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
First of all, the budget you see is just the production budget. Generally you need to make at least 2X-3X the production budget in the box office. The production budget doesn’t include marketing or lots of other costs to break even. (as a side note, when you give a range on the budget like that, it probably means its actually at the high end)
In addition, the movie doesn’t get all of that box office. The real math here is complicated, especially for US movies released internationally, but on a good day, maybe they get 50%-60% of the global box office.
So If the movie costs $150M to make, it may have needed to make closer to $400M to break even.
But even then, thats just on the books. For how accounting is really done on movies (the famous “hollywood accounting”) its much more complicated what money gets counted where, so in reality, the “movie” might lose money, by design, as the money is instead made by other companies involved, while the movie eats all the costs.
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