playing with numbers

baseline studiosystems is a provider of film and television data. although their regular services are expensive and designed for studios, they have a free newsletter you can subscribe to which contains interesting information about the film industry. i've been a subscriber since last year and one featurette of the newletter is the weekly comps, where a comparison is made between three films sharing a general characteristic, be it all having music video directors or set around weddings.

i've put together a spreadsheet (links to downloadable excel file) with the numbers i've collected so far (numbers are in millions):

(click for pic of entire spreadsheet)

the newsletter gives the release date, max screens, budget, p&a, us gross, international gross and us video numbers. my spreadsheet then calculates amount spent on p&a as a percentage of the budget, cost (budget + p&a), revenue (us/intl gross + us video), and net (revenue - cost).

there's nothing scientific about this. their criteria for picking films and the small sample size effectively eliminate any real relationship analysis and obviously there are other hidden costs and revenues, but it's still fun. they have access to p&a and us video numbers which makes tracking the profitability of the films more accurate than simply looking at the theatrical numbers on boxofficemojo or imdb. still the overall totals are interesting:

total films tracked: 27
total profitable films: 17
percentage of profitable films: 63%
total revenue all films: $2.66 billion
total cost all films (includes p&a): $1.18 billion
total profit all films: $1.48 billion
total percentage profit: 125%
total us theatrical revenue: $979.5 million or 37% of total revenue
total intl theatrical revenue: $779.11 or 29% of total revenue
total us video revenue: $899.3 million or 34% of total revenue

what's amazing is how much is spent on p&a. of the $698 million spent on production budgets, almost 70% again was spent on marketing ($482 million). some films spent more advertising the film than they did making it.

note: you'll notice red squares next to 'zodiac'. this is because the numbers given in the latest newsletter for it were wrong. they gave the numbers for the very much lower-budgeted 'the zodiac,' which was not directed by a former music video director (david fincher directed 'zodiac'). i supplemented this with the boxofficemojo figures for 'zodiac' and i'm hoping ryan williams will update his numbers so i can include the p&a and us video numbers. there's a good chance that once those factor in 'zodiac' will either have broken even or lost money.