For example- I looked at The Mummy (2017) on Wikipedia, which had a budget of $125-195 million, and grossed $410 million worldwide at the box office, yet it also says the studio lost $95 million. How is that possible?
In: 99
Because the budget of the movie isn’t the total cost to the studio, and the box office isn’t the total revenue to the studio either.
The box office gross isn’t how much money the studio made on a movie, it’s the total of all the ticket sales. When you go to a movie theater and buy a ticket the theater keeps some of that money, generally somewhere between 40% and 50%, though it can vary from film to film. So if The Mummy made $410 million at the box office the studio probably made somewhere around $200 million and theaters made somewhere around $200 million. So the amount of money that a studio makes on a movie is very roughly half the box office gross.
The other aspect is that budget of a movie is just the production budget to actually make the movie, it doesn’t include the costs of things like advertising and distribution. So on top of the costs of making the movie you need to pay people to design the posters, and pay for ads, press availability, and things like that. For a major blockbuster those costs can be really big. For example according to [Deadline](https://deadline.com/2017/06/the-mummy-tom-cruise-box-office-bomb-loss-1202114482/) The Mummy reportedly had marketing costs of around $150 million. So the studio needed to make that money back *in addition* to the budget. So the budget of the film was somewhere between $125 to $195 million, but the total cost to the studio was between $275 to $345 million.
As a result of these two factors a major Hollywood film generally needs to make around twice or three times its production budget to turn a profit.
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