Now, get me, Ridley Scott has directed some great films during his career. Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Black Hawn Down. All of these are great movies that are done very well.
But he’s still being trusted with budgets in nine figures and the numbers - at least the domestic ones - don’t seem to be bearing it out. His current film, Exodus, appears heading for tankville, population Ridley Scott. The film didn’t open huge and weekend reports show it dropping by two-thirds in its second week. That curve will have it out of theaters pretty quickly.
Over the last 10 years Scott’s films haven’t exactly lit up the world.
Title Budget Domestic
Exodus $140MM $65MM*
The Counselor $25MM $16.9MM
Prometheus $130MM $126MM
Robin Hood $200MM $105MM
Body of Lies $70MM $39MM
American Gangster $100MM $130MM
Kingdom of Heaven $130MM $47MM
** Analyst estimate, it’s only been open for two weekends.*
That’s not a happy curve. Just factoring in gross budget and domestic - and therefore discounting international gross and marketing and so forth expenses we’re looking at 10 year (2014 - 2004) numbers of
Budget: $795MM
Domestic Gross: $593MM
P/L -$201.1MM
Again, that’s not a happy over-under there. Over his last ten years of films he’s got one that more than broke even on domestic numbers and one that came close. That still leaves and average loss per movie of $28MM.
So is it time to close the door on Scott? He’s done great work but the type of big budget items he’s been prone to making have to start making studio execs nervous. With another Prometheus and an apparent sequel to Blade Runner on deck - not to mention The Martian with Matt Damon - there’s still going to be a lot of money riding on Scott over the next few years. Is he still worth it?
Dude , you’re not looking at the whole picture. You’re only looking at US gross $. For example, the unbelievably shitty Prometheus earned $402,486,687 worldwide as of 21 December 2012.
Ridley Scott is still an enormously profitable and bankable director.
Well, I certainly understand that. But it was my impression that for a film to really bank out it need to cover direct production costs with the domestic gross and distribution and marketing was made up via overseas and collateral sales. And there can’t be a ton of collateral sales - toys, clothing and whatnot - based on the movies Scott’s been directing.
So absent further info I think it’s up in the air whether Scott is hugely profitable or not. But I’m not sure where to find that information.
Just a tidbit: The script for Blade Runner 2 is done and Harrison Ford claims it’s good. (But what does he know?) Ridley is reportedly not going to direct it, just produce, etc.
He has several other sequels/adaptations in the fire. Hollywood thinks he’s making them money. Plus there’s that whole Good Wife thing.
That really isn’t true. The accounting that Hollywood is accused of is based on how contracts are written. The contracts account for some things as expenses that still appear to be profits for everyone involved (for example, payments to a production company or a distribution company). Some costs are estimated at a flat rate, even though these estimates may be much higher than final costs. It’s only the people with the profit participation points who aren’t seeing profits. But, again, Hollywood is living up to the terms of the contracts. Everyone who signed gets exactly what they agreed to. The contracts are just written so that profit participants don’t usually see any of the other money - everyone else is too busy grabbing the money first. If profit participants had any real clout, they’d have a different contract.
As others have pointed out, there are other sources for revenue. The listed films may not be making as much money as the studios would like, but they’re probably not losing anything. In fact, I think we’re going to see the conventional wisdom (i.e. that you must make back your budget in domestic sales) go away soon. World-wide sales are only going up, and even mediocre movies can do very nicely in after-theater sales of DVDs and licensing rights.
Perhaps more importantly, Hollywood recognizes that one big hit can offset a dozen small losses. The ALIEN franchise is still raking in the bucks after 35 years. Comics and toys and video games and sequels and cross-overs… this is not something a studio forgets.
As a last thought: you might want to look at where the funding for the movies came from. Some big Hollywood names fund their own movies, either directly from their own pockets, or by lining up their own investors. I honestly don’t know about Ridley Scott in particular, but nobody’s going to stop you from funding your own movies as long as the checks clear.
And while a domestic disappointment, Exodus is making good money overseas as well.
People were saying the same thing about Scott after the even bigger catastrophe 1492: Conquest of Paradise, and while the latest films are nothing to brag about generally speaking, I’ve always thought The Counsellor got a bad rap–it’s a diabolical and uncompromisingly bleak film that will be due for serious reevaluation someday.
Unlike his brother (who was all style and no substance), Scott has some good movies to his credit. Here’s a post from my blog about him. So I have faith that, while long in the tooth these days, he still may surprise us with something visionary in the future.
I tried to watch this the other day, but the dialogue was so unnatural I turned it off during the second scene. I couldn’t do it. That’s not so much Ridley as it is Cormac, though.
Are we talking about making money or making good quality movies?
I don’t care about if a director makes money. I care if their movies are good. In this area, I think Ridley Scott is past his prime quite a bit. Then again, I don’t think he was ever an amazing director.
He made Alien. He made Blade Runner.
For me, those are his only really good movies. He’s made some pretty decent movies since then, but a lot of stinkers too. He directed Hannibal, 1492, and that dull Good Year movie.
He makes money, but is very far from being a great director, at least to me.
Looking at MovieMogul’s coding after having quoted the original, it looks like the link is correctly formatted, but when I hover over it the link shows some extra gobbledygook “%3Cbr%20/%3E” at the end. When clicking on it, that gobbledygook stays attached and brings up the error message. Cutting off the “%3Cbr%20/%3E” will refresh the page to the proper blog post. Still, looking at MovieMogul’s coding, the extra “%3Cbr%20/%3E” doesn’t seem to be there.
Here, I’ll make an attempt at posting the correct link.
Great blog post, MovieMogul! Something I had never given any thought to!
I don’t have any hard data on this either, but more to the point than that is was only his second film: Scott worked as director-for-hire for Alien- he wasn’t part of the original creative team. Thus, I would assume it unlikely that he maintained any rights in the franchise.
The producers remained attached throughout the series. The writers didn’t stay attached but probably had a financial interest in all the sequels- they get screen credit for “based on characters created by”.
As long as Uwe Boll and Michael Bay still get to make movies, I wouldn’t pull the plug on someone who’s actually produced worthwhile entertainment at some point in his career. And unlike the dreck produced by those two hacks, the movies listed in the OP are not BAD movies per se, they’re just not particularly good. I’d watch any of those on a loop before I’d put myself through even the opening credits of Bloodrayne or Transformers.