The High Cost Of Superheroes
On Saturday -- its twenty-third day in theaters -- the domestic gross of X-Men: The Last Stand will finally surpass its production budget of $210 million. Certainly the movie will never achieve actual profitability in the States, but that's not unusual for Hollywood blockbusters. What's noteworthy is that it won't do it worldwide either.
Worldwide profitability would require a gross of $525 million, which The Last Stand will miss by about $100 million. Neither of the previous X-Men movies came close to grossing $525 million worldwide, but then they also had reasonable budgets: $75 million and $110 million, respectively.
Even more inexplicable is the budget of the upcoming Superman Returns, which for whatever reason required $260 million to get in the can. I'm not really looking forward to the new Superman, but even if I were I'd be wondering if any movie could possibly be worth over a quarter of a billion dollars. A quarter of a billion dollars! Oh, the humanity...
posted by Ian @ 10:56 AM
1 Comments:
Normally I would avoid making that kind of connection, but in this case I've had similar thoughts. In Africa, you have people dying of ridiculously preventable diseases (yesterday I was reading about the cholera outbreak in Angola). A quarter of a billion dollars could go a long way there.
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