Hollywood's Abysmal 2024 in Numbers
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Wednesday, April 29, 2026 01:06
VIEWED: 18655
PAGE 34 of 42
Quote:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
6ixStringJack
You're predictions on movies are often good
I believe you add costs of distribution and marketing,
I don't add any distribution and marketing costs, simply because that is only made available to us on a very rare occasion, and only when the movie does exceedingly well. (See: When they bumped up the originally stated production budget for Barbie by $45 Million from only $100 Million and at the same time announced that they spent $150 Million on marketing, which was $5 Million more than the Production Budget. They only announced both of these things after it was clear that Barbie was going to be a smash hit and it made them look like geniuses for doing what they did.
The Rule of Thumb for years was that a movie had to gross 2 times the Production Budget to break even. This included the nebulous marketing budgets, distribution and the theater cuts on ticket prices.
Early last year I saw people using RoT2.5x and even RoT3.0x, and I called bullshit on that. There was no proof that we'd changed from RoT2.0. But we were in the middle of a recession the media still refuses to admit is a recession and the price of everything went up.
If you recall, and there's my post history here to prove it, I wrote a lot about this in the first half of 2023, and even initially based my tables off of the RoT2.0 model. It was only after lefty sites like Deadline were confirming the RoT2.5 model that I went along with it and edited my tables to reflect both models. And I said at the time I was sufficiently satisfied that RoT2.5x was now a legitimate model and I would have abandoned the 2.0 model going forward if I made lists for 2024 and beyond.
So, of course, it's not an exact science. Some big budget movies probably have to make RoT3.0 to actually break even, but without the exact figures we'll never know that. On the flip side, a studio like A24 or Focus Features isn't spending shit on marketing, so they really don't need 2.5x to break even and are probably fine even if they end up just a little shy of 2.0x, depending on what deal they have with the theaters and what the take is. (Again, numbers we're never going to be privy to).
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you don't believe in profits from Toys, DVDs, T-Shirts, Streaming Downloads
Interesting question.
It's not that I don't believe in these profits. I just don't believe anything they say about them now, simply because there is no transparency on them. Outside of DVD sales, we have no reliable numbers to verify or disprove any merchandising or streaming claims. Let's take that list 1 by 1.
1. Toys - Simply put, nobody is buying them anymore. And I'm not at all convinced that fixing the woke bullshit is really going to help with that. Sure... DEI departments making sure that Hasbro was making an equal amount of no-name minority character from Eternals as they did Spider-Man was a horrible, horrible mistake, but outside of 45 year old men that never grew up who are these toys even made for? If it's not a video game or something that ties to a video game system, the kids aren't playing with them.
You can watch hundreds of videos on YouTube with people going up and down the Ollie's aisles showing mountains of unsold Marvel and Star Wars merch all the time. They had marked down Shang Chi action figures to only 10% of their original sales price and they were still rotting on Ollie's shelves years after the movie came out. There are STILL unsold toys from the first Disney Star Wars movie, which is 9 years old now.
2. DVDs - This is the one thing we actually have numbers for, and that Bruce tracks for us.
But this isn't 2004 anymore. Nobody is buying BluRay or DVD in 2024. If you look back 20 years, there were tens of millions spent on this stuff after box office. Now you see numbers like $2 and $3 Million. So if a movie was just shy of breaking even, this is something to consider looking at, but a movie
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Quote:Disney movies are advertisements for their theme parks and Disney+. Disney knows what it is doing even if you are confused about their strategy, thinking that movie theater ticket sales are more important than parks sales.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They could have put out 6 or 7 movies with lesser price tags than Mufasa 2, for instance. I'm pretty confident they would have made quite a bit more money doing that than they will off of M2.
The best thing Disney did in 2024 was limit their releases to only 4 movies, with only one of those being a Comic Book movie, with arguably the two most popular on-screen comic book characters of all time.
Disney is turning record parks profits — even before its big expansions
Published Fri, Nov 15 2024
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/15/disney-parks-profit-expansions.html
Box Office Performance for Walt Disney Movies in 2024
https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2024/distributor/Walt-Disney
Box Office Performance for Walt Disney Movies in 2019
https://www.the-numbers.com/market/2019/distributor/Walt-Disney
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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1) You can’t do this at most theaters but you can at home: Sing-along with the movie
Wicked.2024.SING-ALONG.VERSION.720p.10bit.WEBRip.6CH.x265.HEVC-PSA
Bittorrent Link: fb0e99ec20e7c68ef008fbe9d6c18e3e0778cfff
https://psa.wf/movie/wicked-2024/
2) Wanna know all the details that are NOT available at theaters about how Wicked was made? Then download:
Wicked 2024 EXTRA BONUS FEATURES 1080p MA WEB-DL DDP2 0 H 264-FLUX
Bittorrent Link: 8632a374b959470f740881d63351539e393b2575
https://mypiratebay.cfd/description.html?id=77712722
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Twenty times more expensive than a movie ticket to Wicked, yet worth it since a movie can’t compete with a well-done live show:
‘Wicked’ Has Highest-Grossing Week in Broadway History
By Caitlin Huston | Dec 31, 2024
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wicked-highes
t-grossing-week-in-broadway-history-1236097340/
Wicked brought in a staggering $5 million last week, marking the highest weekly gross in history for any Broadway show.
That total, which was accumulated across nine shows last week, rather than the typical eight, is also a record for the show, which has been running on Broadway since 2003. The musical brought in $2 million more than the prior week and had an average ticket price of $290.61.
Wicked is typically one of the top box office contenders, but it has seen a particular resurgence in recent weeks amid the popularity of the film. The week between Christmas and New Year’s is also typically one of the highest grossing for many shows in the industry.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Disney movies are advertisements for their theme parks and Disney+. Disney knows what it is doing even if you are confused about their strategy, thinking that movie theater ticket sales are more important than parks sales.
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
They could have put out 6 or 7 movies with lesser price tags than Mufasa 2, for instance. I'm pretty confident they would have made quite a bit more money doing that than they will off of M2.
The best thing Disney did in 2024 was limit their releases to only 4 movies, with only one of those being a Comic Book movie, with arguably the two most popular on-screen comic book characters of all time.
You mean an advertisement for things like this?
What Went Wrong with Disney’s Star Wars Hotel?
https://www.disneytouristblog.com/what-went-wrong-star-wars-galactic-s
tarcruiser-disney-world/
They lost almost as much money on this as they did on Indy 5 last year. And that's with the lowball accounting. The actual cost of the Battlecruiser hotel was much closer to $1 Billion to construct than $300 Million.
You keep repeating this bullshit, but they're losing money on their parks just like they're losing money everywhere else. Not to mention Disney merchandising is on life support. The company name, which is now over 100 years old, has been dragged through the mud for the last 8 years. You can't keep losing money on every front, year after year, without a reckoning. That reckoning is now.
Why do you think they settled immediately with Trump over idiot George's comments?
They lost Ready Creek, which sees taxes eating away at their Florida business like a cancer now. Bob Iger just sold $41 Million in shares last month. Why would Bob Iger sell $41 Million of his own shares in the company if he thought it had a bright future? Is he broke and in desperate need for the money? Not likely.
Battered and Bruised, ‘Woke’ Disney Wants Out of Politics
https://insidethemagic.net/2024/12/disney-wants-to-get-out-of-politics
-rl1mmb/
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Fans were disappointed, but not necessarily surprised, when Disney announced last week that it cut a transgender athlete storyline from the Pixar show Win or Lose. After all, for those who voted for Donald Trump, transgender athletes in sports were one of their most important issues.
Disney’s decision followed its settlement with Trump over a defamation suit he brought against ABC News and George Stephanopoulos. Despite most legal experts and First Amendment scholars believing that Disney had a winning case, the company agreed to donate $15 million toward Trump’s presidential library and pay his legal fees.
Trump sued ABC and Stephanopoulos after he claimed on his show that Trump had allegedly raped E. Jean Carroll. Trump denied that he had ever raped her, despite paying millions in a defamation lawsuit brought by Carroll.
Trump wisely brought this lawsuit in South Florida, unlike a $475 million suit he brought against CNN that a judge threw out. Disney assumed it would be difficult to find a jury there to rule in their favor and wisely settled the lawsuit rather than let it go to the Supreme Court.
What? You couldn't fly in a hand-picked jury from Manhattan Island?
Awwwwwwwwwwww..... Shame.
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Taken in isolation, neither of these events would suggest a shift in the company’s policy; however, taken together, along with other moves from the company, it shows that The Walt Disney Company has made an internal decision to move away from any controversial political issue.
However, gaining the trust of right-leaning Americans may be difficult for a company that has been labeled as “woke.” During its first with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the state’s Parental Rights in Education Act, known by its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, DeSantis labeled the company “woke” and claimed that Disney was “grooming” children.
Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek said nothingNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Oh, and I would like to remind everyone that when I would claim that a Disney movie was going to fail, such as Lightyear, you insulted me and said it wasn't made for me. Then nobody went out to see it, proving that it wasn't made for anybody.
We've seen this exact same cycle play out on repeat in the Movie board for 3 years now out of you.
And now that there is no arguing anymore that Disney movies injected with woke Lefty agenda are automatic failures in the box office, you moved the goalposts out of the stadium and started going around telling everyone Disney doesn't care about its movies or if they lose billions a year in the theaters because of theme parks (that are also failing).
If these woke trash movies are "advertising", like you claim they are, it's the worst fucking ad campaign in the history of the company.
Don't expect to see any more of those types of "ads" out of Disney going forward.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:You are unaware that most movies are failures. By predicting failure, you will be a success most of the time.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh, and I would like to remind everyone that when I would claim that a Disney movie was going to fail, such as Lightyear, you insulted me and said it wasn't made for me. Then nobody went out to see it, proving that it wasn't made for anybody.
Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey
Faber & Faber 352pp £16.99
Book Review at https://literaryreview.co.uk/there-was-no-sorcerer | Dec 2024
Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.is//search.php?req=Tim+Robey
There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring romantic drama Gigli (2003), starring Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, but the fact that cinemagoers weren’t sure if they should be asking for ‘two tickets to Giggly’ didn’t help. Synecdoche, New York (2008) and The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) had more people reaching for their dictionaries than their wallets. But what about a title that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story?
This brings us to Rule two: never give a director carte blanche. After William Friedkin won Oscars for The French Connection (1971) and broke box office records with The Exorcist (1973), Paramount pretty much let him off the leash, even down to the choice of the title for his next film, which he dubbed Sorcerer (1977). Nice one, thought fans. Something along the lines of The Exorcist, perhaps, mixing diabolical forces with titillating gore? Well, no. The film turned out to be a remake of the classic French thriller The Wages of Fear (1953). There was no sorcerer.
Friedkin happened to have been listening to the Miles Davis album Sorcerer a lot at the time. He just liked the word. He later recalled, ‘I thought anything I did at that point would work.’ In the event, half his crew came down with amoebic dysentery, gangrene or malaria during the excruciating shoot in the wilds of the Dominican Republic. He lost his line producer after the man’s wife informed him that she would divorce him unless he quit. It was bad luck that, later that year, Star Wars came out and sucked up all the oxygen left in the market.
Rule three: avoid water and cats. What’s wrong with water? It’s unpredictable, which can send costs spiralling. Witness Waterworld (1995), in which Kevin Costner plays a man with gills, or the pirate hokum Cutthroat Island from the same year, or Speed 2: Cruise Control (1997), which also flouts rule one: its title is boring. Actually, it’s worse than boring. It’s baffling. ‘Speed’ speaks for itself. But ‘Cruise Control’? That’s a safety feature. They might as well have called it ‘Speed 2: Automatic Pilot’.
And what’s wrong with cats? This is more mysterious, but feline failings crop up repeatedly in Box Office Poison, Tim Robey’s exhilarating whistlestop tour of some of the biggest financial disasters in Hollywood history. They go back to Queen Kelly (1929), the pervy mega-turkey that tanked Gloria Swanson’s career. There was a scene in which her co-star Seena Owen grew tired of being naked and was handed a cat to cover her breasts. The cat began to scratch her. White mittens had to be placed over its claws.
One of the joys of this book is the excuse it offers to rewatch, or catch for the first time, some of these stinkers. My ten-year-old son and I relished a double bill of Speed 2 (surprisingly slow) and the oddly diverting Catwoman (2004), a superhero fiasco in which Halle Berry is drowned by bad guys, then randomly revived and given feline powers and penchants by a magic cat. There’s a scene, which cannot be unseen, in which someone hands Berry a ball of catnip and she rubs it all over her face in ecstasy.
Yet the mother of these movie monsters is Cats (2019),
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Focus’ Nosferatu grossed $4.96M on New Year’s Day Wednesday (from 2,992 locations). Total domestic gross is $53.08M.
https://x.com/BORReport/status/1874885585078567288
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:You are unaware that most movies are failures. By predicting failure, you will be a success most of the time.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh, and I would like to remind everyone that when I would claim that a Disney movie was going to fail, such as Lightyear, you insulted me and said it wasn't made for me. Then nobody went out to see it, proving that it wasn't made for anybody.
This is simply not true. Not even in a bad year. There are plenty of low to mid budget movies coming out in any given year to make this statement the polar opposite of the truth.
If the odds of betting on a Hollywood movie were a straight 50/50 coin-flip, nobody would be making Hollywood movies when it would be more profitable for the producers and investors to just go to the casino and play Blackjack.
You say the dumbest shit.
Now Disney specifically, on the other hand, have a terrible SHORT-TERM track record for losing TONS of money on more than 50% of their previous 5 year catalog compared to the other studios. In a market necessitating a "what have you done for me lately" attitude, it would be very wise for investors to look elsewhere for places to put their money.
Look around you. The culture war from the Left is done for at least a decade and Disney knows this full well. You aren't going to be hearing shit out of them politically for a very long time. They got their head cut off because they were the ones sticking it all the way up to the sky when everybody else was relatively low-key about their DEIification of Hollywood.
And now it's just really unfortunate for Disney that they're in such bad shape financially that they can't just torpedo Snow White and Black Captain America when they know everybody is going to lose tons of money on both of them.
Most people don't understand the movie making process and how long ago those movies were conceived and just how long ago they began filming... and how different the cultural landscape looked when they began filming. Most people don't pay attention to any of this, and a lot of them are going to be confused all over again when Disney puts this shit out in 2025 after a not-bad year out of them in the Box Office.
My opinion is they should write both of those movies off for huge tax breaks and burn the master copies so they never see the light of day. The further brand damage that they're going to do to themselves at a really unfortunate time for Disney isn't worth saving that money. Especially not when you just proved that you still can do as well as Disney did in 2025 after their worst year in history.
And you know that at least Bob Iger is smart enough to know this and that's why he waited until the end of a very up year for Disney to cash out $41 Million in stock options before people start talking about these soon to release flops.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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How about you put your time where your mouth is Second?
I propose that you and I play a little game in 2025. (And everybody else is free to join if they'd like to).
Once a week until the end of the year, you and I give our predictions for every WIDE release in the Box Office that weekend.
Not anything complicated.
Just a simple PASS/FAIL.
Pass would be making 2.5 times the Production budget, rounded up/down to the nearest $1 Million.
Fail would be any movie making less than this.
No arguing back and forth about the merits of the RoT2.5x model or how it impacts one type of movie differently than the other type of movie. We're just going to make our claims on which movies we believe will make 250% of their Production Budget back and which ones don't. Period.
Bruce's Production Budget will always be the "standard". For movies where Bruce doesn't state the PB, we could come up with an agreement for which media outlets such as Vulture or Deadline we look to for these numbers and which order they supersede each other if they aren't in agreement. Some movies we're going to have to put an "*" on and skip because we won't have any reliable budget numbers, or at least we will not have gotten them early enough to bet on. (Focus Features would be the most likely studio to force us to exempt their entries in this way).
We could figure out the nuances of some rules as we go on and see how smoothly this works. One rule I suggest is that we reserve the option to abstain on a vote for any particular movie. I think this makes it a lot more interesting because there are going to be a lot of low-budget movies we wouldn't normally pay any attention to, and being able to abstain from a vote on a case-by-case basis adds another level of strategy. You won't get a point if you were right, but you won't lose a point if you were wrong on that one.
And then I'd say the natural progression of that would be how to handle it if somebody doesn't vote for a particular week in time. No loss of points for this. But it will be treated as if they abstained from voting on every movie. So you could theoretically come out ahead by missing a vote on a particularly tricky week when your opponent was here and made some bad guesses.
I'm sure there are other rules like this we could come up with.
For instance, is every movie worth 1 point to make all the figuring simple, or do we spice things up and give 2 and 3 points to give more weight to mid-level and high-budget movies, based off of numbers we agree split the low from the mid from the high?
We should flesh this out.
Let's see who's better at this.
Are you game?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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