A Madea Halloween» The maek one made money, so Madea gets to be scared stupid all over again in a sequel so sluggish and haphazardly thrown together that it makes the first one seem like classic comedy by comparison. Madea spends most of the film sitting in a Cadillac and having her most florid swears awkwardly dubbed into softer versions. Madea tends to do a lot of sitting around in this one — a dramedy about infidelity and sudden death — mocking the stupidity of those around her or dispensing old-fashioned life advice. Missing is her trademark wildness, her willingness to ignore all social convention and sense of decency, replaced by sedentary — but often still quite funny — one-liners. Come back when you’re feeling it again, Madea. Blige showing up to knock the title song out of the park. Our heroine tumbles extravagantly down staircases, babbles incoherently, and twerks to a Tyga track. Claus outfit and laying waste to everyone who gets co the way of her Wonderful Life. Christmas crisis averted with antics, bringing much-needed chaos to a character whose energy seemed to be flagging. This time around she defies court-ordered anger management with Dr.
“We’re going to need a bigger boat”
Register with The Numbers for free to customize this chart. The market share is converted into a weekly sales estimate based on industry reports on the overall size of the market, including reports published in Media Play News. The consumer spending estimate is based on the average sales price for the title in the retailers we survey. We refine our estimates from week to week as more data becomes available. In particular, we adjust weekly sales figures for the quarter once the total market estimates are published by the Digital Entertainment Group. Figures will therefore fluctuate each week, and totals for individual titles can go up or down as we update our estimates. Because sales figures are estimated based on sampling, they will be more accurate for higher-selling titles. We enjoy all the ideas that have been flooding our inbox, and are pleased to announce a few more chart improvements based on user suggestions. The first update is that changes in theater count can now be seen on our weekend chart and weekly chart. Finally, our daily chart on the home page now clearly displays the weekly change in box office for all movies. Home Market Releases for June 4th, June 5th, It is a very busy week on the home market, but unfortunately, most of this is catalog titles coming out on Blu-ray or 4K for the first time. In the end, I went with The Venture Bros.
What’s the average cost of making and selling a Hollywood blockbuster?
It is already ahead of the lifetime domestic totals of eight previous installments in the MCU and it will quickly rise into the top ten. Yesterday, I said the film could be in the top ten for the MCU. In fact, given its holds this weekend, it has a pathway to enter the top five. Meanwhile, outside of China, the film held on even better than it did domestically. We will have more details on the international numbers later in the week. March 15th,
A Madea Halloween was the No. I recently had a white friend from Texas tell me that she and her family adore Madea and her antics. Hell, that brilliant Black Jeopardy! Madea is a character in every sense of the word: an uncouth, uninhibited, smack-talking heathen of a woman with a foul mouth, a bad attitude, a never-ending arsenal of weapons and an impressive rap sheet. She’s a lovable fool, reminding audiences of their own crazy relatives. It all turns into a ghetto-fied version of a Marx Brothers movie, with Madea, Bam and Hattie Mae continually shaking in their stockings as Tiffany and other young pissants try to spook them. But since this is a Madea movie, you can expect our heroine to occasionally retaliate by socking upside the head whatever freakish creature dares come face-to-face with her upside the head. Since this is still a Tyler Perry production, a heartwarming message about the importance of family — or something like that — gets slipped in near the end. Perry’s Madea comedies are certainly easier to take than his melodramas, which tend to focus on a conflicted black lady either losing her way, getting her heart broken by a dark-skinned dude and immediately getting her groove back with the help of a light-skinned dude or — in the case of the memorably extreme Temptation — getting AIDS from a Lucifer-type brotha.
Tastes change, audiences move on, but Madea seems to have retained her hold on a devoted fanbase. Popular on Variety. But now that Perry announced his plans to retire Madea, that relationship might look a little different. The rights for Madea still belong to Lionsgate, and the studio can hypothetically decide to churn out more installments. Likewise, Perry can still make movies with Lionsgate if he chooses. Perry has been a reliable moneymaker for the studio by doing what Hollywood has been slow to follow suit on — the mogul has cultivated a billion-dollar empire on movies that put the spotlight on diverse characters. Perry also challenged studios to promote movies more efficiently at at a time when marketing costs can balloon to tens of millions of dollars. It was a precursor to what today would be an effective social media campaign. Lionsgate has been struggling in recent years, releasing one flop after another. The film, [
If they’re given an incentive to shoot a film in Canada or Louisiana or Georgia, producers will usually hustle to do so. Dear Stephen, thank you very much for this excellent read — for the care and detail of your analysis. Thanks Reply. And this seems to be continuing into For a long time, the R rating was seen as the kiss of death but movies such as The Passion of the Christ, American Sniper and Deadpool have shown that it is possible to draw a sizeable crowd to an R rated movie. Company Profiles. The old joke in Hollywood is that the studios charge overhead on interest and interest on overhead and if you find that funny you really are down the rabbit hole of Hollywood economics! Does this sort of thing effect the overall profitability of movies or just some areas like merchandising. Thanks again for your superb analysis. If a movie under performs at the theater box office but has strong streaming, home video sales, etc, would that potentially turn allow the studio to turn a profit even though the box office under performed?
Doug Cowles July 13, at am. Alex August noney, at am. And yes, sometimes theatrical income can be less than the cost of the release. I struggle to imagine a movie tripling production costs at the global box office and still losing money… Reply. The information available online is normally a mix of true figures which have leaked and educated guesses by industry fo. E Thank you — from all of us — for collating, curating, studying, analyzing and sharing these numbers. Judging the correct number of prints and units to manufacture is a key part of the planning done by the studios.
This is an article I have wanted to research and write for a long, long time. I finally had a moment to sit down and crunch the numbers — I hope it helps in the understanding of Hollywood economics. Almost as long as there have been movies, Hollywood has relied on huge-scale productions to bring in the big bucks. The Extra-Terrestrial As the films have grown, so too have the spoils on offer.
The starting point for working out the final costs of releasing a movie is to look at how much it cost the studio to shoot the film i. This includes…. Budgets have been rising in recent decades, well above inflation. In the following ten years this rose to The information available online is normally a mix of true figures which have leaked and educated guesses by industry experts. The studios often try to hide the true cost of a movie, in order to make themselves seem thriftier, smarter or more in control than they actually are.
I performed a quick check for the 29 blockbusters I have inside data on compared with their budgets listed on Wikipedia. Some of the other costs involved in making and releasing a film include…. To give you a little more detail and context, below are some notes on each of the main cost areas….
Judging the correct number of prints and units to manufacture is a key part of the planning done by the studios. If they order too few then cinemas and stores will have to turn away customers in the all-important first few weeks of release. If they over-order then their costs increase and they are left with annoyed cinema owners and large quantities of unsold units. Giving these people a share of the income is a good way for the studio to hedge against poor box office performance and it also defers the moment they have to pay up.
On the flipside, studios have got rather good at using creative accounting techniques to show that they made a loss on paper in order to get out of paying such fees. Fortunately, Hollywood is rather good at squeezing every penny out of a movie, ensuring that the target customer is given many chances to pay to see it. Movies may start in cinemas but they are far from the only place they earn money. Each stage at which a movie reaches a new type of platform i. Of the 29 Hollywood blockbuster movies I studied, 14 generated a profit and 15 lost money.
Note: The following discussion of profit uses this formula: all revenue received by the studios from a particular movie minus all costs they internally attribute to that production. The smallest movies within my dataset i. Would you have made a smart investment? And I am sure this is a fairly low return for that kind of cash. The only problem is — how do you spot the hits?
Hollywood currently employs the smartest, best informed and most profit-focused people in an effort to exclusively make profitable movies and yet half of their movies lose money. In fact, their combined best efforts only produce a 3. Yes, but only by a very small margin. The average Metacritic score i. Similarly, IMDb audiences rated the profitable films an average of 6.
However, we can say that, yes, movies with the biggest marketing budgets do seem to gross the highest amounts at the box office. Added to this, studios are less likely to make missteps on their home turf as they can be on-hand to scrutinise everything to a greater extent. Well, it depends on which part of the process you look at.
Below you can see the origin of revenue and costs for the blockbusters in my dataset. As you can see, the majority of the money collected at the box office does indeed come from countries outside of the US and Canada. However, studios spend a higher proportion of their marketing money in North America. This could be for a number of reasons including the higher cost of advertising in America, the temptation to spend more in the country which studio execs actually live in and because the US is often the first place a movie is released and the media enjoy reporting on huge opening weekends and decrying massive flops.
Together, they mean that only 12 of my 29 movies made money at the domestic box office, whereas 20 made money at the international box office. Alongside this, the losses at the domestic theatrical market were much worse than internationally.
So Hollywood looks to the international market with glee because…. Q4: Is there a rule of thumb for guessing which Hollywood blockbusters are in profit? They reached this conclusion by studying the full financial records of the movies they were involved with and also checking their hypothesis with independent professional film financiers. Using this rule, I was able to correctly identify all of the profit-making films and correctly identify ten as loss-making, however, this system incorrectly marked five loss-making movies as being profitable.
Not as reliable as one might have liked and way below the accuracy the BFI found when the rule is applied to smaller films but certainly interesting. So there you have it — a rather long sorry! The biggest question some readers may have at this stage is — how did he get this data?
I was also helped by a few well-placed friends in the industry who were able to fill in the blanks and confirm the veracity of some of the data points.
I am completely confident that the information in this article is a true representation of how these Hollywood blockbusters make money. The purpose of this site is educational and my sole intention is to help explain how our industry works. In the past, I have been contacted by lawyers for various companies, trying to prevent the sharing of key data points relating to their business. So far, I have managed to avoid lawsuits and also to avoid having to take any articles down, but if I were to offer the full figures as a download or details of how to do the same piecing together I have then I suspect I would get the wrong kind of attention.
So, if you want to know any more about these movies, please add your question in the comments. Very informative and great info as. Thank you, Stephen for some scintillating reading.
When is someone offering you a book deal? Great work Stephen — thank you. And related to this can you demystify the roles, contributions and compensation for these various kinds of producers? Very helpful. Re the query on books sinceour volumes Global Hollywood and Global Hollywood 2 are more recent than the one. They are also available in Chinese, Turkish, and Spanish. Stephen, please, please put all of this marvellous stuff in a book.
Thank you for this amazing work! Can you clarify here? Thanks. Marketing and avertsing are not included, save maybe for the on-set photographer and a publicist who shows journalists around the set. This is particularly important for things like tax incentives, which almost never include publicity and distribution costs when calculating how big the budget is.
Both have a reasonable claim to be correct. The budget is a real document created in pre-production which covers the cost of physically making the film. Before internet streaming as we know it now, Pay Per View PPV was commonplace, in hotel rooms and on encrypted satellite and cable channels. As VOD has grown up, the newer services have become their own new window but the old way of accounting for the older services were retained.
So strictly, the idea of digital delivery of video on demand to the viewer appears within three windows! Just two questions about the average costs graph: 1.
Instead of being included in costs? The opacity occurs for a number of reasons but most are to do with hiding embarrassing or unattractive practices, because they can and because there is no benefit from being open. Wow Stephen. Scary stuff. I want to break down the costs and show how they differ between products. Thank you Steve for your informative article. The research that went into it must have been enormous as it covered so much of the movie business including distribution.
I was really interested in the DVD sales figures and the overseas theatrical markets as the advertising would be. Thank you for your info!!! Michael L Edwards. Can you say the swing on that? Stephen, thank you for your informative detailed article. This is the sort of thing the internet would ideally be used for, instead of widespread trolling. Keep up the good work. Thank you for the information and the analysis you have performed.
The real numbers are never released, nor should. Nobody in the industry pays those numbers. At the end of the day, the important numbers and analyses come from what the windows revenue figures are and their relationships.
As for profits… do magicians reveal their tricks? Hey Adrian. Glad you found it useful. This allowed me to compare the true cost to that of the public figure in this case from Wikipedia. Hi Stephen, thanks for the excellent analysis. Do you have any data to support or contradict these numbers?
Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion
By Anthony D’Alessandro. Hidden World is also the No. My colleague, Nancy Tartaglione, will have more on.
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This is a fantastic result for the series to end on. Lionsgate always seems to find themselves in a position where tracking pegs a Madea pic at a certain level, and then the movie over-performs. Older women continued to fuel business yesterday between the matinee and prime time shows. The Boos did business late at night because of their younger-skewing demos due to the social media stars in the film. Lionsgate opened the pic to No. Buzz Aldrin came out to a screening on Thursday night at the Mann Chinese. The pic expands into top markets next weekend before busting wide on March Given the older-skewing fandom surrounding the movie, Sony should keep it alive theatrically with midnight shows. Warner Bros. This contingent is certainly excited to see the movie in theaters, as they consistently have with Perry films over the years. But, plenty of naysayers claim they thought Madea was dead .
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