Just How Profitable Was Guardians of the Galaxy 3?

It's that time of year again--Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament!

At the time of this writing Deadline has provided only the films making the tenth and ninth spots on the list. The #10 position was taken by PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie--a feature film tie-in with the TV cartoon.

I admit that this one was not on my radar at all, and have nothing to say about it. By contrast I had expected the #9 movie, Guardians of the Galaxy 3, to place here--because if an underperformer in comparison with its predecessors and some of the more bullish expectations held out for the film in the months prior to its release in a year in which so many big-budget films flopped it still looked like a respectable earner, with my reading of the figures back in May making me think a $100 million take in even the more pessimistic scenario I had in mind.

The movie's making the list means that Deadline offers us the numbers about this one. According to these the final bill on Guardians of the Galaxy 3 came to $550 million--about 2.2 times the $250 million production budget, counting the $90 million absorbed by participations and residuals and the like. The movie's total revenue was $674 million, about 55 percent of that theatrical revenue (thanks to the film doing a bit better than the bottom end of the range I discussed, pulling in, instead of $700-$750 million, about $860 million globally). The result was a net profit of $124 million according to Deadline's calculation. Computed another way the profit equals 23 percent of the outlay.

How do these figures compare with the numbers on the prior two Guardians films?

For Guardians of the Galaxy 2 the figure Deadline computed was a net profit of $154 million (a bit under $200 million in today's terms) on total costs of $515 million--yielding a 30 percent return.

For the original Guardians of the Galaxy the figures were a profit of $204 million (some $270 million in today's terms) on an outlay of $520 million, working out to a 39 percent return.

The result is that the original film was, both in terms of the return on expenditure and absolute return, the most profitable, the second film less profitable than that, the third film least profitable of all--affirming a trend of diminishing returns on the franchise from the monetary standpoint that seems reflective of the diminishing returns on the bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) of which it was a part. Of course, that said Guardians of the Galaxy 3's $100 million+ profit still makes it a very worthwhile investment--but with the direction in which this series has moved (a 40 percent drop in relative return, a more than half drop in absolute return), to say nothing of the broader trend with regard to the MCU, the superhero film and the high concept franchise film as we have long known it, should give any astute investor pause in regard to the idea of a Guardians of the Galaxy 4.

Of course, we are likely to be getting one anyway.