Taylor Swift and Five Nights at Freddy's Made Deadline's Top Ten Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2023?

Previously thinking about the likely makeup of Deadline's list of the biggest profit-makers of 2023 I suggested the Taylor Swift concert film and Five Nights at Freddy's would get some recognition--but on the list of smaller films that made relatively large profits, rather than the list of "most valuable blockbusters." However, we see Taylor Swift: The Era Tour ranked at #7, and Five Nights at Freddy's at #8 on that very list--a development very surprising given that, where overall gross is concerned, they did not rank all that highly in that year. Where the listed global grosses at Box Office Mojo are concerned Taylor Swift's film not only did not make the top ten, but failed even to make the top twenty, ending up at only #23--behind that notorious flop The Flash (#21), for example.* However, Swift's film was also relatively low-cost, a $15 million production (one-twentieth of what The Flash cost). The result was that when all was said and done the movie, between its $261 million in ticket sales, and subsequent and associated revenues, made a $172 million profit. Thus did it also go for Five Nights at Freddy's--that movie, between costing a little more money and making a little more money than The Eras Tour ending up just a little less profitable than Swift's film (pulling in $161 million according to the Deadline calculation).

Those who anticipated the films would do well seem to be saying "I told you so" --but this seems mainly because they were confident in those movies' prospects, in large part because of personal enthusiasm about them, and focusing on that would make us miss two very large, important developments here.

One is that these comparatively low-grossing movies outdid so many bigger-grossing movies profit-wise, with all that suggests about the declining viability of those movies that were for so long Hollywood's principal moneymakers (like The Flash, which made more money than the Taylor Swift film, but seems certain to produce a nine figure loss for WBD).

The other is that the bar for making the top ten list is a lot lower than it used to be. Back in 2019 Taylor Swift's film would not only not have ranked at #7 with a profit of $172 million, but would not have made the top ten at all. In 2019 the tenth-ranked film on Deadline's list was the Jumanji sequel, with $236 million, while the seventh-ranked film, the live-action adaptation of Aladdin, reportedly made a profit of $356 million, twice what Taylor Swift's film did, even before we consider the considerable inflation of these years (a more than 20 percent rise in prices since 2019).

Together the two factors are indicative of a situation of a shrunken film market--doing well in which may mean playing by very different rules from those that prevailed just a few years ago when Disney was the champion.