So, I was watching Serenity the other day...
And I started wondering what kind of bank it actually made... It had an ok opening weekend, but it had a standard sales decline(in case anybody was wondering, the decline seems actually to be fairly uniform of dropping by one half every weekend. This means that a film will end up making approximately double what it makes in your opening weekend. Factor in non-US sales, and you get your gross) and a short run resulting in it almost making back its investment through the theatrical run. Sounds like it did pretty good in DVD sales though. Anyway, this depressing news made me wonder, so I decided to check up on some other films to get a comparison: Underworld, which was strong enough to warant a sequel, made back it's initial investment on opening weekend, and had about three times the run time resulting in slightly more than double the investment made back. Van helsing, which had a 160 million dollar price tag made 50 mil it's opening weekend, and had a decent length run, so it made 120 mil in america... 300 mil overall. In fact, it was the most successful movie that I examined(aside from one series that I'll get into later). This did not leave me feeling warm and fuzzy inside. Further investigation revealed that Serenity was cut from theaters earlier, had drastically poorer international sales, and apparently was shown in less countries. Van Helsing, on the other hand, had tremendous overseas sales... in fact, the majority of it's sales were overseas. Sooooo... Shit! It seems to really come down to how much the distribution company puts into it. Or maybe it really wasn't a popular enough movie(but... van helsing?!?)
Anyway, the other thing I noticed that amazed me was that in america alone we spent over 1 BILLION dollars watching the original Star Wars in theaters. Another billion watching the prequels, and a half billion over all to make the movies. Let's round this out to THREE FREAKIN BILLION DOLLARS ON STAR WARS IN THEATERS! Just imagine all of the money we could have saved if we'd simply allowed lucas to make those movies at no cost in exchange for free viewing... I know, I know Recirculation and what not. Anyway, just interested me.
I was going to say something about the national debt in relation to the star wars box offices... but I'd missed a comma... The national debt is an amount that is completely unfathomable to me in any real sense.(psst, almost 9 trillion) I'd known that numbers that large exist, it just never occured to me that I would see one in non-math-geek society. It's so big that I actually had to turn my head to read it on my computer!
Anyway, in short, Serenity=not big money, Van helsing, against all reason or logic=decent money, and star wars equals massive money, national debt=HOLY FUCK MY BRAINS!
-J
P.S. it occured to me that star wars is comparable to the speed of light... if every 6 dollars spent on star wars were spent instead for everybody to push everybody else one meter per second forward... that last person would be going the speed of light! Also... if for 9 hours, we could tax light one dollar per kilometer... we'd be able to pay off our national debt! I should run for president with my light taxation reform policy... I'd vote for me, just because it's the ballsiest policy I've ever heard of!
ETA: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that older movies had a noticably different sales decline... although I was looking at some pretty big cult movies, the sales decline ended up being about 75% per weekend, as opposed to 50%. That is to say that for every 4 sales one weekend there used to be 3 sales, where now there are 2. Of course, these aren't neccesarily regular. I didn't really look at any non-sci fi genres, since I was trying to analyze serenity's reception. Titanic, in contrast had a dramatically slow sales drop. Of course, titanic was playing on nearly or over 3000 screens every weekend from january to may. Everything else was cut from screens after opening weekend. Titanics opening was only 7 mil better than serenity, and it cost more than any other movie to make. The english patient actually grew in sales for the first 2 months before STABALIZING for 4 months at 3 million and then hitting approximately regular sales decline. Very interesting(and incidentaly, not at all how titanic fared. It actually declined constantly, but slower than normal. Hm, there's a rule it seems that when a movie fares less than 100 thousand for a weekend it is dropped from theaters, since every time a movie stops reporting grosses it's just reported less than 100 thousand)
Anyway, the other thing I noticed that amazed me was that in america alone we spent over 1 BILLION dollars watching the original Star Wars in theaters. Another billion watching the prequels, and a half billion over all to make the movies. Let's round this out to THREE FREAKIN BILLION DOLLARS ON STAR WARS IN THEATERS! Just imagine all of the money we could have saved if we'd simply allowed lucas to make those movies at no cost in exchange for free viewing... I know, I know Recirculation and what not. Anyway, just interested me.
I was going to say something about the national debt in relation to the star wars box offices... but I'd missed a comma... The national debt is an amount that is completely unfathomable to me in any real sense.(psst, almost 9 trillion) I'd known that numbers that large exist, it just never occured to me that I would see one in non-math-geek society. It's so big that I actually had to turn my head to read it on my computer!
Anyway, in short, Serenity=not big money, Van helsing, against all reason or logic=decent money, and star wars equals massive money, national debt=HOLY FUCK MY BRAINS!
-J
P.S. it occured to me that star wars is comparable to the speed of light... if every 6 dollars spent on star wars were spent instead for everybody to push everybody else one meter per second forward... that last person would be going the speed of light! Also... if for 9 hours, we could tax light one dollar per kilometer... we'd be able to pay off our national debt! I should run for president with my light taxation reform policy... I'd vote for me, just because it's the ballsiest policy I've ever heard of!
ETA: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that older movies had a noticably different sales decline... although I was looking at some pretty big cult movies, the sales decline ended up being about 75% per weekend, as opposed to 50%. That is to say that for every 4 sales one weekend there used to be 3 sales, where now there are 2. Of course, these aren't neccesarily regular. I didn't really look at any non-sci fi genres, since I was trying to analyze serenity's reception. Titanic, in contrast had a dramatically slow sales drop. Of course, titanic was playing on nearly or over 3000 screens every weekend from january to may. Everything else was cut from screens after opening weekend. Titanics opening was only 7 mil better than serenity, and it cost more than any other movie to make. The english patient actually grew in sales for the first 2 months before STABALIZING for 4 months at 3 million and then hitting approximately regular sales decline. Very interesting(and incidentaly, not at all how titanic fared. It actually declined constantly, but slower than normal. Hm, there's a rule it seems that when a movie fares less than 100 thousand for a weekend it is dropped from theaters, since every time a movie stops reporting grosses it's just reported less than 100 thousand)