The latest film to be considered flop in my eyes is Army of The Dead; gaining only about $1m from a budget of $70-90m. Another flop would be The Room, gaining less than $2,000 at the box office with a budget of $6m.
However when movies make more at the box office than what their budget was they are still considered flops. How much more money does it have to make for it to be considered a success?
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Three reasons:
1. Marketing costs are generally counted separately from production costs and can be enormous. A movie may have “broken even” on its $100 million budget with $100 million in box office receipts, but that doesn’t cover the $50 million in ads they spent.
2. The theaters keep a portion of the box office. It’s obvious, once you think about it, but just because a movie made X dollars at the box office doesn’t mean the coming that made it gets X dollars, so they need to make substantially more to cover the theaters’ share.
3. Opportunity cost. This is a big one. Even if a movie does actually make a tiny profit, even after the other expenses I mentioned, there are only so many movies that can be put out a year. Money invested in a movie that ended up making only $5 million in profit is a waste when the same effort could have gotten $500 million. And this is why you see an endless series of sequels and franchise films: *reliably* large profits.
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