If 2024 was full of movies with mediocre grosses it was also the case that the number of really costly movies was more than usually limited--the year dominated by second-stringers--making it harder to assess the gap between expenditure and revenue. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, for instance, cost $100 million to produce and made $200 million theatrically. It is possible that if not too much was put into promotion and distribution, if not too much went to participations and residuals (they did, after all, bother to bring back Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson), the movie has made some money thanks to home entertainment and the rest topping off its theatrical gross--but it may also turn out that the movie failed to do so.
It is even the case that two big-budget movies the second half of the year delivered--Twisters and Gladiator 2--are in a similar spot. Much of the media put a positive face on their performances, but the truth was that relative to the expectations raised by the originals and the requirements of their colossal budgets neither film can be judged to have been all that was hoped for in this regard (with Twisters especially suffering in the international market). It is thus unlikely that either film will be listed as a major profit-maker by Deadline--but it is not impossible that in spite of the fact that they fell far short of making back the money spent on them during their theatrical runs by next spring we will learn that they got to (or even a little past) the break-even point with the help of their post-theatrical earnings.
Still, the year had its share of evident big-budget money-losers. However, some underperformers were more obviously catastrophic than others. The result is that the list of the five biggest losers seems likely to have Joker 2 and Megalopolis in the top two spots, with the Mad Max sequel Furiosa and Eli Roth's adaptation of the video game Borderlands "competing" for the next two places.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment