Was King Kong a relative Box Office flop?

[cjchaps]

Originally posted by: MmmSkyscraper
Box Office Mojo is a good site for checking out film statistics, including production costs and ticket sales.

Here is what that site says about waterworld:

production costs: 175,000,000

Domestic: $88,246,220 33.4%
+ Overseas: $175,972,000 66.6%
= Worldwide: $264,218,220

So it looks like it actually made money worldwide????????

 

[mooglekit]

Others beat me to the punch on the Waterworld comment, but yeah, it turned a profit in the end

 

[BD2003]

I always thought it was wyatt earp?

 

[pookguy88]

Waterworld wasn't that bad.. I enjoyed it. Of course it helped that I came into it with horrid expectations

 

[LanceM]

Originally posted by: crownjules

Originally posted by: Marlin1975

Originally posted by: kamranziadar
No it is not a Flop the only reason it did not opened near $100 million mark or so was the length of the Movie.
Last week it topped the $200 Million mark, and that much it cost them to make it, so what ever earnings after that is their profit.

Wow, I hope you never go into business. You think the movie as a WHOLE was only 200mill? That was JUST production. Now take into account that 200mill is BEFORE the box, stars, directors, etc... get their cut. Then subtract all teh promotion money. And you can see it is far from profit level. It will take many DVDs to break even after all is said and done.

Do you have proof to support this comment? When I hear XXX movie had a $207 million dollar budget, I would assume that includes a lot of the promotion already. I would think that only a few of the bigger actors in the movie get some sort of small percentage of the profits, but the majority are paid up front and accounted for in the budget.

At the very least, I would think that budget remarks like this already take into account any future costs.

This is very often true. Not always, but often.

Like others have said: it's difficult to know the real costs, since studios hide so much.

 

[Kenazo]

Originally posted by: PlatinumGold
i was wrong.

after googling it, it seems that Eddie Murphy's Pluto Nash was the biggest flop of all time.


http://entertainment.msn.com/news/article.aspx?news=131054

Though according to wiki:

The Adventures of Pluto Nash is a 2002 comedy film directed by Ron Underwood and starring Eddie Murphy as the owner of a lunar nightclub investigating who was behind the arson that destroyed his club.

The film was a tremendous flop: the film's budget was estimated at $100 million, the marketing cost was $20 million and the domestic box office (of which the studio typically receives about 50%) was $4,420,080 (U.S.) and $2,683,893 (overseas) for a total worldwide gross of $7,103,973.

It had its origins back in the mid 1980s. The script went through numerous revisions and upon completion of filming, the film sat on the shelf for two years, finally released in August 2002. The majority of critics lambasted the movie for the awful acting, terrible dialogue and lack of humor. It was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Picture. Murphy himself seemed to sense how bad Pluto Nash actually was, for he did nothing to promote the film upon its release.

As of 2005 this is the third-largest financial loss of any film ever made (after Treasure Planet & Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within), both in absolute dollar values, and adjusted for inflation.

source

 

[prontospyder]

not a flop (about $500 Million worldwide so far) but I expected it to earn more.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Originally posted by: Marlin1975

Originally posted by: kamranziadar
No it is not a Flop the only reason it did not opened near $100 million mark or so was the length of the Movie.
Last week it topped the $200 Million mark, and that much it cost them to make it, so what ever earnings after that is their profit.

Wow, I hope you never go into business. You think the movie as a WHOLE was only 200mill? That was JUST production. Now take into account that 200mill is BEFORE the box, stars, directors, etc... get their cut. Then subtract all teh promotion money. And you can see it is far from profit level. It will take many DVDs to break even after all is said and done.

Wrong-o. There are two parts to a budget, "above the line" costs which are the salaries for the actors, director, writers, cost of the rights to the script, etc. The "below the line" costs are the actual production costs, crew, cameras, sets, props, costumes, etc. When discussing a film's budget in the context "The budget for King Kong was $200 million" that generally includes both the above the line and below the line figures.

The domestic gross for a movie is no longer a good barometer of a films success. With international box office and DVD sales a movie can tank at the US box office and still make money. The key is that a studio can only make 'X' movies per year. They only have the resources to commit to a given number of projects. A movie that makes a small profit is still a flop because those resources could have been devoted to a movie that would have returned a bigger profit. Making 10 $20 million dollar movies that each make a profit of $10 million dollars is far better than making one $200 million dollar movie that makes a $50 million dollar profit. King Kong is not going to be a flop, with overseas gross and DVD sales it's going to make a lot of money. But it's still going to be a MAJOR disappointment for the studio. They commited a lot of energy and resources to a hot director and won't wind up getting anywhere near the return they had hoped for. They probably would have and could have made more profit by spending the KK budget on a bunch of smaller projects.

 

[SilentZero]

Yes