I just read the book “Final Cut”, about the wildly overbudget Michael Cimino movie “Heaven’s Gate”, which caused United Artists to be sold and many people to lose their jobs.
Anyway, around 1980 it was budgeted for around $7 million, came in around $35 million, made almost no money seeing as how it was pulled from release instantly.
My question, for those good with math: How does this compare with recent blockbuster flops? Is it still the biggest money loser ever? How do those 1980 figures compare with today’s? I mean, your average big summer movie can cost $100 mill now, so it’s hard for me to compare.
(Good thing Cimino wasn’t doing LOTR, eh? What is he doing nowadays, anyway?)
Well, according to Box Office Mojo, the conversion for inflation rate for a 1981 film is a factor of 2.28 (applying the figures for Raiders of the Lost Ark).
Hence, that would mean it was budgeted for about $16M in today’s money, and eventually came in at $80M (using your figure). According to the IMDB, the budget was $44M, meaning it was closer to $100M in today’s money. Also, using the IMDB, we see that it only made $1.5M at the box office, or $3.4M in today’s money, making it a loss of over $95M in today’s dollars.
I hope this isn’t a hijack, but is it accurate to compare movies from different decades? Mainly, my question pertains to how has movie viewship increased/decreased over the years - are they any numbers tracking that? Obviously, the population has increased, so viewership does - is that included in these movie inflation rates?
You’re correct that trying to compare box-office performance across the decades is problematic at best. It’s even more complicated than you suggest, though. While the sheer number of people is increasing, per capita viewership is going down. While I may see around a hundred and fifty movies per year in the cinema, my mother sees maybe five, and we all know somebody who’s proud to mention he or she hasn’t been to a movie since E.T. or whatever. Contrast this to the twenties and thirties, when everybody was going to the movies. (Well, not really, but in a greater proportion than today.)
Now combine that fact with the increasing number of media outlets required to advertise a film: hundreds of TV channels, billboards, buses, radio, internet, and so on. As should quickly become obvious, the distributor (usually the studio) is required to spend more money on marketing per capita to spread the word about, essentially, the same number of movies. (A lot fewer movies are being made by the studios now than in 1930, but you also have independent and foreign filmmakers clouding the situation.) If I remember correctly, Pearl Harbor cost $150M to make, and Disney spent around $80M just on the marketing.
Further, the economics of distribution have changed. Until this Supreme Court decision in 1948, the studios owned the cinemas in which their movies were shown, thereby pushing out independent ownership. The ruling forced divestiture, though it’s interesting to note that the same situation has slowly evolved in the present marketplace. In any event, the profit model has changed markedly; right now a studio puts out a movie, blankets the airwaves with advertising, and expects to get the lion’s share of its profits in the first three weeks (since box office receipts are split on a sliding-over-time scale with the cinema, it behooves the studio to front-load the film’s performance) before yanking the picture and rushing it onto video.
In addition, the international market has been growing in importance, and Hollywood has been getting better and better at taking advantage of it. Terminator 3, for example, was profitable here in the U.S., but not overwhelmingly so; however, it’s gonna be freakin’ huge in Asia. The calculus for these sorts of things has always included international viewers, but they’re more important now than they were just twenty years ago.
And so on, and so on: cost of ticket relative to income, revenue from product placement, increased gross-profit participation by lead actors, ad nauseum. Basically, the only honest comparison of movie performance is “number of tickets sold,” and that’s been falling — not smoothly, but steadily — since the 1940s.
This is the reason I don’t ever care when they say such and such movie grossed X amount and that’s some kind of record…well duh. When I was a kid it cost 2 dollars or so to get in, so that is meaningless. Simply adjusting for inflation doesn’t do it either. Considering the population increase in addition, the only fair comparison is, IMO, how many people PER CAPITA went to see the movie. And I can’t work out the logistics of including Pay Per View, movie channels and VIDEO rentals with regards to this. I mean, there are plenty of things I wouldn’t bother to go see but will rent. Also things aren’t IN the movies as long; when I was growing up a movie had one or two theaters in it, and each movie played for months at a time. Now some things are only out for a week or two. Sooooooo you might not see it right away but after a couple months you might decide to see it; which perhaps balances out some of the video rental issue.
I said the last sentence wrong. I meant years ago you might not see it right away, but decide to one night when you want to go out and that’s what’s playing still. In some ways that balances out the fact that now you can just wait a couple months and rent it.
Another point that makes comparisions difficult is the after market for current movies :- merchandising and VCR/DVD sales. (Imagine the Rhett Butler action figure :)). These are included in gross revenues for current movies, but simply weren’t available to older movies.
One could measure the ratio of money spent to gross profit, which, IMO, would be the most accurate measure of the success of a movie. I believe Blair Witch has the highest ratio, but I’m not sure about the lowest.
Heaven’s Gate ranks #5 on their list (with a budget of $44 million and U.S. Box Office of $3 million).
Number 1 on their list is this past year’s The Adventures of Pluto Nash, with a budget of $90 to $100 million, and U.S. Box Office of $4.4 million.
The article is interesting in that it includes not only these basic figures for each of their ten movies, but also the plot (when there was one), some “Turkey Trivia” about the film, what the critics said at the time, and “The Aftermath” where you can learn whose careers were ruined or which studios went bankrupt because of the film.
That was an excellent and convincing analysis, Cervaise. Did you learn all that in one place? Got any good links to share where the rest of us could bone up on this subject? I’m kind of interested in this, but there aren’t a whole lot of informational sources out there on the business side of Hollywood.
I was going to chime in that an increase in population does not necessarily mean a direct increase in viewership, too. Newspapers are another form of media affected by the same phenomenon, although I think quality of the product is less of an issue. Frankly, I see fewer and fewer movies in theaters all the time, and comparing them today to the 1930s makes clear why:
Then: 15 cents (wild guess) to see a double bill, with maybe a cartoon strip and a newsreel thrown in. Groundbreakng, landmark films like “Dracula,” “The Wizard of Oz,” etc.
Now: 9$ to see a warmed-over piece of crap like “Pearl Harbor,” preceded by up to a half-hour of COMMERCIALS! :mad:
It’s no fucking wonder.
Beautiful, Cervaise. Thanks so much for putting so much information out there.
One more issue: If you want to compare the popularity of movies, what you have to do is look at percentage of tickets sold. That is, if during the first two weeks of its original release, “Laura,” was the movie that X percent of ticket buyers saw, while during its original release “Ten Things I Hate About You” was the movie that >X ticket buyers, then “Laura” was a more popular movie… basically.
And getting even those basic numbers (which ignore some factors) takes 400 years of horrible, horrible digging and crunching.
By the way, BOX OFFICE GROSS is not a real number. Not a real number. A big lie. Big lie. Huge.
Thanks. Sorry, no one source where you might learn about that stuff all in one fell swoop. It comes from years of following the industry, reading about upcoming movies (not just “next month’s hot picks” in Entertainment Weekly, but years in advance, and watching how the project evolves) as well as the history of moviemaking (e.g. Memo from David O. Selznick). I’m a sucker for this stuff, whether old (Pre-Code Hollywood) or new (Project Greenlight). Probably most important for understanding the process of how ostensible art emerges from the meat grinder is reading the trades: Variety and Hollywood Reporter, mostly. Some of their content is free online, via their actual sites or via Yahoo News or other sources. The rest of it, you have to pay, either a print or an online subscription, which, depending on whether you think this stuff is interesting and important or incestuous and irrelevant, you will find either a valuable investment or an outrageous attempt at pricing out the non-wealthy outsider. Anyway, from all of these disparate sources is assembled a kaleidoscopic view of the industry from which a high-level summary such as my paragraphs above can be drawn.
True, but the same nine dollars can get you into something unbelievably amazing, like American Splendor, which just came out in limited release this past weekend. Why people are willing to spend money on shit like Scooby Doo, even though they know, in advance, that it’ll suck (all the pre-release tracking interviews with the target teenage audience went like this: “Yeah, I expect it to be bad, but I’m going to see it because everybody else is, and I don’t want to be left out”), while something really wonderful like Whale Rider has to scratch and claw just to get to the fringes of national consiousness… well, I don’t want to say it’s beyond me, because I understand why it happens, but it’s quite frustrating indeed.
Anyway, the point is, go see American Splendor. Nine dollars is a bargain for what is, so far, the best movie of the year.
Thanks a bunch for the posts, Cervaise. I saw an interesting article this weekend (or was it Friday in the WSJ?) regarding how technology like cell phones and text messaging is really eroding box office revenue. Since it used to take a while for crap like Pearl Harbor to make it around, the opening weekend grosses would usually rise Friday to Saturday, with a slight drop off for the following weekend. Now, really bad movies are getting a noticeable dropoff from Friday to Saturday, and then fall off the map in their second week.
j.c. isn’t it horribly unfair to judge popularity by the first two weeks? That is sort of what I was touching on before; it’s an instant society now, I know.
Movies like Star Wars would be considered horrible failures, flops, and would have been gone before anyone even knew they were out. Star Wars started as a little nothing in a few theaters and gained momentum until it was a phenomenon. How can a movie even do that now? The only thing that matters is opening weekend and the first week or two; how wrong is that? That is about the worst basis for judging that I’ve ever seen; though I know it’s the one used, and the one that drives the industry. But it’s damned tragic.
It still happens, but it’s pretty rare, and it happens despite the system, not because platforming (which is what start-small-and-grow is called) was the intended plan. Big Fat Greek Wedding, anyone?