Is Gladiator 2 a Flop?

Admittedly the entertainment press doesn't think so.

Still, consider the situation as it stands.

Seventeen days into Gladiator II's international release the movie has collected $200 million internationally, while ten days into its North American release it has made $120 million in that market. Assuming not unreasonably that the movie has already made 80 percent of its international total by this point, and 60 percent of its North American total, one would expect the movie's final take to come to $450 million. Alternatively were one to take the $200 million figure for the final domestic take implied by the calculations presented above and expect this to amount to 40 percent of the final worldwide gross the way the domestic take did for the original, one gets a figure of $500 million, some $50 million more, while if one is prepared to allow for a margin of $50 million the other way as well we get $550 million.

A gross in the range of $450-$550 million (which is higher than David Gross is picturing it making) may sound like a lot of money. The bullish will point out that this has the movie at least matching what the original made ($465 million), ignoring the dollar's losing almost half (46 percent) of its purchasing power since 2000 according to the Consumer Price Index. The result is that merely matching the original's gross in current dollars means the movie's making about half what the original did in real terms.

We get an even worse picture when we think in terms of the cost of the film. The original Gladiator was made for a little over $100 million, which permitted a very healthy profit indeed on a gross of a half billion. By contrast the sequel will be making a half billion dollars--after an outlay of $250-$310 million on the production, an expenditure of two to three times as much.

We do not ordinarily think of a sequel that made half as much as the original as a success.

We also do not (given the economics of film production and distribution) think of a movie, or anything else, that costs three times as much as its predecessor for the same return a success, with this certainly carrying over to a movie that costs $250 million+ to make (and $120 million more to distribute and market) grossing a half billion dollars. And indeed, as I argued back in April, the bar for profitability may be higher for this one than the range discussed here--a loss still quite plausible even after the post-theatrical income from streaming, TV rights, physical media, etc. is taken into account.

Still, with rare exceptions the press has been fairly upbeat about how Gladiator 2 is doing.

A plausible explanation for the gap between rhetoric and reality is that the entertainment press is on the whole claquing for this one--at least in part because it fits in with the narrative that Hollywood so badly wants to believe, namely that, contrary to the evidence of 2023, and what must be regarded as the ambiguous evidence of the public response to the thinned-out release slate of a 2024 mere weeks short of its end, franchise-addicted Hollywood's formula for generating blockbusters remains viable. And it is not going to let a little thing like movies actually losing their backers money get in the way of that.