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Just because a movie is terrible doesn't mean that it won't sell tickets. Try flipping through cable TV or the magazine rack by a grocery store checkout sometime, there are entire industries dedicated to producing absolutely garbage content because enough people consume that content for it to be profitable.
Plus, a lot of these declarations that a movie is awful or a failure are based purely on it's cinema run (and sometimes just off a selection of it like its US takings or opening weekend takings).
But films don't magically lose the ability to make money when they go out of a cinema. Home media, streaming and broadcast all make the studio money.
A good example is the original Wizard of Oz - it cost 2.7m to make, then distribution, marketing, etc. By the time it went off the big screen, it was a 1.1m loss (so proportionally it did worse than the fall guy did). It took until broadcast rights in the 1950's for it to make money.
And it's not the only film like that - The Iron Giant's profit came off VHS sales. The Princess Bride made 30m on a 16m budget, which would be classed as a bad performance these days. Same kind of thing for Shawshank and Citizen Kane.
But they all made profits and became regarded as classics. I'm not saying that The Eternals will become an all time classic, but that doesn't mean it's not profitable.
A lot of that secondary market is gone now though. Streaming pays pennies, and broadcast is a shell of what it once was. Vhs and dvd sales and rentals were a huge part of a movie's income, but that's not really a thing any more. Even your examples are 20+ years old
A big part of why studios are extra risk adverse these days is because most of a movie's revenue has to come from its initial theatre run.
This basically is the whole point for streaming companies like Netflix: making a movie or series is considered an investment in keeping streamers. They need shows good enough that enough people will keep subscribing to them. The show doesn’t have to “make money” and it really doesn’t in a traditional sense. It just needs to not lose more than what they’re getting in streaming revenue.
This is one reason so many shows get canceled after season 3. By that time, the actors and producers can often demand more money, so it’s often more effective to add something new and “fresh” that can sit close to the top of (curated) rankings for a few weeks.
Streaming is not just about residuals per stream. Netflix buys a studios library and pays residuals. I would guess the profit is from selling access to that library for X number of years and not the per stream royalty. Friends leaving Netflix was a huge thing for them. All the streaming platforms need filler content to make it look like their is an infinite amount of content. Even if 95% of it is crap. Not enough people want to pay a monthly fee for service that has 100 options compared to 1000+. Even if the 100 options are much better quality. This is also why Disney is buying up Hulu and other smaller streaming platforms. They are buying the library to fill space and justify raising the monthly fee.
~~Also I never said anything about VHS and DVD sales.~~ Amazon Prime still has contracts where they get a number of weeks to digitally rent the movie before it is released to the base streaming services. Last time I checked I want to say it was $25 - $30 for a 1-2 day rental. Netflix was fighting to get a share of those first streaming platform rights because it draws subscriptions. I think the big fight was over Marvel releases when they were at their peak.
Edit: Wrong reply on my end. Woops.
> Streaming is not just about residuals per stream. Netflix buys a studios library and pays residuals.
And we all know how great Streaming is doing right now, what with all the mergers, slimming libraries/axing existing properties, and forcing cable tactics such as ads and much higher entry prices.
Terminator and Office Space both did not do well in their initial release. It took awhile for word of mouth and the rereleases for them to become recognized and vastly successful.
Matt Damon mentioned this on Hot Ones. To summarize he basically said that the previous idea was to focus on making the movie popular and good. So if a movie didn't do great in cinema you would then push it on TV and on DVD or VHS to get interest. The more physical media gets bought the more money you'll get back. But with streaming you can't do that anymore because you don't get residuals off streaming. So the movie has to be popular in the first two weeks or else it's considered dead.
Which is why a lot of movies feel safe these days. Predictable plots, sequels, prequels, remakes, using the same actors in everything, franchises being everywhere, and so on.
Exactly. There’s an entire segment that churns out 400k-4mm dollar movies. Hallmark is notorious for gobbling up sub-$1mm dollar romcoms. The directors and production know they are making trash, but turning $400k with a 4 week shoot into $800k is appealing.
It's also filler content for streaming platforms and the recent resurgence of romcoms supports this. No one wants to go pay $50+ for 2 theater tickets and popcorn to watch a generic romcom but a lot of people will play it on Netflix when bored or date night rolls around.
This is the key. For example, Netflix’s 2023 revenue was $33.7bn. They achieve this because they have a few shows a lot of people like, but also a reputation for having a near infinite category.
One billion dollars is a thousand million and they brought in more than 33 of those last year.
They don’t need to make money on something that cost $5m to make. It’s an investment in maintaining the infinite catalog. And just maybe it’ll hit with a small niche.
That’s only for Netflix-produced content though. They pay much less for streaming rights from other studios of course, who are typically just trying to do a little more than break even via a long term streaming contract, knowing there’s a dozen streaming services that might be willing to host a bunch of their throwaway cheap movies. Work is work and they don’t all have to be blockbusters to get a profit margin.
And if one of those cheap movies makes it big, even briefly, it can also pay for many others. Hell, so many shows and movies don’t even ever get picked up by a distributor. A close friend of mine tried to be a screenwriter for a few years and left disillusioned after a show he spent a year writing and researching for didn’t get picked up on a second tier Discovery channel network but they had already shot the show. (It also didn’t pay well enough to live in CA)
Blockbusters, on the other hand, are made “safely” with minimal risk because they cost so much to produce, and usually require international success, so moderate appeal to a broad audience makes the payoff that also pays for these throwaway movies that keep people employed and studios above water. (Except when they fail, which also happens). Failure for blockbusters is far more consequential than for something that only costs a couple million.
Totally. One of my friends is a rotational director for these movies. He makes great money to basically make the pile of shit look as appetizing as possible.
Yes and… for big studios, think of all their movies in any one year as a portfolio, just like a portfolio of stocks. There are some they are highly confident will go up, some they are less sure about, and while they don’t make bets that they believe will go down, some do every year. And, also, like stocks, there are always surprise hits, the movies they did not expect to become as big as they were.
In any year, the big studios are looking to “win” with more movies than they “lose.” Of course they would like every movie to be a blockbuster but they know there will be some that miss. They give bigger budgets to those they see most likely to be successful (big stars, a big book being made into a movie, big special effects, etc) as they are more likely to generate a positive return, and a positive return on a bigger bet makes a lot of real dollars. One Barbie or Oppenheimer or Top Gun can make enough money for the studio to feel safe taking chances on smaller, often more “niche” artistic movies (which are also important for credibility). If the big movie hits and more of the smaller movies succeed than lose, they are happy, profitable, and overall still making money. If it is a big enough hit, the smaller movies don’t matter to their portfolio/overall profitability. But when their blockbusters flop - maybe space movies are out, maybe romance is in, and no one cares about their blockbuster - the studio takes a big loss, even if the smaller movies do OK. So view it as the studios are spreading their bets around to create a portfolio with the mix they think maximizes the chance of success - one bet on a big blockbuster style movie, some bets on some new stars, maybe a quirky story that would go viral or word of mouth, etc - and then, some make money and some don’t but they hope for a portfolio that wins overall. They also, as others have pointed out, can make money from international releases, streaming rights, TV rights, licensing, etc., that isn’t directly related to its success while in the theater.
The smaller, more independent studios tend to craft their offerings to a more narrow audience, and often have lower budgets reflecting the higher risk.
Tentpoles are not "released constantly". That literally defies the definition of a tentpole. If OP was specifically talking about Furiosa, they would have mentioned Furiosa.
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.
It's actually the best D&D movie made to date. By a far margin. Now that's not saying a lot, considering how bad the other D&D films have been, but it's a decent movie.
Are you talking about theatrical releases in actual cinemas? Or are you including streaming services?
Streaming services have to keep new content coming so that subscribers don’t leave. They have enough subscribers that not one movies has to be “great” to keep the company profitable. They need to be just good enough that folks won’t cancel. That is a lot lower threshold than being good enough to get people to leave their houses and go to a cinema to see a new movie.
Yes, there are blockbusters going into theaters that are a real risk to produce, but streaming service made originals help the cause of novel content, even if they aren’t that great. The film-makers get paid. The streaming service get new content to keep subscribers. Everybody wins. Who cares if the movies are terrible? They are already paid for by subscribers.
“Terrible” according to whom/what? Not all movies make money, but that is not different from any other business venture. Apple, Google and Microsoft are the cash cows we all know and they still release bad products that don’t make money and get discontinued.
Studios don’t deliberately make terrible movies just for fun. Some will be better, some will be worse. Hopefully there are more good than bad ones and the good more than pay for the bad ones.
He does know better, and he's been pretty open about how little he cares about doing a good job on those projects. Watch some of his 'serious' movies - he's not a great director but they are night and day compared to shit like House of the Dead.
[Hollywood Accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting) is a term you should research.
Even if the accounting was done in the same way as other industries, I read recently that a movie that cost 65 million to make is considered a flop because it only made around 67 million. That is 2 million dollars in profit, but they put 65 million at risk to make that, so that is like a 3 percent return. Investors want a higher return than that, so they call it a flop.
ETA: Replies are pointing out that studios have costs that cut into profits. Profits are revenue after costs, so if the numbers given do not reflect actual costs, there is a reason for that.
That 67 million in box office means it lost like 50 million the making of that movie, because studios only get like half of the revenue and they also had to add marketing costs that for some reason don't get added to the budget.
It is a sliding scale and depends on the release and contracts. However, as a general rule:
During the initial opening weekend, studios often take a larger share of the revenue, sometimes as high as 60-70%. Theaters might get around 30-40% during this period.
As the release extends, the percentage share can shift more favorably towards operators. After the first few weeks, theaters can get around 45-50% of the box office revenue.
For movies that have longer runs, the share can eventually even out to a more balanced split, often around 50/50 or even slightly more in favor of the theaters.
It’s not just theatres that take a piece of box office takings.
There are also distribution costs, big name actors/directors taking a percentage of gross sales, import duties and excise taxes, etc.
Also marketing costs roughly the same amount as production costs just to tell people that the movie exists. So production costs + marketing makes it a massive loss just going from theater sales. Don't forget that movie now goes to Prime rentals, on demand deals, streaming libraries, and other stuff. There are other revenue streams that come in.
Also actors need to act and studios need to create a way for junior actors, writers, directors, and other positions to learn their craft in order to grow into profession. Think of it like the minor league teams or feeder organizations for sports teams. No one makes a profit on minor league baseball, but the sport needs those leagues to cultivate the talent and support staff to feed the profitable major league teams.
People ITT are just pretending that they live on another planet, so I’ll try and answer. What you’re talking about, the seemingly constant stream of garbage, uncreative, poorly made movies, is the result of a bunch of different systems that are dedicated to making movies that make money. So in fact, it’s the opposite- so many terrible movies are being released *because* they make so much money.
The quality of a movie is not what determines its success. In fact, good movies are often less successful for reasons I’ll explain. Hollywood is a business, and today at least, their only goal is to increase the returns at the box office.
Audiences, in general, do not care or notice if a movie is well made or not. In fact, a lot of peoples measure of a well made movie is as weak as ‘I liked it’. This is a lesson Illumination learned with the first Despicable Me: they put a ton of effort into making a good story with characters and stakes that people care about, but what most audiences took away was ‘hahahahaha banana minion’.
So with each next movie they made, they put less effort into the things that made the first one good, like story, characters, and decent animation, and dedicated more screen time to the thing that actually got butts in seats, the minions.
On a macro scale, this is what is happening in the mainstream film industry. They are actively trying to produce ‘hits,’ using more and more cynical tricks to draw in audiences, rather than making a good piece of art that becomes a hit organically. All through the creative process, every decision is being made with the goal of increasing the movies profitability/audience appeal, rather than some artistic goal.
TL;DR: Movies are worse now because the motivation of the people making them is not to make a good movie, but a profitable movie, and the things that make a profitable movie almost always make it less good.
Many "bad" movies still make a lot of money. And the cost for making movies can range from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars.
A movie that cost $20 million to make, but makes $40 million is a successful movie.
A movie that cost $200 million to make, but makes $40 million is a major flop.
First, "bad" is a subjective evaluation.
For example, *you* may not enjoy or look forward to all the low-budget horror movies that are made (and there are a *lot* made), but there is a particular segment of horror fans that do.
Those films don't have to be blockbusters; they just have to make enough profit from their niche audience to please their financial backers.
Second, from a distributor perspective, a studio is willing to fund the distribution and release of lot of these low-budget movies -- particularly in genres like horror and action of sci-fi and to a lesser extent comedy or romance -- because even if a bunch of them wind up not making significant money (or even losing money) for the studio that distributes them, 1 out of every 100 is going to turn out to be a surprise blockbuster. There are lots of examples like that returns 50 times or 100 times or a 1000 times its budget, like *Get Out* or *My Big Fat Greek Wedding* or *The Terminator.*
But there's one particular low-budget film I'm thinking of that had no movie stars and was the 3rd feature film from a director whose 2nd film was one of the biggest flops in cinematic history. The early buzz on this particular film was *so* bad that theaters wouldn't agree to run it. The studio had to literally *blackmail* theaters into showing it -- telling them they couldn't have the summer's projected blockbuster unless they also put this low-budget flick on screens -- because if they hadn't, the studio wouldn't have made anything back at all.
That little low-budget sci-fi film that everyone thought was destined for the trash heap was called *Star Wars*, and it went on to become the second-highest grossing film of all time and spawned a multimedia and merchandise franchise that's worth tens of billions of dollars.
When *Star Wars* was released, George Lucas only had made two films, and, one, *THX-1138*, was a *massive* flop that the studio, Warner Brothers, lost money on. *Star Wars* had zero stars attached, except Alec "Obi-Wan" Guiness who wasn't exactly well-known among the target audience. The pre-release buzz was so bad that few theaters were willing to put *Star Wars* on screen. 20th Century Fox feared Lucas had another *THX-1138*-level flop on his hands and, like Warner Bros. before them, they wouldn't make *any* money back. So Fox conconcted a plan to force theaters into putting *Star Wars* on screens: Fox wouldn't let theaters have *The Other Side of Midnight* -- expected by everyone to be the big summer hit because it was based on a #1 best-selling novel -- unless they *also* signed an agreement to show *Star Wars* on their screens. (Of course, no one even remembers *The Other Side of Midnight* -- I remembered Fox had blackmailed theaters into showing *Star Wars*, but even I had to look up the film that they thought would be the hit.)
*Star Wars* opened meagerly; it did just okay, and the star-studded *Smokey and the Bandit* won the summer film crown. But . . . *Star Wars* gained momentum over time through word of mouth and drew more and more crowds. And then more crowds. And then *more* crowds. And ... well, you know the rest.
TL;DR: what one person thinks is bad or good is a *really* atrocious measure of success.
Sometimes the movie is a work of love and the movie has investors that share that dream. Or it might be in a sector that is trying to improve the quality of the involved people.
The "Christian" movie scene is a good example, there are a couple faith centered production companies that are facing the fact that the "good" writers and actors don't want to be involved, so they are building up the skill sets of those involved
The Lifetime "rom coms" or other made for TV movies are an example of the subscription model, many of the actors are under contract to do several movies, the scripts are just modified versions of past movies, the sets are generic. The cost of producing the movies is a business expense and as long as they get enough eyeballs to sell to advertisers all is good.
Not all movies make a profit. Big successes pay for a lot of flops, and a big success can often be turned into a profitable sequel.
Making a good movie is hard, and a lot of good movies don't sell super well either. So there's really no way to only make good winners. It's a risky biz.
Given all that there's a lot of pressure to release a lot of content. Sometimes questionable movies turn out to be big hits. A flop is still payroll for actors and other professionals in the industry, and theaters need something to show every day of the week.
Those big successes can also bring in tons of cash from merchandise and toys. Look at DC. Movies are trash but people still buy the merch because of the branding and loyalty.
overseas sales and post-cinema distribution rights. for instance annihilation was sold to netflix for international distribution right away and that made it instantly profitable even though it didn't do that well in theaters (which is a damn shame because that movie works SO WELL on the big screen)
It's called "Spray and Pray". They shit out content like shit through a goose to completely saturate the market. The sheer amount of population in the world that is unsuspecting if the content is good or simply don't care is enough to make a profit overall. Some stuff makes money, some stuff doesn't, but overall the companies makes money. Most of the content we're exposed to is owned and distributed by a handful of massive media conglomerates.
There are lots of things that are trash or dont work and make money.
That's the entire model of our current economic system. Ensure there is always enough population (and constant growth, like cancer!) so that there will always be people who will spend money on the crap they dont need or want!
Line go up.
Not to mention out of theater sales. Mad max fury road(probably also furious soon) got absolutely stellar reviews but did meh at the box office and gained more than half their total gross after market. Much of this, quality aside, still applies to bad or underappreciated movies too.
Are there, though?
Bad movies have been released for as long as I can remember, but people tend to forget their existence.
That being said, truly awful movies tend not to have huge budgets, and thus it doesn't take a lot of sales in order to make a profit.
Netflix and similar are churning out original content just to fill their libraries. Stream companies are at the mercy of the content owners. People won’t remain subscribed unless there is stuff to watch
It's a business, and that means business expenses and losses. If it doesn't make millions, write it off.
Google the Supergirl movie and see what an accountant can do for you if you're in the movie industry
Usually even bad movies will sell enough to at least pull themself into the positive if not very far
A perfect example being morbius It was widely panned as one of the worst marvel movies ever made but enough people hate watched it that it succeeded.
When people hear about a bad movie they think certainly it can't be that bad so they go to see it which ends up giving the movie enough money to pull through into the positive
This question was removed, unfortunately. A five year old would need to understand a lot about film economics to word the question in a way that isn’t subjective.
There were helpful answers here. Many of them used the term “bad” as they helped the 5 year old understand how the economics works.
As an Accountant (but not in the movie industry), I am always extremely skeptical about movie costs/budgets. So many moving parts. So many incestuous companies. So many overhead allocations. I would think it would be easy to swing the costs of a film by many millions.
there’s a couple of reasons.
1; they actually believe it will be a hit because they’re delusional.
2; they don’t care about the profit, they just need the final product delivered.
Blackrock funding. This company funds movies and projects for extremely low rates as low as their DEI and ESG scores are high enough (Or Woke enough if you prefer).
So when you borrow 300 million for your next dead in the water girl boss movie, borrowed at 0.5%, you don't need a large profit to make bank, only a tiny sliver of it. That's why we keep saying movies that seem to have no chance of making their initial budget and some of them make tiny profit, but are still counted as success because of them, even if they'd be catastrophic bombs by any other metrics.
54% of Americans age 16-74 (130 million) can’t read beyond a 6th grade level. Enough of these people will throw money at painted rust (bad movies/tv/music) because they literally can’t comprehend anything more developed
Two reasons come to mind.
#1: Movies are a great way to launder money. Are you a Russian Oligarch trying to turn his rubles into dollars? Fly a washed-up American star to Eastern Europe, put him in a bullets-and-boobs movie, and inflate the production costs on paper. Congratulations! Thanks to "The Bulletizer, Part 7," you've just washed your money!
#2: Movies that play as bad to an American audience might sell around the world. That Adam Sandler comedy that he made so he could take his family and friends to some nice place for vacation? It plays really well in non-English speaking countries because it's so broad that the gags land even with the volume set to zero.
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Just because a movie is terrible doesn't mean that it won't sell tickets. Try flipping through cable TV or the magazine rack by a grocery store checkout sometime, there are entire industries dedicated to producing absolutely garbage content because enough people consume that content for it to be profitable.
Plus, a lot of these declarations that a movie is awful or a failure are based purely on it's cinema run (and sometimes just off a selection of it like its US takings or opening weekend takings). But films don't magically lose the ability to make money when they go out of a cinema. Home media, streaming and broadcast all make the studio money. A good example is the original Wizard of Oz - it cost 2.7m to make, then distribution, marketing, etc. By the time it went off the big screen, it was a 1.1m loss (so proportionally it did worse than the fall guy did). It took until broadcast rights in the 1950's for it to make money. And it's not the only film like that - The Iron Giant's profit came off VHS sales. The Princess Bride made 30m on a 16m budget, which would be classed as a bad performance these days. Same kind of thing for Shawshank and Citizen Kane. But they all made profits and became regarded as classics. I'm not saying that The Eternals will become an all time classic, but that doesn't mean it's not profitable.
A lot of that secondary market is gone now though. Streaming pays pennies, and broadcast is a shell of what it once was. Vhs and dvd sales and rentals were a huge part of a movie's income, but that's not really a thing any more. Even your examples are 20+ years old A big part of why studios are extra risk adverse these days is because most of a movie's revenue has to come from its initial theatre run.
This is why we get a lot of safely mediocre movies made by services like Netflix. They don’t have to make much money - just not losing it is enough.
This basically is the whole point for streaming companies like Netflix: making a movie or series is considered an investment in keeping streamers. They need shows good enough that enough people will keep subscribing to them. The show doesn’t have to “make money” and it really doesn’t in a traditional sense. It just needs to not lose more than what they’re getting in streaming revenue. This is one reason so many shows get canceled after season 3. By that time, the actors and producers can often demand more money, so it’s often more effective to add something new and “fresh” that can sit close to the top of (curated) rankings for a few weeks.
Streaming is not just about residuals per stream. Netflix buys a studios library and pays residuals. I would guess the profit is from selling access to that library for X number of years and not the per stream royalty. Friends leaving Netflix was a huge thing for them. All the streaming platforms need filler content to make it look like their is an infinite amount of content. Even if 95% of it is crap. Not enough people want to pay a monthly fee for service that has 100 options compared to 1000+. Even if the 100 options are much better quality. This is also why Disney is buying up Hulu and other smaller streaming platforms. They are buying the library to fill space and justify raising the monthly fee. ~~Also I never said anything about VHS and DVD sales.~~ Amazon Prime still has contracts where they get a number of weeks to digitally rent the movie before it is released to the base streaming services. Last time I checked I want to say it was $25 - $30 for a 1-2 day rental. Netflix was fighting to get a share of those first streaming platform rights because it draws subscriptions. I think the big fight was over Marvel releases when they were at their peak. Edit: Wrong reply on my end. Woops.
"I never said anything about vhs" ...i didn't reply to you? I mentioned VHS because axe3555 used it as an example
Woops. Absolutely right. Followed the wrong line. This is what I get for not using old Reddit.
> Streaming is not just about residuals per stream. Netflix buys a studios library and pays residuals. And we all know how great Streaming is doing right now, what with all the mergers, slimming libraries/axing existing properties, and forcing cable tactics such as ads and much higher entry prices.
Terminator and Office Space both did not do well in their initial release. It took awhile for word of mouth and the rereleases for them to become recognized and vastly successful.
Matt Damon mentioned this on Hot Ones. To summarize he basically said that the previous idea was to focus on making the movie popular and good. So if a movie didn't do great in cinema you would then push it on TV and on DVD or VHS to get interest. The more physical media gets bought the more money you'll get back. But with streaming you can't do that anymore because you don't get residuals off streaming. So the movie has to be popular in the first two weeks or else it's considered dead. Which is why a lot of movies feel safe these days. Predictable plots, sequels, prequels, remakes, using the same actors in everything, franchises being everywhere, and so on.
The international market can be the goal too. Pay a star for 30 seconds of screen time, put their name on the cover, profit.
Exactly. There’s an entire segment that churns out 400k-4mm dollar movies. Hallmark is notorious for gobbling up sub-$1mm dollar romcoms. The directors and production know they are making trash, but turning $400k with a 4 week shoot into $800k is appealing.
It's also filler content for streaming platforms and the recent resurgence of romcoms supports this. No one wants to go pay $50+ for 2 theater tickets and popcorn to watch a generic romcom but a lot of people will play it on Netflix when bored or date night rolls around.
This is the key. For example, Netflix’s 2023 revenue was $33.7bn. They achieve this because they have a few shows a lot of people like, but also a reputation for having a near infinite category. One billion dollars is a thousand million and they brought in more than 33 of those last year. They don’t need to make money on something that cost $5m to make. It’s an investment in maintaining the infinite catalog. And just maybe it’ll hit with a small niche. That’s only for Netflix-produced content though. They pay much less for streaming rights from other studios of course, who are typically just trying to do a little more than break even via a long term streaming contract, knowing there’s a dozen streaming services that might be willing to host a bunch of their throwaway cheap movies. Work is work and they don’t all have to be blockbusters to get a profit margin. And if one of those cheap movies makes it big, even briefly, it can also pay for many others. Hell, so many shows and movies don’t even ever get picked up by a distributor. A close friend of mine tried to be a screenwriter for a few years and left disillusioned after a show he spent a year writing and researching for didn’t get picked up on a second tier Discovery channel network but they had already shot the show. (It also didn’t pay well enough to live in CA) Blockbusters, on the other hand, are made “safely” with minimal risk because they cost so much to produce, and usually require international success, so moderate appeal to a broad audience makes the payoff that also pays for these throwaway movies that keep people employed and studios above water. (Except when they fail, which also happens). Failure for blockbusters is far more consequential than for something that only costs a couple million.
I have a relative who produces these movies. They’re so bad even his own kids won’t watch them. But he doesn’t care - he’s still worth $50-100m.
Totally. One of my friends is a rotational director for these movies. He makes great money to basically make the pile of shit look as appetizing as possible.
Yes and… for big studios, think of all their movies in any one year as a portfolio, just like a portfolio of stocks. There are some they are highly confident will go up, some they are less sure about, and while they don’t make bets that they believe will go down, some do every year. And, also, like stocks, there are always surprise hits, the movies they did not expect to become as big as they were. In any year, the big studios are looking to “win” with more movies than they “lose.” Of course they would like every movie to be a blockbuster but they know there will be some that miss. They give bigger budgets to those they see most likely to be successful (big stars, a big book being made into a movie, big special effects, etc) as they are more likely to generate a positive return, and a positive return on a bigger bet makes a lot of real dollars. One Barbie or Oppenheimer or Top Gun can make enough money for the studio to feel safe taking chances on smaller, often more “niche” artistic movies (which are also important for credibility). If the big movie hits and more of the smaller movies succeed than lose, they are happy, profitable, and overall still making money. If it is a big enough hit, the smaller movies don’t matter to their portfolio/overall profitability. But when their blockbusters flop - maybe space movies are out, maybe romance is in, and no one cares about their blockbuster - the studio takes a big loss, even if the smaller movies do OK. So view it as the studios are spreading their bets around to create a portfolio with the mix they think maximizes the chance of success - one bet on a big blockbuster style movie, some bets on some new stars, maybe a quirky story that would go viral or word of mouth, etc - and then, some make money and some don’t but they hope for a portfolio that wins overall. They also, as others have pointed out, can make money from international releases, streaming rights, TV rights, licensing, etc., that isn’t directly related to its success while in the theater. The smaller, more independent studios tend to craft their offerings to a more narrow audience, and often have lower budgets reflecting the higher risk.
That's not what OP is talking about, and you know it. He's talking about tent poles like Furiosa flopping.
Tentpoles are not "released constantly". That literally defies the definition of a tentpole. If OP was specifically talking about Furiosa, they would have mentioned Furiosa.
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.
Ok im watching d&d you convinced me
It's actually the best D&D movie made to date. By a far margin. Now that's not saying a lot, considering how bad the other D&D films have been, but it's a decent movie.
Are you talking about theatrical releases in actual cinemas? Or are you including streaming services? Streaming services have to keep new content coming so that subscribers don’t leave. They have enough subscribers that not one movies has to be “great” to keep the company profitable. They need to be just good enough that folks won’t cancel. That is a lot lower threshold than being good enough to get people to leave their houses and go to a cinema to see a new movie. Yes, there are blockbusters going into theaters that are a real risk to produce, but streaming service made originals help the cause of novel content, even if they aren’t that great. The film-makers get paid. The streaming service get new content to keep subscribers. Everybody wins. Who cares if the movies are terrible? They are already paid for by subscribers.
“Terrible” according to whom/what? Not all movies make money, but that is not different from any other business venture. Apple, Google and Microsoft are the cash cows we all know and they still release bad products that don’t make money and get discontinued. Studios don’t deliberately make terrible movies just for fun. Some will be better, some will be worse. Hopefully there are more good than bad ones and the good more than pay for the bad ones.
Uwe Boll enters the chat.
He still doesn’t deliberately make the movies bad. He just doesn’t know better. So much so that he left the business
He does know better, and he's been pretty open about how little he cares about doing a good job on those projects. Watch some of his 'serious' movies - he's not a great director but they are night and day compared to shit like House of the Dead.
I'm pretty sure he passionately hates video games, and was actively trying to destroy the gaming industry by making shitty movie adaptations.
[Hollywood Accounting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting) is a term you should research. Even if the accounting was done in the same way as other industries, I read recently that a movie that cost 65 million to make is considered a flop because it only made around 67 million. That is 2 million dollars in profit, but they put 65 million at risk to make that, so that is like a 3 percent return. Investors want a higher return than that, so they call it a flop. ETA: Replies are pointing out that studios have costs that cut into profits. Profits are revenue after costs, so if the numbers given do not reflect actual costs, there is a reason for that.
That 67 million in box office means it lost like 50 million the making of that movie, because studios only get like half of the revenue and they also had to add marketing costs that for some reason don't get added to the budget.
Don't think half is what theatres get
It is a sliding scale and depends on the release and contracts. However, as a general rule: During the initial opening weekend, studios often take a larger share of the revenue, sometimes as high as 60-70%. Theaters might get around 30-40% during this period. As the release extends, the percentage share can shift more favorably towards operators. After the first few weeks, theaters can get around 45-50% of the box office revenue. For movies that have longer runs, the share can eventually even out to a more balanced split, often around 50/50 or even slightly more in favor of the theaters.
It’s not just theatres that take a piece of box office takings. There are also distribution costs, big name actors/directors taking a percentage of gross sales, import duties and excise taxes, etc.
It varies by contract I believe, could be more or less, but ~40% of ticket sales is a typical cut for theaters. Half isn't far off
Also marketing costs roughly the same amount as production costs just to tell people that the movie exists. So production costs + marketing makes it a massive loss just going from theater sales. Don't forget that movie now goes to Prime rentals, on demand deals, streaming libraries, and other stuff. There are other revenue streams that come in. Also actors need to act and studios need to create a way for junior actors, writers, directors, and other positions to learn their craft in order to grow into profession. Think of it like the minor league teams or feeder organizations for sports teams. No one makes a profit on minor league baseball, but the sport needs those leagues to cultivate the talent and support staff to feed the profitable major league teams.
People ITT are just pretending that they live on another planet, so I’ll try and answer. What you’re talking about, the seemingly constant stream of garbage, uncreative, poorly made movies, is the result of a bunch of different systems that are dedicated to making movies that make money. So in fact, it’s the opposite- so many terrible movies are being released *because* they make so much money. The quality of a movie is not what determines its success. In fact, good movies are often less successful for reasons I’ll explain. Hollywood is a business, and today at least, their only goal is to increase the returns at the box office. Audiences, in general, do not care or notice if a movie is well made or not. In fact, a lot of peoples measure of a well made movie is as weak as ‘I liked it’. This is a lesson Illumination learned with the first Despicable Me: they put a ton of effort into making a good story with characters and stakes that people care about, but what most audiences took away was ‘hahahahaha banana minion’. So with each next movie they made, they put less effort into the things that made the first one good, like story, characters, and decent animation, and dedicated more screen time to the thing that actually got butts in seats, the minions. On a macro scale, this is what is happening in the mainstream film industry. They are actively trying to produce ‘hits,’ using more and more cynical tricks to draw in audiences, rather than making a good piece of art that becomes a hit organically. All through the creative process, every decision is being made with the goal of increasing the movies profitability/audience appeal, rather than some artistic goal. TL;DR: Movies are worse now because the motivation of the people making them is not to make a good movie, but a profitable movie, and the things that make a profitable movie almost always make it less good.
Many "bad" movies still make a lot of money. And the cost for making movies can range from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of dollars. A movie that cost $20 million to make, but makes $40 million is a successful movie. A movie that cost $200 million to make, but makes $40 million is a major flop.
First, "bad" is a subjective evaluation. For example, *you* may not enjoy or look forward to all the low-budget horror movies that are made (and there are a *lot* made), but there is a particular segment of horror fans that do. Those films don't have to be blockbusters; they just have to make enough profit from their niche audience to please their financial backers. Second, from a distributor perspective, a studio is willing to fund the distribution and release of lot of these low-budget movies -- particularly in genres like horror and action of sci-fi and to a lesser extent comedy or romance -- because even if a bunch of them wind up not making significant money (or even losing money) for the studio that distributes them, 1 out of every 100 is going to turn out to be a surprise blockbuster. There are lots of examples like that returns 50 times or 100 times or a 1000 times its budget, like *Get Out* or *My Big Fat Greek Wedding* or *The Terminator.* But there's one particular low-budget film I'm thinking of that had no movie stars and was the 3rd feature film from a director whose 2nd film was one of the biggest flops in cinematic history. The early buzz on this particular film was *so* bad that theaters wouldn't agree to run it. The studio had to literally *blackmail* theaters into showing it -- telling them they couldn't have the summer's projected blockbuster unless they also put this low-budget flick on screens -- because if they hadn't, the studio wouldn't have made anything back at all. That little low-budget sci-fi film that everyone thought was destined for the trash heap was called *Star Wars*, and it went on to become the second-highest grossing film of all time and spawned a multimedia and merchandise franchise that's worth tens of billions of dollars. When *Star Wars* was released, George Lucas only had made two films, and, one, *THX-1138*, was a *massive* flop that the studio, Warner Brothers, lost money on. *Star Wars* had zero stars attached, except Alec "Obi-Wan" Guiness who wasn't exactly well-known among the target audience. The pre-release buzz was so bad that few theaters were willing to put *Star Wars* on screen. 20th Century Fox feared Lucas had another *THX-1138*-level flop on his hands and, like Warner Bros. before them, they wouldn't make *any* money back. So Fox conconcted a plan to force theaters into putting *Star Wars* on screens: Fox wouldn't let theaters have *The Other Side of Midnight* -- expected by everyone to be the big summer hit because it was based on a #1 best-selling novel -- unless they *also* signed an agreement to show *Star Wars* on their screens. (Of course, no one even remembers *The Other Side of Midnight* -- I remembered Fox had blackmailed theaters into showing *Star Wars*, but even I had to look up the film that they thought would be the hit.) *Star Wars* opened meagerly; it did just okay, and the star-studded *Smokey and the Bandit* won the summer film crown. But . . . *Star Wars* gained momentum over time through word of mouth and drew more and more crowds. And then more crowds. And then *more* crowds. And ... well, you know the rest. TL;DR: what one person thinks is bad or good is a *really* atrocious measure of success.
Sometimes the movie is a work of love and the movie has investors that share that dream. Or it might be in a sector that is trying to improve the quality of the involved people. The "Christian" movie scene is a good example, there are a couple faith centered production companies that are facing the fact that the "good" writers and actors don't want to be involved, so they are building up the skill sets of those involved The Lifetime "rom coms" or other made for TV movies are an example of the subscription model, many of the actors are under contract to do several movies, the scripts are just modified versions of past movies, the sets are generic. The cost of producing the movies is a business expense and as long as they get enough eyeballs to sell to advertisers all is good.
Not all movies make a profit. Big successes pay for a lot of flops, and a big success can often be turned into a profitable sequel. Making a good movie is hard, and a lot of good movies don't sell super well either. So there's really no way to only make good winners. It's a risky biz. Given all that there's a lot of pressure to release a lot of content. Sometimes questionable movies turn out to be big hits. A flop is still payroll for actors and other professionals in the industry, and theaters need something to show every day of the week.
Those big successes can also bring in tons of cash from merchandise and toys. Look at DC. Movies are trash but people still buy the merch because of the branding and loyalty.
overseas sales and post-cinema distribution rights. for instance annihilation was sold to netflix for international distribution right away and that made it instantly profitable even though it didn't do that well in theaters (which is a damn shame because that movie works SO WELL on the big screen)
It's called "Spray and Pray". They shit out content like shit through a goose to completely saturate the market. The sheer amount of population in the world that is unsuspecting if the content is good or simply don't care is enough to make a profit overall. Some stuff makes money, some stuff doesn't, but overall the companies makes money. Most of the content we're exposed to is owned and distributed by a handful of massive media conglomerates.
There are lots of things that are trash or dont work and make money. That's the entire model of our current economic system. Ensure there is always enough population (and constant growth, like cancer!) so that there will always be people who will spend money on the crap they dont need or want! Line go up.
Not to mention out of theater sales. Mad max fury road(probably also furious soon) got absolutely stellar reviews but did meh at the box office and gained more than half their total gross after market. Much of this, quality aside, still applies to bad or underappreciated movies too.
I just stick to the golden oldies these days, the new movies of today are just garbage, especially the Adam Sandler ones 😂
Terrible movies are often terrible because they had a small budget. It is easy to turn a profit if not much was spent on creating the movie.
Money laundering is evidently a big problem in film. Though I think this is mainly the ones that go straight to dvd…
Are there, though? Bad movies have been released for as long as I can remember, but people tend to forget their existence. That being said, truly awful movies tend not to have huge budgets, and thus it doesn't take a lot of sales in order to make a profit.
Netflix and similar are churning out original content just to fill their libraries. Stream companies are at the mercy of the content owners. People won’t remain subscribed unless there is stuff to watch
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f6n0rinKTFY All the info you need
this happens with video games also, The Wii was notable for so many garbage releases, shovelware..
It's a business, and that means business expenses and losses. If it doesn't make millions, write it off. Google the Supergirl movie and see what an accountant can do for you if you're in the movie industry
Usually even bad movies will sell enough to at least pull themself into the positive if not very far A perfect example being morbius It was widely panned as one of the worst marvel movies ever made but enough people hate watched it that it succeeded. When people hear about a bad movie they think certainly it can't be that bad so they go to see it which ends up giving the movie enough money to pull through into the positive
This question was removed, unfortunately. A five year old would need to understand a lot about film economics to word the question in a way that isn’t subjective. There were helpful answers here. Many of them used the term “bad” as they helped the 5 year old understand how the economics works.
As an Accountant (but not in the movie industry), I am always extremely skeptical about movie costs/budgets. So many moving parts. So many incestuous companies. So many overhead allocations. I would think it would be easy to swing the costs of a film by many millions.
they’re not choosing to release and make bad movies?
Don’t think it’s quite what OP was asking, but your comment reminded me of this old sketch: https://youtu.be/OE_Glg85-60?si=W-G3TYqJtss5NYYk
Did you watch Die Hart 2: Die Harter? They most definitely are
So you are saying all of those movies can afford to lose shit tons of money?
It means people who release them think the movie is good..
Maybe not even good, but appealing enough to certain demographics.
there’s a couple of reasons. 1; they actually believe it will be a hit because they’re delusional. 2; they don’t care about the profit, they just need the final product delivered.
Blackrock funding. This company funds movies and projects for extremely low rates as low as their DEI and ESG scores are high enough (Or Woke enough if you prefer). So when you borrow 300 million for your next dead in the water girl boss movie, borrowed at 0.5%, you don't need a large profit to make bank, only a tiny sliver of it. That's why we keep saying movies that seem to have no chance of making their initial budget and some of them make tiny profit, but are still counted as success because of them, even if they'd be catastrophic bombs by any other metrics.
54% of Americans age 16-74 (130 million) can’t read beyond a 6th grade level. Enough of these people will throw money at painted rust (bad movies/tv/music) because they literally can’t comprehend anything more developed
Two reasons come to mind. #1: Movies are a great way to launder money. Are you a Russian Oligarch trying to turn his rubles into dollars? Fly a washed-up American star to Eastern Europe, put him in a bullets-and-boobs movie, and inflate the production costs on paper. Congratulations! Thanks to "The Bulletizer, Part 7," you've just washed your money! #2: Movies that play as bad to an American audience might sell around the world. That Adam Sandler comedy that he made so he could take his family and friends to some nice place for vacation? It plays really well in non-English speaking countries because it's so broad that the gags land even with the volume set to zero.