I really don’t get it how it works. Making a movie costs a lot of money, even if it is not a blockbuster.
So many TERRIBLE movies are being released every month. How are all they making profit?
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Whether a movie is good or bad is only somewhat related to how much money it earns. There are movies that are poorly reviewed yet make money: for example, 50 Shades Darker has 11% on Rotten Tomatoes yet made $381 million against a $55 million budget. On the flip side, there are movies that are well reviewed yet underperform: for example, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves has 93% on Rotten Tomatoes yet only made $208.2 million against a $150 million budget. The general rule is a movie needs to make at least double its budget to be profitable (the budget doesn’t include marketing and distribution costs), so here the “bad” movie was profitable and the “good” movie lost money.
As we can see above, one factor is simply the cost of the film. If Fifty Shades Darker had cost $200 million to make, it’d have lost money. If D&D: HAT had cost $100 million, it’d have been profitable. A lot of “bad” films released every year are simply cheaply made, so they don’t need to be super popular to make a profit.
The other factor is finding an audience and marketing to them. 50 Shades Darker is a sequel to a film adaptation of a popular romance novel, and the original was considered trash/smut fiction, so it had a built in audience with low expectations that didn’t particularly care if the film was “good.” While D&D has a reputation for being a hobbyist’s game, and people who have never played the game may have felt they weren’t the target audience for the film, even though critics assured them the film was “good.”
So it’s a mixture of setting the right budget, finding the right audience, and marketing to them. Reviews can help in that they can influence people unsure of whether they want to see the film, but they do not guarantee the success or failure.
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