It seems almost every ‘big’ movie gets a sequel nowadays - but some didn’t. Eragon didn’t; Golden Compass didn’t. Divergent will apparently get a sequel but Beautiful Creatures won’t.
So how much money do they have to make to ensure a follow-up film?
It comes down to money, like you said.
How much is a moving target, honestly. It can come down to a combination of box office revenue, are there any ancillary revenue chains (books, posters and so forth) and whether the production company thinks there will be a good payoff on the series.
In terms of Divergent, it was gone into planning for a sequel based on the success of the books and The Hunger Games trilogy. I’d assume that the others you mentioned didn’t come up to that level for some reason.
I suspect the reason The Golden Compass didn’t get a sequel is because it seems to have been more or less a bomb for New Line Cinema. It cost $180 million to make, only grossed $70 million in the US and the studio sold the overseas rights to try to recoup the production costs. Ultimately the film returned a profit, but not to New Line, who got merged into Warner Brothers by Time Warner at least partly because of the film’s outcome.
Regards,
Shodan
Exactly. Compass was supposed to be the first in a series, but those plans were dropped when nobody went to see it.
Due to it it being touted as an atheist kids movie in the USA. (I saw it, and any atheism was not at all apparent, but I guess it might have emerged in the planed sequels).
In very general terms, a movie is a success if it grosses three times its budget and sequels tend to make around 65% of the original, so if the original grosses fives times budget, there will probably be a sequel.
Conventional wisdom is that a sequel will make 70% of what the original made. ( I was surprised to learn that this was true of The Godfather Part II)
So, if that 70% means profit, the sequel will more than likely be made.
I don’t think it could have been avoided since a major part of the plot was killing The Authority, which is the God character of the trilogy.
I can’t figure out what sense the OP is using “big” in. Eragon wasn’t a big movie in any way. It had a $100,000,000 budget, which wasn’t big even in 2006, and it bombed at the box office, returning about $75,000,000 domestically, although it did better in foreign markets. It couldn’t even take first place in its first weekend, then fell to sixth in the second week. Beautiful Creatures did even worse, returning less than $20 mil on a $60 mil budget. What possible reason could you have for considering them sequel worthy? Their nonexistent panting fan bases on the Internet?
Whatever the multiplier is for breakeven is on a film, making *less * than the production budget - *without *adding in marketing costs - is surely failure.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula cost about $40 Mil, earned $82 Mil in its first year domestically & $215 Mil worldwide. Its success definitely spurred Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein which flopped domestically but not internationally. Neither got a sequel, tho there was talk of Anthony Hopkins starring in The Van Helsing Chronicles.
Did “Divergent” really do that well? It seemed to have a lot of advance hype then disappeared almost immediately. (The film’s young main actress just said in an interview that she’s not a feminist. cause she likes guys, or something. she has a right to her opinion, but I found it annoying.)
While money is the deciding factor, there’s also the question of how much clout the producer has to make it happen. Does anyone believe for a moment that Peter Jackson would have shut down production on The Lord of the Rings if Fellowship had gotten a lukewarm response? He was determined to make that trilogy, come hell or high water.
How much of the second and third parts of the LoTR trilogy was shot during filming of the first part?
And ISTM that parts II and III of a trilogy are somewhat different from “we made a buttload off Raiders of the Lost Ark - get me a screen writer for the sequel”.
Regards,
Shodan
It cost $85 million to make.
Regards,
Shodan
Divergent has earned $143 mil of that $250 mil worldwide total at home. That’s usually an indicator these days that it has not fully rolled out in foreign markets. In addition, this is the first of a planned trilogy so it would take a huge failure not to proceed, a totally different circumstance from spawning a sequal. This is nowhere near a huge failure; it’s just not as wildly successful as Hunger Games.
thanks for the info, Shodan.
Every title listed in the OP was part of a planned trilogy. That they failed is why there’s no sequel to any of them. At the time, Eragon was a really big deal. I honestly have no idea why it didn’t do better.
The short answer is, it comes down to money.
The long answer is, there’s a lot of factors that come in to play when deciding whether a sequel will be profitable. First, one thing that a lot of people don’t know is that just because a movie’s gross exceeded it’s production budget doesn’t mean that it’s profitable, there’s a lot of costs that go into a film that the production budget doesn’t cover. For example, let’s say a movie has a $100M production budget. Beyond that, it probably has about $30M in promotion, the theaters that show it keep roughly a third of the ticket price, and there’s probably some deals in a few of the contracts, notably a director or big name actor, where they get some percentage of the box office. So, say that film grosses $200M, the studio gets probably $140 of that, then you cut out the $130 in production and promotion, and the percentages have to come out of the $10M left and basically you have a movie that maybe managed to squeeze out a small profit. A good rule of thumb, barring weird circumstances like the recent ASM2,which had an enormous promotion budget, thus forcing it higher, is that the studio needs to make about twice the production budget to break even. So, you might see a film with say $80M budget and it makes $150M and think it did well, but that’s not really how the studio sees it.
Second, even if a film did do well, it doesn’t mean it will get a sequel. Sometimes a movie does well because everyone went out and saw it in the first week or two, but over time word of mouth spreads and it’s seen as a poor film and there isn’t much interest in seeing a sequel (Batman and Robin is a good example, hence the long wait and eventual Nolan reboot). As such, if a film gets bad critical and audience reviews, even if profitable, it’s unlikely to get a sequel. On the other hand, sometimes a movie that was barely profitable or even lost money might still get a sequel if it gets really good reviews. For example, Pacific Rim was slightly in the Black on a huge production budget, but it also had a lot of positive audience reviews. A sequel with a somewhat more restrained budget could very well make the studios more money, and that’s why there’s some work being done on one.
Third, on a similar note, there’s a question of where to go with the sequel and how that might affect the franchise. For example, take the Dark Knight trilogy, despite it being enormously popular and profitable, given the way the third film ended, given that several key players had no interest in continuing (Nolan and Bale particularly), it just made no sense to try to pick it up from there and possibly repeat the disaster of too many changes trying to continue the franchise that they had with the aforementioned Batman and Robin.
So, specifically looking at the examples in the OP, Eragon had a $100M budget and made roughly $250, so it was somewhat profitable, but it got terrible reviews (16% critical, 47% audience). So, based on that, I think the studio was reasonable in not continuing the franchise. Golden Compass is in a similar boat, $180 and $372 with 42%/51%, except it lost money, and slightly better reviewed, but still not liked. The reason that it lost money is that even if it made slightly more than twice in the gross, a larger than typical amount of the box office is foreign, which generally means the studio gets even less of it. So, there was no chance of making a sequel to a movie that lost money AND was poorly reviewed.
Divergent is a bit of a different story, it made $250 on an $85M budget, so it was definitely profitable and while the critics didn’t really care for it, the audience did (41%/77%), so even if it makes a bit less money in a sequel, it will still be fairly profitable. What makes it a different story though is that they had already announced the sequel before the film even came out and while they could have canceled it if it did poorly, studios see a big audience for young adult films right now, Hunger Games being huge, so they have reason to believe it will continue to be profitable.
ETA: Sources for my numbers are boxofficemojo.com and rottentomatoes.com
I don’t disagree with you, but all four titles mentioned in the OP had ready-made sequels waiting to be turned into movies if it had been someone’s overwhelming intent.
Am I invisible, or do I only appear in the unfilmed sequel?