It seems like even before the first weekend is over, all the box office analysts have already declared the success or failure of the movie. I know personally, I don’t see a movie until the end of the run, so I don’t have to deal with huge crowds and lines and bad seats, it’s safe to say that nearly everyone I know follows suit. Doesn’t the entire run – including theater receipts, pay per view, home media sales, etc. – have to be considered for that hit or flop call is made? If not, why?
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> Doesn’t the entire run – including theater receipts, pay per view, home media sales, etc. – have to be considered for that hit or flop call is made?
It’s true that some movies do end up making money in the long run thanks to media sales (although since streaming those have taken a MASSIVE hit, Matt Damon has talked about that), but studios don’t drop hundreds of millions of dollars on making a movie for it to become profitable “eventually.” They want a movie to not only make back its budget but also turn a profit before it ever leaves the theater; anything after that just gets to be gravy. And again with them losing so much on the streaming market (seriously most are not profitable) that is not being made up by home media sales, they need these movies to turn a profit fast, not wait a year or two until they start to see profit on it.
Also, in general you can tell if a movie will make back its budget or not by looking at a) how much it cost and b) how much it made opening weekend. Movies need to make at least 2.5x their budget back which accounts for budget, marketing, distribution costs, etc. And most movies have a typical drop on the second weekend that’s hopefully around 60% (this is referred to as a movie’s “legs”). If a movie makes Y in its opening weekend, you can predict using typical legs that it will make Z during its second weekend and so on and so forth. So you can usually tell opening weekend what a movie will end up grossing in the end. The actual number might finish up or down a bit but you have a general enough idea to know if it’s gonna turn a profit before its run is done or not. (There are exceptions where exceptionally good worth of mouth means a movie recovers after a bad opening weekend – Greatest Showman opened badly but actually gained steam after release – but that’s SUPER rare).
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