Evonisia said:
Jake Martinez said:
I really don't understand why they are making a sequel to a flop. I didn't go see Ant-Man, but I based that decision off of my gut instinct that it would suck, however I can't find a single friend of mine who did see it who thought it was better than "mediocre". Some even said it was about as bad as Iron Man 3, which in my honest opinion was terrible.
If making more than double your money back (400 million plus worldwide) and being reasonably well received is considered a flop I weep for the state of the film industry.
Well, that's actually the state of things. For a big studio like Disney (of which Marvel is now a part of) they have a limited release schedule for big movies, that is to say, they'll only release them at certain times of the year and they seldom have them competing against each other. This is so that they can maximize profits throughout the year and it makes sense - for instance, you don't release an expensive to make movie in the off season.
Secondly, that 400 million dollar figure is the gross ticket sales. It's not the actual money earned. They also have to pay various taxes in various regions, distribution fees, ticket sale sharing with theatres (although personally, I feel like this should be higher) and then they need to pay any gross points off the top of that to investors or other people (sometimes directors, producers or actors) and finally the production budget of $130 million doesn't include distribution and advertising costs. I guarantee you the actual money made off this film wasn't 400m - 130m = 270m. It was probably closer to 180m which just barely double their production costs.
Now that might sound great, I mean - double your money, right? But the truth is that when you look at the other movies that they
could have released during that coveted movie going period, they really blew it. For a movie that big to gross less than 700m internationally is not a success. To give you a relative figure Disney/Marvel spent 280m on Age of Ultron and it grossed a whopping 1.5
billion dollars.
But maybe that's a little excessive considering the amount of money spent was almost double, let's look at something else that was considered a success from the same studio at a similar price: Captain America: The Winter Soldier. This movie cost a reported 180m to make and grossed internationally about 715m dollars. I'm positive that despite making less than 2x as much as Ant-Man once you do accounting on say Captain America, it'll have actually earned 3-4x as much money as Ant-Man because the higher profit would have overcome various sunk costs related to the movie production and release.
Anyway,
this is what movie studios are looking at - how to maximize ROI in a short window of viewing time that they have every year (there are only so many movies that they can realistically release before they start diluting or taking share away from their other movies). This is why Ant-Man is a flop - low return on investment and was a loss for Disney/Marvel on what they call "opportunity cost" - to put it bluntly, by releasing this movie they missed the opportunity to potentially release another movie that would have made them a higher return.
