lucasfilm did wasn't clever or elegant, however. It just wasn't designed, by and large, to create the same buzz.

 

It was too low-key if you ask me. Part of it was Lucasfilm and its promotional partners thinking it was amped up a little too high with TPM which they could have thought was at the root of the backlash against the film, part of it was simply...they didn't know what the hell to do with AOTC. TPM had an easy hook with all new characters and an all-new Star Wars film. ROTS had an easy hook with Vader. But AOTC? Was it a love story or an urban sf adventure or a conspiracy tale or what? The very first trailer shown with "Monsters, Inc." was awesome. But Spider Man was attached to a lot more films the Christmas of 2001, including the first HP and LOTR, while one action-oriented trailer was online only (!!) and the other one focused on Anakin/Padmé. Now, had it been attached to a Twilight movie or something, it would have been gold. But this was years before Twilight and long before anyone realized there's a whole audience of young women/girls out there that had never been tapped. And I had a hard time even finding a movie showing the A/P trailer. Yoda going to town in the film was such a crowd-pleaser I wondered what crack head didn't think of using that in every promo. They made a lot of strategy mistakes with AOTC.

Anyhoo, as for the box office, the Star Wars movies never played on 15,000 screens and the prequels never benefitted from 3D or IMAX showings, save for a short re-release of AOTC in late '02, known as the Jimmy Smits-Free Version since they chopped 30 minutes out of the movie. When TPM came out, the only movie to crack a billion worldwide was Titanic and given that, TPM came pretty close to what was the biggest box office hit worldwide.

With the 3D re-release, maybe we can help TPM over the line!

--MissPadme

 

The divided nature of AOTC (all the SW pictures are divided to some extent, I suppose) probably harmed its marketing a little, yes. And it clearly presents a challenge to some viewers; even some of its fans.

This audience must have been known about by Lucas/Lucasfilm because of James Cameron's "Titanic", which you mentioned. The thing is that Star Wars, if it's anything, is more of a guy thing, in general, or had been, generally speaking, until AOTC, so it would have been difficult, on the face of it, to suddenly emphasize latent or emergent characteristics to an untapped demographic. Maybe the box office could have been upped slightly if some more specific marketing had been run. Who knows?

My understanding is that approximately twenty minutes were cut, not thirty. This was because -- again, if my understanding is correct -- the IMAX system used to allow for a maximum of two hours, and AOTC ran/runs some two hours and twenty minutes. From what I've read of the cuts, AOTC was essentially stripped of its heart, brain and soul. Funky ad poster, though.

 

What about inflation + 3D? It's not fair to compare the PT with Transformers or the latest Harry Potter movies...

 

I made that point earlier. You absolutely have to take into account the 3D gimmick and inherent increased ticket price as well as the inflation to get an accurate picture.

Also, delve more into the economics of the whole affair. Compared to the production budgets (which do not include the ad campaigns) Vs the box office take and you can start to see how much these new movies actually made compared to the same with the SW films.

 

I'll also say that the divided nature of AOTC is one of the things I love about it, but yeah, the marketing people didn't do themselves any favors by dialing things back, especially when Star Wars was recieving unprecedented competition.

Actually, I think that what MissPadme was saying is that AOTC failed to capitalize on the untapped audience of young women/girls in terms of sci-fi/fantasy entertainment. Twilight, Harry Potter, even Avatar showed how much you can attract a wider, unexpected audience for these kinds of genre films with some emphasis on the romance angles. I'm reminded of all the andecdotes comics-fans give about Neil Gaiman's Sandman series, and how often it's a gateway book for girls who get hooked on comics by reading it from their boyfriends' collections. Also anecdotally, the biggest fans of AOTC I've talked to personally are girls who really dug the "forbidden love" aspect of the film. Who knew making the Jedi celibate could provide a hook for the female crowds? Not the people at Lucasfilm marketing, it seems.

This was also before studios realized that all they had to do was just project the regular film on a huge IMAX screen and not actually cut the film to fit the IMAX limitations. Other than movies that actually have stuff shot with IMAX cameras (TDK and... um...), you're pretty much just getting either the same damn film shown on a big screen, or a reframed version to take better advantage of it (Avatar was 1.77 in IMAX, 2.35 on other screens, and 1.77 again for TV). Mainly, this just shows how much people enjoy seeing films on a really big screen. You don't need to fill the whole vertical space of the IMAX proportions to take advantage of it. Too bad nobody thought of that for AOTC.

 

That was the point I was trying to make, JFP. Thanks! I've noticed an awful lot of the people who have commented or favorited recently my Anakin/Padmé stories posted on Fan Fiction.net have Twilight-related user names. And I have run into female fans who had no interest in SW prior to seeing AOTC and either they were dragged along to go see it or they just happened to catch it on t.v., and the A/P thing turned out to be the hook that got them on the bus so to speak, which led them to finally appreciating all of the films.

There are times when I wonder why with such a huge market for girls' "young adult" books these days Lucasfilm hasn't taken advantage of it with its EU but I guess that's a question for another forum.

--MissPadme

 

If I may make a more general observation pertaining to the topic itself:

People didn't used to care about box office takings and related numbers and figures. But now, they do. The film world has become hyper-commercialized, with fans of all stripes falling over themselves to report and analyze revenue tallies, fallaciously using them as barometers of a movie's inherent quality, waving them as victory banners in other fans' faces, and often wielding them as a rod against opposing opinions, if the figures are strong, or whining and moaning, treating them as a sort of diseased rose or rotten timber that proves the rest of the ship is badly-built and sinking (or already sunk), and slating the films and the films' directors accordingly, if they happen to be weak.

This is all wrong. It's not how film appreciation is meant to be. Hollywood and the blockbuster juggernaut has trashed aesthetic principles and made baying fools of everyone. In an increasingly-claustrophobic movie release space, and a 21st Century dominated by global powers (multi-national corporations, banks and the military-industrial complex), people have become blind, materialistic sycophants, kissing the butt of Hollywood and doing its dirty work free of charge. Now, a film can't actually be worthy or relevant, apparently, unless it trounces its "rivals" and cracks into an ever-changing and ever-more-trivial "Top 10" or "Top 20".

As the ROTS-based documediamentary "Thee Backslacpkping with Media" captures in its ninth chapter, "$", the media is obsessed with promulgating vast figures -- millions, billions, "gazillions" -- and this sickness has been transmitted to fanboys and fangirls, who now, frequently, talk about a movie in terms of its money-making power: commerce over art. I saw it starting to happen on another site I used to frequent, and it was one of the reasons I decided to leave. Enjoy a film or don't enjoy it. Be aware of facts and figures if you must, but don't become *obsessed* by them, lest they, like the Dark Side, consume you. Films are made with commercial concerns in mind, absolutely. But there's a lot more to a film's appeal than that, both personally, and yes, popularly.

 

I think the Prequels are generally more women-friendly than Lucasfilm might have thought. Women tend to enjoy juvenile characters like Jar Jar or mother-son-relationships (Anakin&Shmi) and childactors ("He's is so cute" vs. "Oh no, an annoying kid") much more. And a centered love-story and many beautiful costumes can't harm. Women are just less dogmatic in many aspects.

 

I think AOTC was doomed from the start to be the worst box office grossing film of the PT. TPM was verrryyy highly anticipated because it was the first SW film in 20 years. ROTS was also highly anticipated because we would finally see things comes full circle: Empire's foundation, Anakin becoming Vader, the end of the Jedi order, etc. AOTC was simply in the middle. It didn't benefit from the enormous hype that TPM and ROTS had. Also, you have to take into account inflation and stuff like that.


So . . . am I supposed to believe that AOTC was the worst movie in the PT, because it made less money? If that's the case, you might as well claim that TESB is the worst movie in the OT for the same reason.

And are we really supposed to believe that box office is supposed to be the measure of a movie's quality?



There's also the psychological narrative thing. ROTS is about the Jedi dying, Anakin falling to the dark side, and the rise of the Empire. DH2 is just a big long movie about Harry finally beating Voldemort. So in the end, it's an upper, instead of depressing.


Well, that's just dandy . . . except I didn't like DH2 that much. I don't care how upbeat it was in the end.

 

The PT films did very well at the box office including AOTC.

Check out the website: www.the-numbers.com. It has market analysis for each year including ticket sales and adjusted for inflation.

In the US AOTC made $302,181,125 (excluding IMAX). This amounts to 52,010,521 tickets sold and $410,363,011 adjusted for inflation. The reason that ROTS did not appear to make vast amounts in the US is that repeat viewings by audiences is no longer a movie-going trend. Films are front loaded nowadays. Also there was not a 3-D factor and thus even lower ticket prices. Also it must be remembered ROTS broke the then record for a single day (over $50,000,000). That was a huge number then and done on much lower screen counts (because Lucas film tried to ensure that the film is only shown on the best screens).

It has to be acknowledged that Harry Potter and Pirates of the Caribbean are liked far more in the rest the world (in general) than the Star Wars films. That is why their international totals are so huge in comparison to Star Wars.

In addition, it must be also be noted that new emerging and major markets in China, Russia and South Korea have come into their own in the last 2-3 years. These new markets add large box office totals that the PT did not have.

Finally - lets remember TPM will be released in 3-D in less than a year. IT WILL BECOME THE FIRST STAR WARS MOVIE TO CROSS THE 1 BILLION MARK!!
(TPM in the US made $430,443,350 selling 84,732,943 tickets which adjusted for inflation is a MASSIVE $668,542,920!!)

 

Do re-releases count for box office ratings? If they do, then I could theoretically make an average, short movie and keep it in theaters for so long that it has to hit the billion dollar mark?