Update: Lowest Grossing Movie In US Made Just $72 In 2013

[Karloff]

Update: Lowest Grossing Movie In US Made Just $72 In 2013


It's Mickey! Hello Mickey! Or is it Ricky? I can never remember.

There are disasters, there are box office flops, and then there is Storage 24, a British horror film that has the honor of being the lowest grossing movie in the US in 2013. It cost £1.6 million (c. $2.6 million) to make - pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of things - and earned just $72 all told. It was shown in one cinema for one week. Yes, that is Noel Clarke in the trailer, who most of you know best from Doctor Who. He co-wrote as well as starred in Storage 24, and did most of his own stunts.

Clarke's character Charlie goes to the storage facility because he's trying to pick up his stuff; he and his girlfriend split, and it's time to divvy up their possessions. Ex-girlfriend Shelley is also on hand, just to add that extra bit of tension. Cue disaster, as an alien creature crash-lands more or less on top of them.

The whole thing is Clarke's idea. "I literally was at a storage facility with a family member, just walking around the corridors, thinking, 'This place is crazy,'" he said in a Moviezone interview [http://www.movieweb.com/news/exclusive-noel-clarke-talks-battling-monsters-in-storage-24]. "There's no windows, there are the same lights, and if you walk too far and try to find your way back, you find yourself looking down a corridor and going, 'Where is everyone?'"

The monster's look, at Clarke's suggestion, is based in part on Spider-Man foe Carnage [http://marvel.com/characters/bio/1009227/carnage]. "I was very happy with it. It was important to me that it wasn't some pig, that it was some humanoid thing," says Clarke.

If you're in the mood for low budget horror thrills, this one's on iTunes now [https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/storage-24/id581715255].

Source: Guardian [http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/10/noel-clarke-storage-24-lowest-grossing-us-film]

Update: the Guardian has since confirmed that the movie was shown for one day only, as part of a TV licensing deal.


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[008Zulu_v1legacy]

$72? How many people was that? Couldn't have been more than 5 or 6.

 

[josemlopes]

It got a bit more then that but its still close

 

[Exterminas]

Hey, profit is still profit! At least they got their names out and I am sure iTunes and other sources will add some more money to that.

 

[BrotherRool]

This sounds like film industry contract chicanery*. I wonder if it was a tax break on the DVD release or if theyd promised to distribute the film but didn't actually want to.

It made about $600 million elsewhere which is still a loss but a bit better than $72



*Is contract chicanery one of those rote phrases? Because I swear I didn't know what the word meant, yet for some reason I knew how to spell it and this is the correct context

 

[josemlopes]

Hey, profit is still profit! At least they got their names out and I am sure iTunes and other sources will add some more money to that.

I dont think that was profit, I think that is all it made in the US

 

[Angelous Wang]

It was shown in one cinema for one week.

I think that is key here, if Iron Man 3 was shown in only one cinema for one week (on regular schedule, not a special one to get half the world in) I don't think it would be pushing more the triple figures.

Just because of the amount of people who can view it is directly proportional to the profits.

 

[Quiotu]

This doesn't make any sense at all. How does a movie get released in ONE theater for a week?! Doesn't that seems a little odd to everyone else? It'd have made more money if it was i more theaters and people just went to see it by accident. That sounds a whole lot like some tax fraud BS there... no one in their right mind would bring it to the States and have it just be in ONE theater. They wouldn't bother unless they got something else out of it.

 

[gigastar]

This doesn't make any sense at all. How does a movie get released in ONE theater for a week?! Doesn't that seems a little odd to everyone else? It'd have made more money if it was i more theaters and people just went to see it by accident. That sounds a whole lot like some tax fraud BS there... no one in their right mind would bring it to the States and have it just be in ONE theater. They wouldn't bother unless they got something else out of it.

It was likely an independent cinema, im sure such things still exist somewhere.

 

[Quiotu]

Alright, the original article updated with more information. Apparently it was in one US theater for one day for the terms of a TV deal. And even given that... I have to wonder how pessimistic you are about your own movie that you wouldn't even give it a chance in the US. I mean if it only cost $2.6 million, what do you have to lose?

 

[Scarim Coral]

Mmm it sound like it's that Freeview film channel right for the taking!

 

[Trucken]

This doesn't make any sense at all. How does a movie get released in ONE theater for a week?! Doesn't that seems a little odd to everyone else? It'd have made more money if it was i more theaters and people just went to see it by accident. That sounds a whole lot like some tax fraud BS there... no one in their right mind would bring it to the States and have it just be in ONE theater. They wouldn't bother unless they got something else out of it.

It was likely an independent cinema, im such things still exist somewhere.

I think the 70mil is the global total, not the US total
but still that makes this film a mosnter success ironically. They spent 3 mill they got 70 mil back 20x the production cost... yeah, more failures lik that and they'll need a Scroog McDuck style Money Bin.

70 million bucks? Where did you find these numbers? The article says that it made 72 dollars in the US, not 72 million dollars.

 

[Falterfire]

For anybody curious, according to Box Office Mojo [http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=intl&id=storage24.htm] the movie made about $646,000 internationally. Much better than $72, but still a net loss.

 

[Karloff]

This doesn't make any sense at all. How does a movie get released in ONE theater for a week?! Doesn't that seems a little odd to everyone else? It'd have made more money if it was i more theaters and people just went to see it by accident. That sounds a whole lot like some tax fraud BS there... no one in their right mind would bring it to the States and have it just be in ONE theater. They wouldn't bother unless they got something else out of it.

It was likely an independent cinema, im such things still exist somewhere.

I think the 70mil is the global total, not the US total
but still that makes this film a mosnter success ironically. They spent 3 mill they got 70 mil back 20x the production cost... yeah, more failures lik that and they'll need a Scroog McDuck style Money Bin.

70 million bucks? Where did you find these numbers? The article says that it made 72 dollars in the US, not 72 million dollars.

No it doesn't.

It cost £1.6 million (c. $2.6 million) to make - pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of things - and earned just $72 all told.

72 Million, all told, as in no where in the article up top did it say it made 72 Mil in the US. it was the Lowest Grossing Film in the US of 2013. In the US it earned $646K thereabouts.

Um. You might want to read that again. Very carefully.

 

[Trucken]

This doesn't make any sense at all. How does a movie get released in ONE theater for a week?! Doesn't that seems a little odd to everyone else? It'd have made more money if it was i more theaters and people just went to see it by accident. That sounds a whole lot like some tax fraud BS there... no one in their right mind would bring it to the States and have it just be in ONE theater. They wouldn't bother unless they got something else out of it.

It was likely an independent cinema, im such things still exist somewhere.

I think the 70mil is the global total, not the US total
but still that makes this film a mosnter success ironically. They spent 3 mill they got 70 mil back 20x the production cost... yeah, more failures lik that and they'll need a Scroog McDuck style Money Bin.

70 million bucks? Where did you find these numbers? The article says that it made 72 dollars in the US, not 72 million dollars.

No it doesn't.

It cost £1.6 million (c. $2.6 million) to make - pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of things - and earned just $72 all told.

72 Million, all told, as in no where in the article up top did it say it made 72 Mil in the US. it was the Lowest Grossing Film in the US of 2013. In the US it earned $646K thereabouts.

$646K in the US? The article clearly states that it only made $72 in the US, where are you getting $646K? Nowhere in the article is Karloff saying that it made $646K in the US.

 

[Frezzato]

I remember seeing this on Netflix Instant. Unfortunately it's still on there. I'm glad there's confusion as to how much Storage 24 made in the US as the film itself is an abortion--err, an abomination.


No, let's stick with abortion.

 

[F'Angus]

I've seen this actually. It was on the Horror channel or SyFy. (UK).. It was fairly entertaining, I'd recommend it....It's basically a low budget version of Alien, just set in a Storage building in London.

 

[Lightspeaker]

It cost £1.6 million (c. $2.6 million) to make - pretty cheap, in the grand scheme of things - and earned just $72 all told.

72 Million, all told, as in no where in the article up top did it say it made 72 Mil in the US. it was the Lowest Grossing Film in the US of 2013. In the US it earned $646K thereabouts.

Re-read the article. Or click the Guardian link. It doesn't say "million" after $72. It made seventy two dollars. That is to say it made just under the cost of 16 MacDonald's Big Macs (going by the US 2013 Big Mac Index value; and yes, that is an actual thing).


From the Guardian article and from some quick googling: it made £225,000 in the UK when it was first released in Summer 2012. It was over a year old when it finally got shipped to the US from the UK and was shown on only one cinema for one day as part of a deal to immediately release it on DVD over there.

Worldwide it apparently grossed $646,175, meaning it made an overall loss of roughly a million dollars.