Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament: A Few Thoughts on the Likely Winners

Looking ahead to the Deadline Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament--the magazine's ranking of what movies were not the highest grossing but rather most profitable--it seems to me that in this year when so many movies made so little money it is easy to guess the taker of the #1 spot. That would be Inside Out 2, which grossed almost ten times its big $175 million budget (finishing up its run with just a little under $1.7 billion), with, of course, much more money coming from post-theatrical revenues, where Disney home entertainment tends to do particularly well, such that the net on this one being much under $700 million would be surprising given the way these things tend to go.

Guessing the taker of the #2 spot is a little trickier. Yes, Deadpool & Wolverine, if well behind the Inside Out sequel, was well ahead of everyone else in its box office take--but there are complicating factors. If the movie's combination of a $200 million budget with a $1.3 billion gross likewise guarantees a take far larger than the outlay for production and distribution the fact remains that Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman's agents almost certainly demanded, and received, something out of it for their stars. The result is that the studio net might be a lot lower than it would otherwise have been. (Think, for instance, of what getting Tom Cruise back into the air cost Paramount when it made Top Gun 2.) Disney-Marvel has almost certainly done very well out of the movie regardless, but the point is that the margin of profit may be lowered just enough to give the third highest-grosser of the year so far, Despicable Me 4, a shot at edging it out of the #2 position on the list (or Moana 2 doing so, should it overtake Despicable Me before finishing its run, and pushing that movie down one place).

Past these uppermost spots the guessing game gets harder because in light of the outlays of money and the grosses the margins between success and failure, and between one film and another, get smaller. Still, some of the year's releases seem safe enough bets. The second half of Dune? The first part of Wicked? I'd be surprised if they didn't at least make the top ten, while I would hesitate to rule them out of the top five. Kung Fu Panda 4? Very plausibly. Beetlejuice 2 or Venom 3? Maybe. At the same time there are movies that the media has tended to portray as successes that I really don't expect to see there--like Twisters, given its combination of big budget and weak international earnings, and Gladiator 2, about which it seems that, skeptical as I was of that one from the first, I may still have been overly optimistic (imagining $600 million globally as having been within the range of possibility for the film)--and of course the notorious flop Furiosa. Instead of these I would expect to find some of those movies that between merely robust grosses and lower budgets made the list, with It Ends with Us still seeming to me to have a good chance of at least making the top ten, and Alien: Romulus maybe doing so as well.