A Closer Look at How Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer Did in Deadline's 2023 Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament

Previously when speculating about the outcome of Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament this year I guessed that Oppenheimer would make the top five--and indeed it did, making exactly the #5 position.

How did the economics of that work out? Deadline reports that the production cost $100 million. But, as is the case when a movie does really well, participations and residuals were hefty--making the eventual outlay over five times that. At the same time the revenue from ticket sales was lower than one might have thought given the near billion-dollar gross, just $422 million (43 percent of the worldwide gross, where often it approaches 50 percent). This may have been a function of the high share of international sales (the movie did two-thirds of its business internationally, which has been known to skew the cut downwards), and the film's "legs" (the usual arrangement with leggy movies being the studio keeping less and less of the take in return for theaters running the movie longer). All the same, if the participations and residuals took a big bite out of revenue that might have been a bit lower than one might have guessed from the gross, it still worked out to an over $200 million net on the production, an extraordinary sum for a film such as this one.