The View From Here I

One use for this site will be as a place for me to periodically ponder the American film industry. (Those among my friends and family who used to receive these pondering unsolicited in their email inboxes can now collectively brief a sigh of relief.) And the subject that will come up regularly, starting today, is how this once-self-sustaining industry now relies on foreign and ancillary markets to achieve profitability.

Trying to determine the actual profitability of a particular movie would require more spare time than even I have. So I choose to judge the profitability of all movies by the same standard -- that is, a movie is profitable if it grosses two-and-a-half times its production budget.

This may sound like an exacting standard, but actually it's barely comfortable. Studios receive just 65% to 80% of every dollar their movies earn at the box office, and it’s not unusual for a studio to spend as much money releasing a movie (on prints and advertising) as it did on the production itself.

(If your movie happens to star a certain A-list aspiring OB/GYN who will receive ten percent of the gross plus a share of merchandising, then just move along. There’s no reasonable definition of profitability for you here.)

For the last few months, I’ve been tracking wide U.S. releases to discover which of these movies were achieving profitability in the so-called domestic market (“so-called” because it includes the renegade province “Canada”). Of the 48 movies I’ve been tracking, eight would be considered profitable even without foreign markets, DVD, cable, and so on. And they are, in order from highest to lowest gross:

Revenge of the Sith
Madagascar
Hitch
Wedding Crashers
Are We There Yet?
The Amityville Horror
Diary of a Mad Black Woman
Hustle and Flow

(The Devil's Rejects will shortly join this group; Boogeyman, The Wedding Date and Coach Carter all just barely missed being part of it.)

What’s interesting -- or at least what I always find interesting when I look at these numbers -- is how many perceived successes are nowhere near achieving domestic profitability. Movies like War of the Worlds, Batman Begins, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Four. For these movies, and many other $100-million-plus movies, appealing to the domestic audience won’t be enough.