Illumination does it again. Their formula of low budgets and heavy marketing works.
Not that it would change the results much, but I sort of wonder if Deadline is underestimating the marketing costs for Sing and SLOP. Those seemed to be everywhere for many months prior to release.
I didn't really do much in the way of original work here, but Deadline presented their data in the most annoying way possible: fake business balance sheets that were only viewable in some image viewing applet and split up on 21 different pages.
I am sure that they will do a summary article, with a format more convenient for comparing films, at some point. I figured, why wait?
Deadpool is one of the higher films on the list for Participations. Ryan Reynolds got paid.
You probably shouldn't look for Ghost in the Shell on the 2017 version of this list.
Half of them are talking animals. Basically people just want comfort food movies.
Looking at this I don't get why Marvel Studios isn't more interested in trying to make more smaller scale and budgeted affairs in the vein of Deadpool or even Logan. Something like Heroes for Hire or even Black Widow can be comfortably made along similar lines
I was expecting to see The Shallows in there somewhere.
I don't imagine the marketing cost was all that big, and it made nearly $120m on a budget of $17m.
Because Deadpool and Logan are movies that happened after the lineup up until 2020 was mapped out and now they cant move around because they have to set a couple of things up.
I think we will something smaller scale after Infinity War 2.
Amazing work.
I find this list depressing. Full of sequels, superhero crud and explosiony box-office bullshit. But when that stuff is pulling in numbers like that, how can you blame the studios.
I do think they'll end up killing the golden goose though.
A few things to point out.
1) You might notice that the revenue sheet for La La Land is a bit strange. This is due to the fact that Lionsgate sells off the majority of the international distribution rights for its films. This allows them to offset the risks of their productions (and avoid losing big money on their bombs), but it is to their detriment when a film blows up like La La Land. So, while the film made quite a bit overseas, Lionsgate only directly profits from the UK gross (where they distributed). I would guess that the remaining $30M or so in that overseas studio cut comes from profit sharing clauses in territories where La La Land overperformed. The proceeds of the international rights sales for La La Land are listed under foreign contributions ($55M).
Selling the foreign rights also means that Lionsgate misses out on international TV and home video profits. I'm not really sure why Deadline left the WW Home Media figure blank though. Presumably, Lionsgate makes money off domestic home video.
2) There are two categories for Prints and Advertising under the Expenses chart. If the studio handled worldwide distribution (with some exceptions in most cases), the total marketing and distribution costs (domestic + international) are listed under WW Prints and Ads. In La La Land's case, Lionsgate is only paying for the domestic distribution and ads, so the expense is listed in the domestic column.
3) The participation expense estimates money distributed in the various gross participation deals in the contracts of a film's actors, director, producers, etc. I assume that the residuals come from TV and Home video profits (and also go to the talent involved in the film).
4) Don't Breathe is a good case study in why studios don't just release 50 low budget films a year even if they typically gross 3-20x their production budgets. When you factor in the other expenses, production budget is almost negligible.
This thread started when we only had #11-20. I have been updating the thread as new data was added. If you are joining late, many of the posts before #47 are talking about an then incomplete list of films.
Where would Marvel's pecentage of Deadpools BO go? Residuals or participation? Or is it just not accounted for?
Sing, SLoP and Finding Dory are in the top ten? Well, not too surprised by FD(even though it was a boring rehash), but Sing and SLoP cracking the top 10 is unbelievable.
Illumination found its formula, I guess.