I think Clerks was made for $27,000.
Chasing Amy was made for $250,000.
Dogma cost $10,000,000, but grossed $30,000,000.
KS movies will never be blockbusters, but talk about return on an investment…
Kevin Smith movies are not really that great. IMHO, the acting is terrible and the production values ameteurish.
It basically comes down to ROI (return on investment). If a movie costs $100 million to make, it has to bring in at least that much to break even. Usually, that means the movie has to be generic enough to appeal to a least common denominator audience. Cult classics like Clerks, Reservoir Dogs, Office Space, or Evil Dead don’t cost that much to make so they don’t have to earn that much. That also means that they can focus on one particular audience group instead of trying to please everyone.
What I want to know is what happened to the blockbusters with logevity? Movies like Jaws, Star Wars IV and V, and Raiders of the Lost Arc are classics 20 years after their release. I can barely remember what movies were released last year. What happened to the giant blockbusters that were actually good? Now it seems like all we see are sad versions of classics (Deep Blue Sea<>Jaws), sequals/preqils (Star Wars I, II <> IV and V) or combinations of the two (Mummy, Mummy Returns, Scorpion King).
Ah, if it were only that easy…granted, sly accountants could probably prove that Titanic has yet to make a profit…but in reality, the weekend grosses that you hear about do not all go to the studios - and even if they did, there are extra costs.
Say a film cost $100 million.
But:
Then there is print & tv advertising ($10-20million is lowballing it).
Prints cost about $25,000 each, times 5000 screens or so…
Then some stars and directors and producers get points (percentage of gross).
add to that advertising junkets for stars, dubbing costs for foreign countries.
Next to consider is that the movie theaters get a cut of that box office…this can vary with studio and theater chains, but figure that the first week it is 80% studio and 20% theater and each week the theater gets a bigger cut and the studio less. (the reason theaters all want blockbuster hits to run a looooong time)
The short math version:
A $100 million film probably needs to pull in close to $200 million and still will not exactly clean-up financially.
No, you should not weep openly for Spielberg and DreamWorks…but in case you were thinking of investing $50,000 in your kid brother’s newest vampire film…don’t hold your breath for those huge profits to come rollng in…
Unless your kid brother made that horrible, wretched Blair Witch Project that DID clean up and probably made more money per invested dollar than most any film in history!