As with Bay, people need to stop confusing box office success with their assessment of the quality of the director. Except for Lady in the Water every one of Shyamalan’s major films has been a hit though none as big as Sixth Sense of course. The Happening cost 48m and made 163m worldwide. The Village cost 60 and made 256 worldwide.
See, here’s why I can’t understand Hollywood accounting. You skipped a column.
“Budget” refers to the amount of money it takes to make a film. “Gross” is box office, foreign and domestic (DVD sales and other media are ongoing and, as you noted, rate a separate column); “Net” is the gross minus taxes and theater overhead.
None of these columns accounts for advertising, which is usually as expensive as the actual production. Often, it’s even more.
The only times in history that a film has made what we laymen refer to as “profit,” it did freakishly huge box office beyond what was anticipated. For Steven Spielberg, that means Jaws, Close Encounters, ET and the first Indiana Jones movie. The usual response to this is to generate additional in-house expenses to gobble up the difference. Spielberg’s best 70s and 80s films stymied this effort.
Every film on your chart deserves to have a little asterisk next to every number.
He may have redeemed himself with State of Play- it is getting pretty decent reviews so far.
Dane Cook was ok as Steve Carrells brother in Dan in Real Life. Not really a blockbuster type movie though. He can’t carry a film though.
Kevin Smith is the same way. All of his movies have made a profit. The real secret to a successful filmmaking career isn’t trying to figure out how to make all of your movies into $250,000,000 blockbusters. The secret is realizing that pretty much any halfway decent movie makes at least ten or twenty million dollars so if you spend less than that you’re always going to make a profit.
I watched Smith speaking to an audience on some show, and he was quite honestly the most disgusting, vile pig-man I have ever had the misfortune to watch speak, or do anything. I find it hard to believe the guy has a wife.
But it’s funny… in talking about his movies, really only two things stood out; he doesn’t really know many words beyond “fuck” and “shit,” and he’s budget-conscious. He clearly was concerned about where the money was going. Save a few hundred bucks staying in a motel instead of renting trailers? Stay in the motel. The bottom line was always in mind.
Some people in the movie biz, not so much.
You win the thread.
I thought both of Stallone’s recent returns to his classic days were quite good, Rocky and Rambo. I’d be fairly certain they made a healthy profit, and the former of the two, at least, was positively reviewed.
Krok, if the only films to ever make money are the four you listed, why is there even an industry? :rolleyes:
Gotta tell you, I can’t take financial arguments very seriously from somebody who just 30-odd posts ago claimed that Spielberg didn’t make any money for anybody this decade and that he had no “runaway hits”. Even if you double the films budgets (to account for P&A), it’s patently obvious that Spielberg made tons of moolah on his films this decade.
And had you read closer, you would’ve seen that commasense’s post did take P&A into account, which is where (s)he got the $1.3 billion in profit in the following line:
You are correct that Hollywood accounting is notoriously cryptic and arcane. However, in the section of my post you quoted I mentioned the rule of thumb that when the gross is twice the budget the film is considered to be “in the black.” It is a rough estimate, but it generally takes into account the theaters’ take and P&A (prints and advertising). Note, also, that I put the word “profit” in quotes, to indicate that I wasn’t using it in its ordinary sense.
I would have been happy to include P&A costs in my table, but I don’t happen to know of an online source for those numbers, whereas the budget and grosses are easily available from Box Office Mojo.
Finally, I believe it’s rare for an advertising budget to be greater than the production budget. I seem to recall that the norm for P&A is about 40% of the budget, but I could be wrong about that.
Keep in mind there’s a difference between real world accounting and studio accounting. For example, they include money they pay to themselves as “expenses” so that comes off the “profits”.
That’s like me running a business and I telling everybody I haven’t made a profit in the last ten years because the expenses of my business were higher than what I took in. If they ask me how I keep the business going, I explain I just make up the difference out of the $200,000 annual salary I pay myself.
Um…that is real world accounting.
Specifically, the salaries the studio pays themselves and their employees are considered Expenses in the Income Statment and not part of the Net Income.
By “real world” I mean the common sense understanding of how things work. Most people are going to understand there is a difference between an expense like paying somebody else rent or a heating bill and paying yourself a salary.
We have a small business, and paying ourselves is an expense, just like any other. Do you honestly think that in the “real world” people only pay themselves out of pure profit? No way- payroll is part of the cost of doing business, even if you’re the boss.
Well…those people understand incorrectly. Not sure what else I can tell you.
But those expenses should be pegged to the studio as a whole, not to specific movies, which is one of the many tricks of the thing people refer to as “studio accounting”.
I’d say if you see no essential difference between the money that ends up in your wallet and the money that ends up in somebody else’s wallet you’re getting too abstract in your economics.
I think one of the problems with Hollywood accounting is that, because many participants, such as mid-level stars, are given “net points,” i.e. a percentage of the film’s profits after all “expenses” have been paid, the studio has an incentive to cook the books to make sure that expenses are inflated. This can include, as Justin_Bailey points out, adding in salaries of people whose pay should be amortized across the entire studio, or inflating, after the fact, the “above the line” salaries of other participants.
As a result, many hugely successful films have been claimed by the studios never to have made a profit.
The really important people get “gross points,” not net points. It’s harder to monkey around with them.
Huh, that’s possible, I guess. I always assumed that most folks on a movie were hired for each specific production, rather than working full time for a studio, which would mean (to me, anyway) that their salary would be tied to the budget of the film. Isn’t that the case?
I agree with your disagreement,that movie really changed my opinion of DiCaprio,I even stopped calling him DiCraprio.
I didn’t look at any numbers but how bout Samuel Jackson?