So you’re saying you aren’t willing to put in hours of work in your free time to make a minor point about movies on an obscure Internet message board? What the hell kind of geek are you? I’ve a good mind to take your Internet geek card away!
Foreign and domestic gross was besides my main point anyway. The point I was going for was the comparison of production costs to gross. Too many people focus on just the gross and ignore the production cost.
This leads to people saying Guardians of the Galaxy was the most successful movie of 2014. Which is arguably true but you can make an equally plausible argument that Guardians of the Galaxy wasn’t even among the top ten most successful movies of 2014.
But at the end of the day, what matters is the size of the pile in your bank account, not how profitable the movie was. For example, take the most profitable movie of the year, “God’s Not Dead,” bringing in just over $60M on a $2M budget. That leaves the producers with $58M in their bank account. Nice! Guardian’s of the Galaxy, on the other hand, was not nearly as PROFITABLE in terms of expenses vs. earnings, as you point out. That’s because it had a production budget of $170M and grossed only $274M domestically. But it DID have an $800M gross overseas. Even if you use that $2 worldwide equals $1 US that’s still and addtional $400M for the studio. That means after you subtract the production budget, GotG brought in $500M in profit to the studios.
And slice it any way you will, $500M is a lot more than $58M. Quantity has a quality all its own!
On the other hand, if the production company had $170M sitting around in their bank account that they wanted to invest in a movie, they can put that money into one blockbuster like GotG, or they can spend it on 85 movies like God’s Not Dead.
Uh yeah…no. I don’t think there is a plausible argument to be made for that, given the merchandising revenues to be had from a successful comic book movie.
How many of that 85 are going to be successful though? It seems from what I’ve seen that there is only enough room for one word-of-mouth, church-promoted movie like God’s Not Dead per year. And most don’t get near the wide release that God’s Not Dead got, either.
That’s the kind of short-sighted thinking I’m talking about. Studios don’t make a decision between producing Guardians of the Galaxy and producing God’s Not Dead. For the amount of money a studio spent producing Guardians of the Galaxy, it could have produced God’s Not Dead, The Fault in our Stars, Neighbors, The Purge: Anarchy, Heaven is for Real, Ride Along, Let’s Be Cops, If I Stay, Tammy, About Last Night, and Think Like a Man Too - eleven movies whose combined budgets were less than the budget of Guardians of the Galaxy and whose combined box office was three time as high.
Diversifying is actually much safer. If you put your money on ten different movies, you can figure some of them will succeed. But if you bet all your money on just one movie, you might get stuck with Transcendence.
Right, when I said "85 movies like God’s Not Dead, I didn’t mean “word-of-mouth, church-promoted movie” like RikWriter interpreted it; I meant “low budget but decent audience potential”. And obviously most of them won’t be as successful as God’s Not Dead was (after all, we’re using it as the example because of how successful it was), but then, they don’t need to be.