Superman, By The Numbers
Posted by Balcony Fool on August 26, 2008
Apologies for having disappeared over the last few weeks. I hate it when personal matters get in the way of obsessing about movies. I know, you do too. Shhhhhh.
Following up on our previous Superman discussion, it appears Warner Brothers has officially decided to reboot the franchise, just two years after the release of the last film. Per this interview with the Wall Street Journal, WB president Jeff Robinov states:
“Superman didn’t quite work as a film in the way that we wanted it to,” says Mr. Robinov. “It didn’t position the character the way he needed to be positioned.” “Had Superman worked in 2006, we would have had a movie for Christmas of this year or 2009,” he adds. “But now the plan is just to reintroduce Superman…”
I’m against a reboot, but most of the message boards I frequent have received this news with great rejoicing, so there you have it.
However, I am sick to death of hearing people say Superman Returns was a “bomb.” I’m not usually a numbers guy, but this angle really annoys me so I took a quick trip to The Numbers and did a little research.
Superman Returns had DVD sales of around $81 million. WB sold the television rights for about $20 million, and merchandising revenue was “more than $60 million.” So that’s $160 million dollars that WB is in the clear. Subtract the $40 million dollar advertising budget, and that leaves them $120 million dollars ahead of the game before you even begin counting box office revenue.
So for the movie to be profitable, they needed to bring in more than $150 million. The movie brought in $391 million. Let’s give the theaters a generous 25% of the box office. That leaves WB with $293 million.
In other words, on a film that cost an absurd $270 million dollars, they managed to make a clear profit of $140 million (and, technically, Australia gave them a $28 million tax break, so they actually cleared about $168 million). That’s fairly amazing, especially considering many fans didn’t like the movie.
Could that pot have been sweeter? Sure. WB execs no doubt had visions of Spider-Man revenue dancing in their heads. Unfortunately, the flick just wasn’t as well-received as Spider-Man, and the studio lit a fair amount of their own potential profit on fire. For one thing, $40 million dollars of that budget comes from failed development over the last ten years. Seriously. They paid various parties $40 million to not make the movie. The remaining budget of $230 million is ludicrous for any film. No reason that movie needed to cost more than $180 million (especially given how little of that money was onscreen).
If $168 million isn’t an acceptable profit, they simply need to put the sequel on a reasonable budget, make it shorter, and require more action from the script. The average moviegoer isn’t as discerning as the fanboys. If they’re interested in Superman, they’re not going to stay home just because the last one wasn’t very good. The Star Wars prequels proved that. And The Incredible Hulk proved that a reboot won’t necessarily bring in a bigger audience.
So can we put to rest this nonsense about Superman Returns being a failure? Movies that fail don’t make $391 million. Movies that are mismanaged, however, can sell $391 million worth of tickets and still not meet profit expectations.
Johne Cook said
Point taken – the film didn’t bomb. It just sucked, ala Ang Lee’s Hulk, which while Roger Ebert liked it, wasn’t remotely the actual character most people think of when they think of the Hulk. This Superman was Bryan Singer’s Superman, not the guy we sort of know from canon, from the comics, from the prior films. At least with Spider-man, Spidey was close enough to the character we thought we knew that we could enjoy or dislike the films based on some common ground.
I’m looking forward to a new old Superman. I don’t necessarily need something darker, just something effective. How hard is it to write a good script, people? (And please, for the love of Krypton, don’t give the role to Nick Cage, no matter how desperately he wants the role!)
petertchattaway said
I thought the rule of thumb was that theatres keep roughly half of the box-office revenue, rather than a quarter. Similarly, wouldn’t a hefty chunk of the DVD and merchandising revenue stay with the manufacturers and retailers?
Paul Christian Glenn said
Half? Not even close. The typical split is anywhere from 70/30 to 90/10 for the first two weeks of showings, with the theaters’ cut increasing incrementally as the weeks go on. (I’m not sure why, but apparently the better a film tracks, the higher the studio’s initial cut. Guess they leverage the film’s buzz against the theaters.)
The trouble with that system, of course, is that it’s outdated. Worked fine for exhibitors when blockbuster films ran all summer long, but these days most big films make half their box office on opening weekend. Unless a film has remarkable legs, 25% is a pretty safe bet. I’ve seen it reported as low as 10%-15%.
FWIW, I guess this is why we pay ten bucks for a penny’s worth of popcorn.
As for DVD, you may have me there. I don’t know what percentage the studios get from that, but I think it’s safe to assume the discs are manufactured for next-to-nothing. A small print shop like mine can get DVDs printed in quantities of 500 for less than a dollar apiece, and these studios are printing discs in the millions. I don’t know what a typical mark-up is, though, so my estimate on that could be high.
The merchandising revenue, as I understand it, is what the studio gets for licensing their property to various manufacturers (video games, toys, towels, lunchboxes, etc), so that’s all money in the studios pockets. Whatever the manufacturers make off their product goes to to them.
petertchattaway said
FWIW, I don’t believe I have ever heard of a 90/10 split. 70/30, yes, but not 90/10.
If memory serves, there was a huge stink a decade ago when Sony wanted to do an 80/20 split for their bloated remake of Godzilla. Their efforts were widely interpreted as a sign that the film sucked, and that the studio knew it sucked, and that the studio was trying to get as much money out of the movie as it could before word-of-mouth shot it down in subsequent weeks.
That’s all from memory, though, so I could be wrong about the details.
And as you say, the theatres’ cut increases as the weeks go on.
Paul Christian Glenn said
Here are a few pages that mention a 90/10 split. The first link appears to be some kind of legal document for Carmike Cinemas, in which they even have a name for it (“the 90/10 clause”). The last link even mentions a 95/5 split!
http://tinyurl.com/69tvx3
http://tinyurl.com/6xz9hs
http://tinyurl.com/5zasvz
http://tinyurl.com/5sdx7p
http://tinyurl.com/5kdv9x
http://tinyurl.com/3x6mro
While I was looking for links, I found a couple references to Lucas demanding a 100/0 for first weekend when Episode I came out. These were just comments on blogs, so not solid enough to really reference, but I do seem to recall there being some kind of stink about the split when that movie was released.
Dan said
I agree with you Paul, I hear so much from people how much of a “bomb” it was and I exhaust myself in trying to explain to them that it wasn’t! I know it was hard for us Superman fans to be totally blown away by it being that we’ve already seen Superman, we know how he looks, feels, reacts, loves, etc., but nevertheless, put aside the geeky obsessive fan, and it was an entertaining movie.
Thanks for the numbers, that’s going to help me a lot as I continue to battle the nay-sayers in my life.
thomwade said
It was not a financial failure, but that is not what people are addressing. The response from critics and film goers was lukewarm at best. Heck, I had several friends tell me they enjoyed the film-until they started thinking about it. It made it’s money, but it was nowhere near as loved as either Dark Knight or Iron Man. Warner Brother wanted a reaction to Superman Returns like we saw with Dark Knight…and comparatively speaking? Superman Returns was a bomb.
petertchattaway said
FWIW, I’ve never been inclined to call Superman Returns a “bomb”. That implies a major disaster at the box office, which this film was not. I have, however, been inclined to call it a “flop”, which suggests a film that lands with a dull thud and fails to live up to its reputation.
Just wondering, was Ang Lee’s Hulk a “bomb” or a “flop”? How did things compare, there, in terms of the cost-benefit ratio? I think it did decent box-office, but it was still considered a big-enough disappointment that Marvel went ahead and re-booted the franchise, instead of producing a sequel — and the re-boot did only marginally better business, at least in North America, but I *think* it was considered more of a success, partly because it had better “legs”.
Paul Christian Glenn said
> I have, however, been inclined to call it a “flop”,
> which suggests a film that lands with a dull thud
> and fails to live up to its reputation.
That’s a pretty good label, I think, and a nice distinction.
As for “Hulk,” that’s an interesting question. If I get some time, I’ll look up the numbers and see how the two films compare.
Paul Christian Glenn said
Huh. Interesting note about the Hulk movies. Their budgets were virtually identical (the new one had an increased budget of only $500,000), and made virtually the same amount of money (the second film performed marginally better).
Rotten Tomatoes shows the first film was 61% fresh, and the new film was 67% fresh. So, oddly, even though the “fan reaction” to the new film was much better, critically and monetarily speaking, the two films performed more or less the same. So what does this tell us? I suppose that the Hulk has a limited appeal, and no amount of re-booting or re-imagining is going to change that.
Superman, of course, is a higher profile character–but not by much. Sure, he’s more iconic, but the exposure of the two characters is close. Is it possible that in this age of darker, more “realistic” heroes, Superman’s time has come and gone? Maybe the boy scout image simply doesn’t have the same appeal it had thirty years ago. Hmm.
petertchattaway said
Interesting you should mention Superman’s appeal “thirty years ago”. The late ’60s and early ’70s were, of course, the era when “New Hollywood” supposedly tore apart all the myths that had sustained the industry for decades; it was the era of the anti-hero and the downer ending; it was the era of The Godfather and The French Connection and so on and so on and so on. So the original Superman movie was, in a sense, bucking the trend at that time. Yes, by the time it came out in late ’78, movies like Star Wars had revived the old “mythic” way of doing things. But the first two Superman movies went into production in ’76 or so, if I’m not mistaken, and there was no guarantee at the time that the public would have an appetite for something so corny, so old-fashioned, so boy-scout-ish. Indeed, the first movie plays up the fact that Superman is somewhat antiquated, for example in his interview with Lois Lane, who is portrayed not merely as the smart ambitious reporter that she always was in the comics, but as something of a cynic who no longer sees “truth, justice and the American way” prevailing in her country. So if our culture is again going through a period of cynicism, who knows, there may yet come a time when someone as ridiculously virtuous and upright as Superman will be popular again.
river said
interview with comic book writer mark millar regarding superman reboot:
http://tinyurl.com/6n76e6
Johne Cook said
Moriarty’s on a one-man tear to save Superman. And I’ll be dad-gummed if he isn’t onto something.
http://www.aintitcoolnews.com/node/38353