BIRDS OF PREY starring Margot Robbie (2020?) 1 1

[Bosco685]

24 minutes ago, Gatsby77 said:

Spoiler

 

You're not wrong.

The reason *every* expert uses a 2.5-3.0x production budget multiplier to worldwide theatrical gross ratio to estimate "break-even" is the other lines basically cancel each other out.

 

Experts don't care about "P&A" expense because - with the exception of extremely low-budget or high-budget films, they're more than off-set by post-theatrical revenue.

Spoiler

 

Low-budget exceptions: Blumhouse horror movies.

The film itself may only cost $5-$10 million to produce, but the studio typically spends $25-$30 million on advertising. So theatrical break-even is usually $50-$60 million worldwide, as much as 10x "production cost."

Note: 2017's "Get Out" is an even more egregious example of this, as Deadline's end-of-year chart shows it cost just $4.5 million to produce, but P&A came in at $77 million. But in this case, they ramped up the advertising after it was already a monster $90 million domestic hit, and it ultimately grossed more than $175 million worldwide.

Here too, while the global gross revenue was $255 million, the estimated net studio profit from post-theatrical alone was $126 milliion, more than the entire estimated production cost, P&A, profit sharing, etc.

In other words, per Deadline's analysis, Get Out would have been barely profitable *from post theatrical studio profits* alone, and the studio's net take from the theatrical release was pure profit.

High-budget exceptions: The new Star Wars films.

They may cost $200-$250 million to produce, but Disney will then spend as much as $150-$250 million *more* on advertising. Which is highly unusal, and throws theatrical break-even out-of-wack in the opposite direction, to like $850-$900 million worldwide.

On the flipside, Disney has *far* more long-term revenue coming in from licensing of Star Wars films that make over-spending on the films themselves worth it. These include widely popular merchandise (including video games) and theme parks like Galaxy's End.

They're also dealing with brand protection. The Force Awakens is reportedly the most expensive film of the new trilogy. This makes sense because:

a) It had a longer development lead-time, and they developed a new set of characters, etc. from scratch.

b) Much more than just the film itself was at stake -- the viability of another half-dozen (or more) films in the franchise were riding on Episode VII. It had to be a grand slam.

 

Birds of Prey: In this particular case, Birds of Prey has an estimated theatrical break-even of $230 - $250 million.

Which means it had a presumed $84.5 million production budget (actually $97 million before tax incentives).

And $35-$50 million in P&A expenses. Let's be generous and say $75-$85 million in P&A (doubtful).

Then true estimated "break-even" is ultimate revenue of $300-$325 million.

But that only requires $230-$250 million from theatrical, the other $80-$100 million will come from post-theatrical -- the credit line items JayDog conveniently ignores in his ongoing jihad.

 

 

For years I have been noting 2.5X or better to account for revenue shared and marketing cost. Though it is more guaranteed the closer you get to 2.8X-3.0X.

Though with rare big-budget cases like The Last Jedi where Disney forced lower theater revenue shares depending on how soon the film was pulled.

Disney has an impressive list of demands for theaters who want to show 'The Last Jedi'

Quote

The contract to run the latest Star Wars film, which lands everywhere in just six weeks, also ups Disney's take to 70 percent if the theater puts a foot wrong on a number of counts, according to a Wall Street Journal report. U.S. theater owners are required to run the movie for four weeks without skipping a single screening if they want to avoid that penalty. They also have to run specific marketing promotions for the film exactly when Disney wants, and not a day early.

 

It's an unusual clause, both in its duration (two weeks is more common for hit Disney movies) and its level of punishment — 5 percent of the Last Jedi gross could make the difference between profit and loss for many theaters.  

 

[Gatsby77]

6 minutes ago, Bosco685 said:

For years I have been noting 2.5X or better to account for revenue shared and marketing cost. Though it is more guaranteed the closer you get to 2.8X-3.0X.

Though with rare big-budget cases like The Last Jedi where Disney forced lower theater revenue shares depending on how soon the film was pulled.

We're in agreement here (as is the *entire* film analyst industry).

But you bring up another nuance that most folks may not understand.

Even outside of Disney's autocratic demands re. the Star Wars films, domestic studio revenue is always on a sliding scale. Typically, studios get 60-65% of the first two weeks' theatrical revenue, then just 35-40% thereafter (weeks 3-20).

But since films make the majority of their revenue in the first two weeks overall, the studio take averages out to about 50-60% a film's overall domestic gross.

Theaters usually run movies at break-even or a slight loss, with *all* of their profit coming from concession sales.

[Bosco685]

26 minutes ago, Gatsby77 said:

We're in agreement here (as is the *entire* film analyst industry).

But you bring up another nuance that most folks may not understand.

Even outside of Disney's autocratic demands re. the Star Wars films, domestic studio revenue is always on a sliding scale. Typically, studios get 60-65% of the first two weeks' theatrical revenue, then just 35-40% thereafter (weeks 3-20).

But since films make the majority of their revenue in the first two weeks overall, the studio take averages out to about 50-60% a film's overall domestic gross.

Theaters usually run movies at break-even or a slight loss, with *all* of their profit coming from concession sales.

I had read a paper on this a few years back.

Movie Theaters: how do they make their money? What does that imply about movie distributor contracts with theaters?

Quote

On the contrary to popular conception, the movie theaters themselves rarely make any money of the tickets of the movies that they are showing inside the theater.  So how do theaters make their money?  Concession Margins.  Most of the theaters’ money comes from concessions.  Theaters can stay in business because the profit margins on drinks and food is so high.  Fountain drinks cost pennies to make, including the cup/lid/straw, so profit ratio is massive.  Popcorn is likewise really cheap, and they also charge a huge markup for it.  Their fixed costs with employees also leads to zero marginal costs for movie theaters in regards to selling concessions.  As Time magazine puts it in 2009, “Movie Theaters make 85% profit at concession stands”.

 

Looking at the price discrimination graph below, Movie theaters markups in their concessions are reflective of second degree price discrimination, meaning that the theaters charge a different price for different quantities.  This applies for movie ticket sales/food quantity.  Price discrimination is the action of selling the same product at different prices to different buyers, in order to maximize sales and profits.   The tickets are a form of price discrimination as well for their are different ticket prices for certain age demographics.

 

For example, I pay $10 to go see La La Land at my local theater in their opening week, in which the the first week or two of the showing the theatre itself gets to keep only 20-25% of that $10 per unit.  As the theater moves into the third and fourth weeks of release, the percentage starts to swing anywhere from 45%-55% that the theater gets to keep.  Usually towards the end of the movies lease, the audience number starts to really decrease and the higher percentage allocation towards theater at that time means really little.  More often than not, the theaters itself are willing to lose money in the first week or two of a popular movie opening (giving distributors higher percentages) so they can generate higher volume in  people going to the concession stands, where the margins are high and they keep 100% of the profits.

 

[Jaydogrules]

4 hours ago, zhamlau said:

I was just figuring a lot of those debits and credits were cancelling out. Otherwise box office numbers are meaningless right? Cause we could never know all the details behind the scene so we couldn’t really know if a film made money.

This is pretty much accurate.  

There are a couple of guys who think they are impressing people with their vast box office knowledge by over complicating something that can in fact be reasonably ball parked quite easily with this basic formula:

Domestic box office to studio- 50%

Foreign box office to studio-  40%

China box office to studio-  25%

Do you need to know all the other ancillaries, off the tops, video/TV aftermarket deals etc to really know how much a movie has made or lost ?

NO.

Case in point, Halloween (2018).

Let's only apply the above percentages to the box office numbers reported by Deadline to the actual net profit attributed to the movie, and ignore everything else, and see how close we get:

Domestic-  $159MM × 50%= $79.5MM

Foreign-  $94MM × 40%= $37.6MM

China-  $16MM × 25% ÷ $4MM

For a total approximate net to studio profit of $121.1MM.

Now let's look at the "Studio Net Profit" line on Deadline's chart.  There, we see that Deadline calculates a profit of $128.5MM.

Which is just a few million off from our shorthand calculation, essentially ignoring all the other fluff, that, as it turns out, do indeed generally cancel each other out.  

This is indeed the simplest, easiest way for a layman to figure how much a movie has/will make or lose a studio money.  

(Now get ready for someone to pretend I claimed that this is authoritative and not a thumbnail for a layman, and scour the internet trying to find an outlier example where this quick formula might be off by more than 15-20% to show us how smart they are .)

-J.

Edited March 7, 2020 by Jaydogrules

[paperheart]

1 hour ago, Jaydogrules said:

This is pretty much accurate.  

There are a couple of guys who think they are impressing people with their vast box office knowledge by over complicating something that can in fact be reasonably ball parked quite easily with this basic formula:

Domestic box office to studio- 50%

Foreign box office to studio-  40%

China box office to studio-  25%

Do you need to know all the other ancillaries, off the tops, video/TV aftermarket deals etc to really know how much a movie has made or lost ?

NO.

Case in point, Halloween (2018).

Let's only apply the above percentages to the box office numbers reported by Deadline to the actual net profit attributed to the movie, and ignore everything else, and see how close we get:

Domestic-  $159MM × 50%= $79.5MM

Foreign-  $94MM × 40%= $37.6MM

China-  $16MM × 25% ÷ $4MM

For a total approximate net to studio profit of $121.1MM.

Now let's look at the "Studio Net Profit" line on Deadline's chart.  There, we see that Deadline calculates a profit of $128.5MM.

Which is just a few million off from our shorthand calculation, essentially ignoring all the other fluff, that, as it turns out, do indeed generally cancel each other out.  

This is indeed the simplest, easiest way for a layman to figure how much a movie has/will make or lose a studio money.  

(Now get ready for someone to pretend I claimed that this is authoritative and not a thumbnail for a layman, and scour the internet trying to find an outlier example where this quick formula might be off by more than 15-20% to show us how smart they are .)

-J.

you forgot to deduct production cost.  if you only take revenue and no expenses, it's going to be hard to show any film lost $.  (if i'm not missing something in your post)

[Jaydogrules]

15 minutes ago, paperheart said:

you forgot to deduct production cost.  if you only take revenue and no expenses, it's going to be hard to show any film lost $.  (if i'm not missing something in your post)

You're right.

I'm going to look at it again when I get another minute.  

-J.

[Bosco685]

1 hour ago, Jaydogrules said:

Spoiler

This is pretty much accurate.  

There are a couple of guys who think they are impressing people with their vast box office knowledge by over complicating something that can in fact be reasonably ball parked quite easily with this basic formula:

Spoiler

 

Domestic box office to studio- 50%

Foreign box office to studio-  40%

China box office to studio-  25%

Do you need to know all the other ancillaries, off the tops, video/TV aftermarket deals etc to really know how much a movie has made or lost ?

NO.

Case in point, Halloween (2018).

Let's only apply the above percentages to the box office numbers reported by Deadline to the actual net profit attributed to the movie, and ignore everything else, and see how close we get:

Domestic-  $159MM × 50%= $79.5MM

Foreign-  $94MM × 40%= $37.6MM

China-  $16MM × 25% ÷ $4MM

For a total approximate net to studio profit of $121.1MM.

Now let's look at the "Studio Net Profit" line on Deadline's chart.  There, we see that Deadline calculates a profit of $128.5MM.

Which is just a few million off from our shorthand calculation, essentially ignoring all the other fluff, that, as it turns out, do indeed generally cancel each other out.  

This is indeed the simplest, easiest way for a layman to figure how much a movie has/will make or lose a studio money.  

(Now get ready for someone to pretend I claimed that this is authoritative and not a thumbnail for a layman, and scour the internet trying to find an outlier example where this quick formula might be off by more than 15-20% to show us how smart they are .)

-J.

 

 

But isn't this the persona you projected when trolling the Wonder Woman, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse and Shazam threads? That you know better than everyone else how studios determine hits.

You predicted Spider-Man: Homecoming was going to make more money than Wonder Woman with profits.

You predicted Spider-Man: Into The SpiderVerse bombed so hard, we would never see a sequel.

That Shazam bombed so hard, we would never see a sequel nor a Black Adam spin-off.

And then, that Joker would be a flop as only male anti-socials would go see this domestically.

So don't you make your own bed with these situations when you purposely serve up such negativity leading to an incorrect premise?

[Gatsby77]

19 hours ago, Jaydogrules said:

 

Oh, Hey Kids!  Look!

Halloween is a *perfect* example that illustrates why P&A costs don't matter in back-of-the-hand theatrical profitability calculations!

Notice that the revenue from "Worldwide Home Entertainment" ($32 million) and "Global TV Net ($87 million) sum to $119 milliion.

Meanwhile, the total non-production expenses -- Worldwide P&A ($75.5 million), Video Costs ($11 million), Participations ($12 million), Residuals & Off-the-Tops ($11 million) and Interest ($2 million) sum to $111.5 million.

Which means that all the non-production expenses (the bulk of which is P&A) are covered by post-theatrical revenue.

They cancel each other out.

What have we learned?

You don't need to count P&A expense against a theatrical break-even calculation. It will be covered by post-theatrical revenue.

This is why the industry shorthand for break-even is global theatrical revenue of 2.5-3.0x production budget, not 4.5x production budget, or "2.5-3.0x production budget plus P&A expenses."

[paperheart]

still seems to be lagging a bit vs recent R rated CB movies

[Bosco685]

Birds of Prey domestic results topping the $1.5M to $2M forecasts with a 47.3% drop. International TBD.

Edited March 8, 2020 by Bosco685

[paperheart]

hey Scotty, here's a headline you can reuse; maybe next weekend as well

Box Office: ‘Birds Of Prey’ Nears $200M Global

[Chaos_in_Canada]

Just now, paperheart said:

hey Scotty, here's a headline you can reuse; maybe next weekend as well

Box Office: ‘Birds Of Prey’ Nears $200M Global

[paperheart]

going to have to go big in Japan to get past the aborted DCEU launch Green Lantern, getting to mega-bomb Dark Phoenix a pipe dream

Edited March 8, 2020 by paperheart

[Bosco685]

$4.56M worldwide weekend.

Now at 2.3X production budget

[I like pie]

Saw it a few days ago with super low expectations. Gets a 4/10 from me, with all 4 stars going to Margot Robbie eye candy.

The fighting choreography was awful. Seemed like they were under water.

[Bosco685]

16 minutes ago, Bosco685 said:

$4.56M worldwide weekend.

Now at 2.3X production budget

Oh, I forgot.

[NoMan]

Didn't Art Buchwald's lawsuit reveal that even the studios don't understand the "box office numbers?"   How you guys do is beyond me.

 Just a short visit, I don't belong here.

Edited March 8, 2020 by NoMan

[Bosco685]

25 minutes ago, NoMan said:

Didn't Art Buchwald's lawsuit reveal that even the studios don't understand the "box office numbers?"   How you guys do is beyond me.

 Just a short visit, I don't belong here.

[jmg3637]

So is there any discussion of the actual movie in this thread?  I saw it last weekend and enjoyed it.

Going to see The Invisible Man in an hour.  It is comic related as I have an invisible man comic

[Bosco685]

3 minutes ago, jmg3637 said:

So is there any discussion of the actual movie in this thread?  I saw it last weekend and enjoyed it.

Going to see The Invisible Man in an hour.  It is comic related as I have an invisible man comic

There has been discussion of the film itself. But those that want to celebrate how it was a misstep are dominating the film discussion.

My review when I saw it on 2/15 at a small theater showing.

On 2/15/2020 at 3:47 PM, Bosco685 said:

Back from seeing the first showing of Birds of Prey at a  2-D showing (12:40 PM).

Total Audience: 28 people, though more male than female. Including what appeared to be 6 teenage girls that came in together.

Overall: 7.5/10

Biggest Mistake: R-rating, as those teenage girls were the loudest ones in the audience giggling out loud. Though with certain scenes (Harley bouncing a guy's head off a steering wheel while kicking another guy) got audience reactions.

The Good:

• This was definitely set up as a female team buddy film that took time to line up all the players together which once they do join up is jammed with action
• Throughout the film each character is given a chance to demonstrate their skills and their motivations for liking or disliking certain characters
• Huntress from the beginning is dropped in from childhood to the final vengeance-bringer she is recognized to be; but even early on she is drawing blood (not sure what this 'Not til much later' thing is)
• Diana Lance is definitely a strong player throughout the film, though not to full strength until later in the film
• Roman Sionis and Victor Zsasz were perfect street-level threats that ate up any screen time they were given, they were so sinister and engaging together; Black Mask when he goes full Big Bad is extremely well fitting
• The women in this film kick a lot of butt throughout the film in believable ways if you take the time to watch them use their momentum to throw men larger than them, including Huntress, Black Canary, Harley Quinn and Renee Montoya
• Overall, the story comes together to a wild ending loaded with action (so no weak Act III here - though a decision of how it ended was a letdown for the future)
• Joker is referenced so many times in this film as a cartoon, a drawing and by name you feel like he is in the film; though it would have been really cool to have him appear like in the animated series
• The soundtrack is extremely well placed throughout and complemented the scenes quite nicely in many spots
• This was definitely the wild misadventures of Harley Quinn throughout, so they were very true to the character (and her supporting cast for the most part)
• Someone noted this felt like Deadpool 2 with some of the theme - I agree, and thought that would have been perfect for the teenage audience this was intended for as a 'MY HERO' message
• Bruce actually got a lot of 'awwww' from a portion of the audience, so as a mascot he definitely worked more than I expected
• Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Huntress) and Jurnee Smollett-Bell (Black Canary) need to figure out how to team up, as they were fantastic together
• Oh, and the diamond

  Reveal hidden contents

The backstory made perfect sense, and being associated with Huntress was a solid connection; no stupid male genitalia thing as was 'leaked'

The Bad:

• I can't say enough how big WB missed its audience here, as listening to those girls laugh out loud at certain scenes I wasn't completely connecting way demonstrates who this was more for
• The flashback scenes at times can throw you off if you don't take a moment to understand what is going on (but just certain scenes)
• One decision made, to me, was a huge mistake:

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WHAT THE HECK WERE THEY THINKING KILLING OFF BLACK MASK AND VICTOR ZSASZ LIKE THAT???!!! These actors owned those roles so wonderfully, and you throw them away?? Especially once Black Mask when he suits up.

• The end result leads to the title, so I think this should have been called something else and the sequel (if there will be one) would have been 'Birds of Prey'
• With that, WB messed up with the title and messaging here and deserves the kick to the nuts it is experiencing for right now (hopefully a lesson will be learned)

Would I see it again: Although this is not my type film, if someone wanted me to go with them I would see it again without a fight; but it wouldn't be top of my Digital HD purchase list (I am not the audience for this film). Though again it was Huntress and Black Canary I was really impressed with, along with Black Mask (Mister Intensity).