Yes it’s a shameless clickbait slideshow list, but actually it’s a very interesting group of movies with mini-descriptions and some details of how they got made and the cost vs box office.
Weird for a list like that not to include Primer which was famously made on film for $7000.
“Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels”
Budget: $1.35 million
Revenue: $28.3 million
“Sex, Lies, and Videotape”
Budget: $1.2 million
Revenue: $24.7 million
“Saw”
Budget: $1.2 million
Revenue: $103 million
“Rocky”
Budget: $1 million
Revenue: $225 million
“Napoleon Dynamite”
Budget: $400,000
Revenue: $46.1 million
“Mad Max”
Budget: $400,000
Revenue: $100 million
“Halloween”
Budget: $325,000
Revenue: $70 million
“Clerks”
Budget: $27,575 ($230,000 post)
Revenue: $3.1 million
“The Blair Witch Project”
Budget: $750,000 (depending on the source)
Revenue: $248.6 million
“Paranormal Activity”
Budget: $15,000
Revenue: $193.3 million
Primer didn’t even make a half million so it hasn’t turned “a dime into millions.”
“Vote for me and all your wildest dreams will come true.”
“Deep Throat” was made for less than $50,000 and probably grossed about $100 million, much of that going to the Columbo family. Would have made more if it wasn’t banned in New York City, which was not as suave and sophisticated as Binghamton.
Primer didn’t have a huge theatrical release but it was huge on DVD/streaming as people discovered it. Still, even at half a million, that’s a 7000% return on investment.
They said Paranormal Activity was the most profitable movie ever…but then the next movie showed more profit than PA. On top of that, surely other movies have made considerably more than those two. Let’s quick look at Titanic. 200mil budget, 2bil at the box office.
Here’s another such list with an overlapping set of movies compared to the one linked to in the OP:
And neither list includes Hardware Wars, which made about $1,000,000 on a budget of about $8,000.
Note that “most profitable” here means the largest number from this calculation:
(Gross of the film)/(Cost of the film)
Yeah, and there’s a lot more to it than that.
Clerks, for example, may have made $3.1MM box office - I have no idea - but it’s made a lot more money in downstream revenue than anyone could have every expected. Toys, comics, the entire ViewAskew universe and so forth.
They’re looking at percentages rather than total dollars. Titanic had a 900% return on its investment. Good, but Paranormal Activity had a 1,288,500 % return! That’s insane. It’s mostly due to it having a budget lower than the cost of a used Honda Civic, of course, but it’s still impressive.
calculation method : (total revenue - production budget) / production budget
To put it another way, for Titanic to get the same return relative to it’s production budget as Paranormal Activity, it would have to make 2.5 trillion dollars. Trillion!