Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbusters of 2024 Tournament: Some Thoughts

Deadline has (finally) presented the results of its Most Valuable Blockbusters tournament.

Reviewing the list of champions I was unsurprised to see Dune make the top ten (#7), Wicked the top five (#5), Despicable Me rank higher than Wicked (#4), Deadpool rank higher than that (#3), Moana higher still (#2) and Inside Out 2 land the top spot (#1). I was also unsurprised to see It Ends with Us place (#6), and Kung Fu Panda also make the cut (#8). And while I didn't mention them in the post that I wrote before the holidays (even if it only got up in early January) after seeing their grosses I wasn't surprised to see late holiday releases Mufasa or Sonic 3 round out the group (ranking at #9 and #10 respectively).

Of course, that leaves the matters of the smaller movies that turned relatively large profits, and of the year's biggest failures. I had no expectations about the "small movies, big profits" category, except that if It Ends with Us failed to make the top ten list it would end up here--and, I suppose, that horror movies would be a strong presence. That didn't happen, of course, leaving us with a list made up entirely of the year's higher-profile horror movies (A Quiet Place and Nosferatu followed by Smile 2, Speak No Evil and Longlegs). By contrast I did have expectations about the biggest flops, and I was, again, unsurprised that Joker 2 got the #1 spot, and that Furiosa, Megalopolis and Borderlands accounted for the next three places. (I had thought that Megalopolis would get the #2 spot, rather than #4, but it seems Lionsgate did well in the pre-Cannes screening foreign deals, such that the foreign distributors suffered much more from paying $50 million for rights to a movie that grossed just $7 million--a reminder that estimates are only that in the absence of knowledge of the details of the dealmaking.) I didn't have anything to say about Kraven the Hunter, but it's goetting the number five spot (for Sony's Spider-Man Universe movie it might be it still had a $110 million production budget, with a marketing budget to match) was, again, no shocker.

That said, I do not think the "smaller hits" or "biggest flops" lists tell us very much about the state of the market these days. That we had five horror movies on the "smaller hits" list is pretty consistent with past experience, and only affirms the old truism that horror remains by far the most consistently successful way to turn a relatively large profit on a small movie. The list of flops similarly affirms old truisms. Joker 2's colossal ($144 million in the red) failure merely demonstrates that if a successful filmmaker is intent on making his the sequel to a major hit of his a flop that will ruin any legacy he may have achieved with its predecessor, is empowered to act in such a fashion, and makes the fullest use of that opportunity by displaying utter, hate-filled, contempt for his fans, he has a fair chance of succeeding. Meanwhile Furiosa's flopping underlines the extent to which Mad Max: Fury Road was a money-losing flop rather than the success the financial illiterates of the press made it out to be back in 2015, and the hazards of making big-budget releases about side characters, the audience's limited appetite for prequels generally, and the dubious prospects of a film reliant on a connection with a release from a decade earlier. Megalopolis was another example of how "directorial vision" can miscarry at the box office, while Borderlands and Kraven the Hunter each seem footnotes in the stories of the video game adaptation and the superhero film, respectively. If Borderlands flopped very badly that was a matter of a much-delayed, bad buzz-burdened, poorly reviewed dump month release hitting theaters when a mega-hit was carrying everything before it, and far less significant than the many successes the genre has been piling up recently (most recently, Minecraft); while the December release of Kraven the Hunter only proved again the difficulty of selling superhero films centered on relatively minor characters, especially when they come from outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with delay, bad buzz, poor reviews and a crowded market working against them.

Still, I think that if examination of the "smaller movies with big profits" and the flops is not very illuminating with respect to the larger picture of the post-pandemic film business the biggest hits do tell us something about the market, especially if we look past the surface. At first glance the movies may seem to affirm the salience of the established blockbuster mode, and with it the skepticism about Hollywood needing to change the way it does things of the kind that 2023 seemed to suggest. After all, not one of the movies was an original film based on an original screenplay, with, excluding the Dune movie (treatable as the second half of a larger story) seven of them actually sequels or prequels (with two of them a "Part 3" and two more of them a "Part 4"). Of those ten films nine (all but It Ends With Us) were science fiction or fantasy spectacles of some type. Five of those nine (counting Mufasa), and one might add the top two (the Inside Out and Moana sequels), were family-oriented animated spectacles, and the live-action movies a retread of a classic space opera, a Marvel superhero film, a stage-to-screen adaptation of a hit Broadway musical, and a video game-based adventure (with a computer-generated protagonist, even if the film is otherwise live-action). The list even seems an affirmation of Disney's dominance of this kind of filmmaking, with the company's movies having a highly disproportionate four of the top ten spots, including the top three (in the Inside Out, Moana and Deadpool sequels).

However, the actual financial data quickly complicates that view. Certainly I was struck by how the figures indicated lower spending on the big animated hits than I thought it they would. Illumination's reputation for efficiency (and the published price tags for the preceding Despicable Me franchise films) may not make the $100 million Despicable Me 4 was made for surprising, but this was still important to the bottom line, while it is worth remarking that Kung Fu Panda was made for half what its predecessors cost, and that if Mufasa was pricey ($200 million) it was still rather cheaper in inflation-adjusted, real, terms than 2019's The Lion King--all of which was even more important to their achieving these their profit margins, given their relatively low grosses compared with those predecessors.* I had a similar impression looking at Deadpool & Wolverine. Granted, that franchise began with a relatively low-budgeted film (as Deadpool's own endless breaking of the fourth wall constantly reminded us), but especially when we consider the charge bill for Marvel's movies in the past, the inflation of recent years, the cost of getting Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman together (a key selling point for the movie), and the film's being a threequel to a series launched by another studio, $200 million is far from extravagant, all as the final bill for "participations" ended up lower than I would have guessed between the series' history, the stars and the final colossal gross. (As the movie approached a Top Gun 2-like gross I had thought the numbers here could be Top Gun 2-like as well. It didn't play out that way in the end.) And so on and so forth, the kind of bank-breakers to which we were previously accustomed just not a presence, as the totals show. After all, gGoing by Deadline's figures, in 2019 the production bill for the ten most profitable films was at least $2 billion (perhaps much more, going by what has been reported about the full bill for the highest-grosser, Avengers: Endgame), which in 2024 dollars would work out to $2.4 billion+. By contrast the top ten films of 2024 cost perhaps $1.4 billion.. Meanwhile the total outlay (counting in distribution, promotion, etc.) was $5.3 billion for the top ten films in 2019, and $6.4 billion when we adjust the figure for 2024 dollars, while the comparable figure for the top ten films of 2024 was a comparatively modest $4.1 billion.

In considering these totals it is only fair to point out that 2024, and particularly the first half of 2024, saw fewer big movies come out than usual due to the delays caused by the Hollywood strike of the prior year (with this only partially compensated by the extent to which big movies slated for release in late 2023, like Dune, Part Two, were bumped over into 2024). Still, the fact that they were such typical blockbusters in franchises that had previously generated top ten-caliber hits, and that so many of them were franchise films with smaller budgets than their predecessors, works against any argument that this was simply a matter of the bar for such success having been lowered. Rather it suggestsif the release slate was thinner than with the fact remains that, as shown before, nine of the top ten were the kinds of movies we expect to be such blockbusters, while when we compare the budgets on those big movies to the cost of not just comparable earlier movies but often immediate predecessors in the same franchise (most obviously in the case of Kung Fu Panda, though as other cases show the trend is more broadly evident) it seems that Hollywood is responding to a tougher market by putting out the same old product, but endeavoring to make it more cheaply so as to lower the threshold for profitability. That

In other words, rather than rising to the challenge by trying to make movies people really want to see, they are staying the course, but pinching their pennies--and to go by some of the comment, cutting corners.

Still, in spite of the studios' predictable resistance to change the top ten do show us that even if they are shoveling the same . . . stuff . . . out to the moviegoer, the moviegoer is not necessarily acting in accordance with their plans, really needing to be excited to get to the theater. In their own ways those two seemingly very different films, Deadpool & Wolverine, and It Ends With Us, offer handy demonstration of this. If some would like to think Deadpool & Wolverine was a "four-quadrant" movie the truth was that it was a case of a movie with a very strong appeal to a particular slice of the audience which flocked to the theaters for a record opening weekend and kept business hopping for weeks afterward, not least because the makers of the film made such a point of giving that target audience what they wanted (to the point of caring more about that than making a movie that was "good" in the conventional sense in the view of some)--while the backers of It Ends With Us similarly aimed for a particular portion of the audience that was very interested in the movie rather than trying to bring in "everyone," and relative to their smaller investment did even better. (Deadpool saw a half billion dollars spent to make a profit of $400 million--whereas It Ends With Us saw a $150 million spent to net $200 million, a return of 130 percent as against the 80 percent on Deadpool.)

Again, as I have been arguing since seeing the data from 2023: rather than looking for returns by putting up the proverbial tentpole and expecting everyone to show up, the studios would do better to make movies for a smaller but really interested share of the audience. As the case of Deadpool shows this does not have to mean original fare, or low budgets, or low (absolute) grosses--but Deadpool would seem a comparative rarity, the more successful efforts more likely to look like an It Ends With Us than a Deadpool. And at this stage of things, with 2025 so far looking much more like 2023 than it does 2024, my guess is that this year, producing a bigger harvest of big-budget flops, will only provide more evidence for that argument--while my guess is also that those who call the shots in Tinseltown will continue to completely ignore that viewargument as they continue to barrage us with sequels and prequels and reboots and remakes no one ever asked for, with the sole difference from what they were doing before their making them in a cut-rate fashion.

* Kung Fu Panda 4 cost $85 million, as against the $185-$195 million the prior three films cost when adjusted for 2024 prices; while Mufasa's $200 million is a lot less than the $260 million, or $320 million in December 2024 terms, spent on The Lion King.