Does every movie seem to "flop" these days

Sad Professor

It may have been said already, but streaming deals and blu-ray sales are figured into the profitability of a film. It's not all about box office anymore. The studios keep making these box office "flops" so they are obviously making money somewhere along the line.

As for why they don't make more smaller mid-budget films, such films still have to be marketed and the marketing would probably end up costing more than the film. In such situations the studios may decide it's not worth the risk and just shelve the film or send it straight to Netflix. It's seemingly only when a ridiculous amount of money is on the line and/or the fate of the whole studio is hanging in the balance that films get the marketing they need to be a success. As a result there seems to be an incentive to spend as much money as possible on the film in order to ensure it gets the release it needs or gets made in the first place.

Dodge

Very specifically with Disney, the film isn’t produced in isolation. There’s merchandise, theme park tie ins and all sorts of inter connected segments of their business

They may have the odd flop but in 2019 the film part of the business reported over 11 billion dollars in revenue. The Disney company. And of course, they have Disney Plus to provide content for now too

The theme parks bring in most revenue fwiw https://www.statista.com/statistics/193140/revenue-of-the-walt-disney-company-by-operating-segment/

fryup

95% of films is the same ol same ol ....there's only about half a dozen a year that stand out (imo)

vriesmays

Charlton Heston was on the Late Late years ago and Gaybo asked him which movie did he regret doing. Answer: Call of the wild.

Tony EH

No. But a lot of the flops are simply symptomatic of the problems with modern capitalism. Rampant, unreasonable, greed has caused everything to spiral out of control and the costs of things have gotten away from any kind of realistic parameter or measure.

$150 million for a story about a guy and a dog. Just think about that for a second and how bloody absurd it is. Movies don't need to be made for that kind of silly money, especially for such a twee concept. There are plenty of good story driven films that have been produced for a fraction of that. In fact, 'Call of the Wild' has been made several times for much, much, less money than this Harrison Ford outing.

However, the major problem with these super budgeted movies is that they have to make back so much money to just break even, that the risk is extremely dangerous. Anyone with any kind of risk aversion in project management would touch these things with a barge pole.

And sure, art should have an element of risk and all that. But, the amount of actual art involved in these Hollywood movies is minimal, at best.

It has to go pop at some point.

fritzelly

Maybe if Hollywood stopped remaking the same films over and over again and actually brought to screen some new story they wouldn't be as big a flop
It's like some guy says hey this film did amazing 10 years ago lets remake it and throw loads of money at it and then someone else wonders why it lost money

Flesh Gorden

As a very rough guide, films need to be breaking the $1 billion mark to be considered successful and the $2 billion mark to be blockbusters.

Good example being the Charlie's Angels film from last year, which had an estimated budget of about $50m and grossed $72m.

Which sounds good, but the studio were probably hoping for it to make 10-20x times as much.

Plus, there's no way to know if it actually did make any money due to...


Hollywood Accounting

In a nutshell, studios use similar tricks that the tech companies use to avoid paying taxes and residuals, with shell companies and inflated licensing and distribution fees, to ensure it never turns a profit.

Even though studios design films to lose money, they don't want them losing too much money.

A nice little list to look at: List of Biggest Box Office Bombs



Decent video here explaining how the Harry Potter films have technically never turned a profit and neither has The Return of the Jedi.

(Skip to 1:35 to get to the point, as he has a lot of filler in his videos.)

Homelander

Saying a movie has to make $2bn to be a blockbuster is a bit silly as 99% of movies don't reach that, even the literal blockbusters.

Harry Potter and ROTJ made tonnes of money, it was just clever Hollywood accounting means they "didn't"

The more correct rule of thumb is probably that a movie has to make double its budget to break even, anything after that is profit (though obviously in some cases, double budget is a healthy profit, in others, nada, but in general)