bartholen said:
Making your budget back doesn't mean the film has made money. The budget doesn't include, among other things, marketing, which can be a huge amount of money, especially for big summer movies. Additionally, movie theaters take around 45% from each ticket sold. As a rule of thumb movies in general have to make around 2-3 times their budget before they break even, and only after that does the film become a success. For example, After Earth was considered a flop with a budget of 130 million and a total box office gross of 243 million.
It's a good point. I guess the reason I went to the box office returns is because...they're really the only numbers publicly available, and I'm woefully underqualified on the subject to begin with.
How much money a film makes is a super [http://io9.gizmodo.com/5747305/how-much-money-does-a-movie-need-to-make-to-be-profitable] confusing [http://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/093015/how-exactly-do-movies-make-money.asp] question. Part of the problem is that important factors like marketing expenditure, merchandising revenue, and per-ticket returns are either hidden or in constant flux. (For example, the percentage of the ticket price that goes back to the studio varies wildly overseas.) I
could try and take a guess as to how successful Snyder is, accounting for all of this...but I could also try to take a guess at the existence of God. I've got just as much chance of being correct.
Let's try anyway!
Let's assume you need to make back double your production budget to turn a profit. That's generous; it assumes the studio is getting 50% of the ticket price back (which isn't the case internationally) and that they spent zero dollars on marketing. It might be more accurate to say triple, so we'll go with that instead; a film that pulls in three times (300%) or more of its production budget probably sorta maybe turned a profit, potentially.
Under that criteria, three [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucker_Punch_(2011_film)] of Snyder's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen_(film)] films [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Guardians:_The_Owls_of_Ga%27Hoole] were failures. The other four were all successes, if you don't count the sequel to
300, which he wrote and produced but did not direct. Both
Man of Steel and
Batman v Superman were successful in the sense that their box office take exceeded 300% of the production budget.
While I'll happily agree that Sucker Punch and that weird-ass owl film I didn't know existed have nothing else in their favour, Watchmen also has the merchandising revenue to consider, and I have no way of quantifying that other than by saying that "it exists."
There's also DVD sales, of which the studio generally takes a larger cut than the box office, but which have been falling steadily for the past, I don't know, five to ten years. According to the Internet [http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Watchmen#tab=video-sales], Watchmen pulled in just under ~$100 million gross in DVD sales. I don't know how much of that got back to the studio, and bear it mind it has accumulated over the past seven years since the film's release.
If we added that $100 million from DVDs to the $185 million in box office revenue,
Watchmen still falls low of our 300% rule-of-thumb. I'm okay with calling that a failure, though to be honest, it exceeded 200% and once merchandising is factored in it almost certainly turned a profit. I just can't assess the non-existent numbers on merchandising revenue.
One should also keep in mind merchandising and DVD sales for Batman v Superman, which given its Ultimate Edition shenanigans may well impact its total profit significantly.
All in all, Snyder has 4 solid successes out of 7 films total, three of which were comic book adaptations. Out of his 3 bad eggs, only 1 (Watchmen) was a comic book adaptation.
I am still pretty comfortable with characterising him as a successful director of comic book adaptations, and I stand by my statement that I wouldn't compare his record to that of a plumber who has repeatedly flooded Fox12's basement with poop.
Fox12 said:
I wouldn't consider those figures successful when you factor in the marketing cost, which is sometimes as much as the production budget, and then split the profit amongst multiple groups, including theatre chains.
Covered a lot of that above, but I'd like to mention that marketing costs for films seem to be usually pretty static at around $20 million to $50 million. Think of it as more of a flat fee than a percentage; it costs about the same amount to market a film irrespective of the film's own production budget. A marketing budget that equals or exceeds the production budget most commonly [http://io9.gizmodo.com/5747305/how-much-money-does-a-movie-need-to-make-to-be-profitable] occurs at the ~$20 million range - smaller films, like romantic comedies and everything ever made by Adam Sandler.
The exception is Batman v Superman, which had such a grossly over-inflated marketing budget (some estimates say ~$100-$150 million up to $160 [http://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2016/04/06/was-the-400-million-warner-bros-paid-for-batman-v-superman-a-good-investment/] million, but there's no real way to tell) that it's lucky to have turned a profit at all.
That was fun! I learned a lot spending an hour or so making this extensively-researched and thoroughly potholed post on a forum thread polling the vital question of whether Suicide Squad or BvS was the bigger sack of turds.
, And must I bring up Groot AGAIN?: