Just How Well Would Shazam 2 Have to Do to Be a Winner?

What would it take for Shazam 2 (Shazam! Fury of the Gods) to be a hit?

None but the insiders can say that about this or any other film with any great precision given the opacity of film budgeting and revenue. Yes, we are often given figures for production budgets--but these both overstate and understate the expenditure. Dubious accounting can be used to either end--overstating a budget to make sure "there is no net," overstating it to make sure there is net enough for bonuses to the principals. Also on the side of overstatement one may add that as a practical matter government subsidies and product placement often cover part of the cost; and on the side of understatement the bill for publicity--which in this utterly insane attention economy matches the cost of production.

My response to this is to play it safe and to assume that whatever the production budget was, twice as much was spent making it by somebody.

Meanwhile there is that matter of the revenue. We hear that a movie "grossed" so much. But that is the total in ticket sales, much of which may not go to the studio. Theaters keep their share of their revenue (typically getting a higher cut the longer they run a movie in their theater), while where overseas earnings are concerned there are foreign distributors to think of--all as the details of particular deals may vary. (For instance, a studio with what everyone thinks is a sure-fire winner may demand an exceptionally large share of the opening weekend sales.) No one knows how the staggering number of not-so-little deals entailed in getting a movie screened all over the world will wind up working out until they actually do work out. Still, the studio usually gets the equivalent of 40 to 50 percent of the gross.

Of course, there are other, non-theatrical revenue streams. Like merchandising. And TV rights. But the value of these is often related to the expectations, and actuality, of its theatrical run--the merchandise for a movie no one liked not likely to sell very well. Moreover, if those revenues are often hugely important, as the straight-to-streaming experiments of the last few years demonstrated, there is little that can compete with a $20 ticket for cash-in-hand. The result is that a profitable theatrical run generally remains the standard of judgment, the movie that (these days, at least) only covers its cost after years of money trickling in from other sources understandably deemed a failure financially.

So, back to the 40-50 percent figure. According to my rule of thumb that 40 percent should equal twice the production budget--so that one can say that the global gross should be five times that budget.

With Shazam we have a movie with a budget reported as $100-$125 million. That could see the movie be profitable with $400 million taken in (or even less, depending on how it was financed). However, it would seem safer to call the movie profitable if it crosses the $600 million mark.

Does it have much chance of that? Well, Shazam took in $366 million in early 2019. This is, to go by the Consumer Price Index, about equal to $430 million at last (February 2023) check. Should the new movie merely match the original's performance then it might make it--but I suspect it would fall short of really being a success.

Meanwhile the actual expectations for the new movie's gross are . . . somewhat lower. The current Boxoffice Pro prediction for the opening weekend is $35 million. Should the film, like many a sequel to such a movie, take in forty percent of its money on opening weekend it would have a hard time grossing $100 million in North America. Should the balance between domestic and international gross approximate that of the original one would see the movie make perhaps $250 million--rather less than its predecessor globally as well as domestically. And it is far from implausible that it could do less business than that.

The result is that, while there was never a very good chance of a Shazam 3 given the big shake-up at DC, I doubt the executives at WBD will be tempted to give the franchise a third shot very soon.