In today's mainland China market, the final total box office of a movie can easily reach several billion yuan. Some of them are not big-budget science fiction blockbusters, but they can still reap high box office revenue of more than 5 billion yuan, which will definitely make investors a lot of money.
However, there is a saying that "investment is risky, and you need to be cautious when entering the market." Not every movie may eventually make investors make money. Even some movies that do well at the box office are likely to cause losses to the studios because the costs of these movies are high.
Now, whether in mainland China or the North American market, the cost of a movie is often hundreds of millions of yuan or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Like some Hollywood blockbusters, the production cost alone exceeds 200 million U.S. dollars. Coupled with subsequent publicity and other costs, the total expenditure of Hollywood blockbusters may even exceed 400 million U.S. dollars.
With such a huge expenditure, if the final total box office of the film fails to exceed 1 billion US dollars, the film studio will inevitably lose money. Because the film studio cannot take away all the box office revenue, most of it must be distributed to theaters.
In 2023, the most successful movie at the box office was " Barbie " which successfully received a box office of US$1.446 billion. It is reported that the production cost of "Barbie" was only US$145 million. Adding in the subsequent publicity and distribution costs, the total cumulative expenditure should be only US$250 million.
Based on this calculation, "Barbie" should be the most profitable movie in 2023.
And if you make money, you lose money. Not long ago, foreign media announced the list of the most profitable Hollywood movies in 2023. Among the top five on this list, Disney Pictures alone has four.
You must know that before the outbreak, Disney Pictures was the most profitable movie company in the world. "Avengers 4", "Captain Marvel" and "The Lion King" produced by it have all created extremely high box office numbers around the world. Now Disney has become the movie company that loses the most money in the world. They still have themselves to blame.
In the list of the most expensive movies in 2023, the movie that lost the most money is the Marvel superhero blockbuster "Captain Marvel 2" produced by Disney.
The cumulative total expenditure of the film is as high as 455 million U.S. dollars. However, its cumulative global box office is only 206 million U.S. dollars, and the film studio’s revenue sharing is only 88 million U.S. dollars. Calculated in this way, the net loss of "Captain Marvel 2" is as high as 237 million US dollars, which is 1.716 billion yuan converted into RMB.
Following "Captain Marvel 2", the movie with the second largest loss was DC's " The Flash ". The film has a cumulative loss of US$155 million, making it the film with the largest loss for Warner Pictures.
The remaining three movies with the largest losses are "Raiders of the Lost Ark", "Star Wish" and "The Haunted Mansion". These movies lost US$143 million, US$131 million and US$117 million respectively.
It is not unexpected that most of these five movies caused losses to the studios. After all, their quality is really poor. However, DC's "The Flash" also suffered a loss of US$155 million, which still made some viewers feel uncomfortable, because the quality of this film is very good and the audience's reputation is also very good. However, it was born at the wrong time and received a lot of attention from previous The impact of low-quality, low-reputation superhero movies.
