If it's losing money it's being subsidized by *someone*. The question is whether that someone cares about losing money and how likely they are to run out of money
Most of the big movies make money for the movie industry. The studios' notorious accounting practices mean there's generally a pretty small bottom-line number for the film as a whole, but that's after most investors have already taken their profit.
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These are the investors I refer to. They are inured to risk by utopian dreams and thick cushions of old money. In the absence of consistent profits, their preferences drive the industry, not the market. If investor money ever dries up, the industry will fold overnight.
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The investors I'm talking about are the big 6 studios themselves, who take their profits partly in their other divisions, via internal accounting for promotion and distribution
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The rule of thumb I heard is a movie needs to gross something like 2.5 x production costs to make money. If you look at that list of the most expensive productions, 80% make money, and as many make big money as lose.
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Don't forget to factor in the dates. The industry was quite different in 2000-2014 as opposed to now. Not many big blockbusters since then, and lots of red ink.
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Looks like a couple of movies a year lose over 50M, and more than that make 50M. I mentioned my impression they're scaling up the successful franchises more effectively now, but I can't see that (yet) in the data. "Biggest losers" bottom of https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/
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What is different is the low budget end. People working for peanuts or investing in losers hoping to make the jump to the big time. Standard tournament economics. Plenty of vanity projects in there too.
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This site has some stats https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all …
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Good data. Too bad it isn't available as a flat file. I'm quite curious about the trendlines.
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Yes, the industry is not at all transparent, but I think it's more likely that it's concealing profits than concealing losses. The wikipedia for Justice League chimes with my rule of thumb (300M budget, 658M worldwide gross, 60M estimated loss) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justice_League_(film)#Box_office …
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