As Deadline’s Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament comes to a close, with the two most profitable movies of 2024 unveiled Thursday, we look at the movies that didn’t work. Streaming continues to be a wildcard: While traditional motion picture studios such as Disney, Warner Bros, Sony, Paramount and Universal rely on lucrative pay two and pay three streamer deals to catapult their slates into the black, those streamers who’ve embraced theatrical (specifically Amazon MGM Studios and Apple Original Films) have a clandestine metric as to how they evaluate a movie’s post-cinema success. By traditional studio P&L standards, some of those releases would be considered flops. Given that, Apple and Amazon are excluded from this year’s survey.
The Film
KRAVEN THE HUNTER
Sony Pictures
Net Loss: $71 million
First of all, it should noted that the overall loss here is for the film in its entirety. Sony smartly co-financed this grounded gangster Marvel movie, so its loss is less than $35 million. Kraven the Hunter, who is one of Spider-Man’s foes, opened to $11M stateside, the lowest start for any Sony/Marvel title (the Culver City lot owns largely the Spiderverse portion of the Marvel catalog, while Disney owns the rest). Kraven the Hunter began production in 2022, with reshoots taking place in November 2023 after the actors strike was resolved; the start and restart drove production costs from $90M to $110M. During this time there was a cultural shift by audiences in their attitude toward superhero movies” they just expected more, and this bare-chested, leopard-pants-and-leather-vest-wearing rifleman wasn’t going to cut it (the pic received a C CinemaScore). The release date jumped around the calendar, too, first dated for MLK weekend 2023, then October 6, 2023, then Labor Day weekend 2024 before finally landing on December 13, the pre-holiday Christmas frame where Sony had launched the Jumanji movies and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse. Despite tanking with $25M domestic and $62M worldwide, Kraven the Hunter did manage to pull off $40M in global home entertainment and $50M in TV and streaming revenues. Residuals were less than other films as Kraven the Hunter was made in the UK. While Sony’s Marvel title Madame Web bombed earlier in the year, its red ink isn’t as great as what we see here on Kraven. Then-Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra said at the time that Kraven and Madame both failed due to the media’s crucifixion of such titles. When asked if the strategy around the Spider-Man spinoffs should be refocused, he told the Los Angeles Times, “I do think we need to rethink it, just because it’s snake-bitten. If we put another one out, it’s going to get destroyed, no matter how good or bad it is.”
The Box Score
The Film
MEGALOPOLIS
Lionsgate
Net Loss: $75.5 million
Box office bombs are in the moment. However, any misfire, especially one from an auteur, can last a lifetime, particularly now with streaming and FAST channels in need of content, not to mention in the endless film studies conversations at universities around the world. With that, Francis Ford Coppola‘s two-decade dream project Megalopolis, financed from his own money for $120 million as well as $16M in domestic P&A, winds up on the 2024 list of bombs. Important to note that Coppola funded Megalopolis by borrowing $200M against his ownership stake in Delicato Family Wines; that equity deal reportedly was worth $650M.
The sophisticated movie followed ambitious architectural idealist Cesar (Adam Driver) in the City of New Rome. He yearns for a utopian, idealistic future but comes up against Mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who remains committed to a regressive status quo, perpetuating greed, special interests and partisan warfare. Complicating matters is that Cesar is in love with Cicero’s daughter, socialite Julia Cicero (Nathalie Emmanuel). The movie was screened at the Universal CityWalk in Imax prior to Cannes (where it nabbed a seven-minute standing ovation) before Coppola’s friends. Coppola’s longtime lawyer Barry Hirsch and Vincent Maraval, president of Goodfellas (ex-Wild Bunch International), brokered the new Megalopolis foreign-sales deals, which our sources estimate at $50M here. Key foreign rights sold faster than U.S., i.e., major Euro territories Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, UK and France sold before Coppola and cast walked up the stairs of the Palais. By June, Lionsgate brokered a distribution deal for the film, the studio having handled the filmmaker’s Zoetrope library director’s cuts like Apocalypse Now Final Cut, The Conversation, The Cotton Club Encore, Tucker: The Man and His Dream and One From the Heart: Reprise. Imax committed to Coppola before Lionsgate, promising a 20-city release. One of the pic’s stunts included having a live actor (playing a reporter who talks to Driver on the screen) at key metro Imax auditorium, the gimmick first seen at Megalopolis‘ Cannes premiere. Imax contributed 41% of the movie’s $4M domestic opening weekend. Those moviegoers who attended were 61% fans of Coppola per Comscore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak, while a third were Driver fans. Lionsgate has no skin in the game; it was merely a gun for hire by Coppola at a distribution fee between $3M-$5M.
Prior to opening, there was a major marketing snafu with the trailer containing false AI-generated quotes from critics about Coppola. The trailer was pulled, but that’s not what hurt Megalopolis at the box office, as critics never understood the movie from the start out of its Cannes premiere (45% on Rotten Tomatoes), nor did the few moviegoers who showed up, pummeling Megalopolis with a D+ CinemaScore and a very low 32% definite recommend.
The Box Score
The Film
BORDERLANDS
Lionsgate
Net Loss: $80 million
Lionsgate during the pre-Adam Fogelson era thought it had a hit on its hands when they decided to make a feature take of the video game Borderlands, which had sold 68 million units. Clearly, Borderlands was no A Minecraft Movie, or even Sonic the Hedgehog. Even though the studio safeguarded in selling foreign for $70 million, our film finance sources assert that the black eye here is around $80M — greater than the $30M loss being floated around the time the movie tanked. It opened to $8.6M stateside; whupped by Sony/Wayfarer’s Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni movie It Ends With Us in the No. 2 spot with a $50M opening, and the third weekend of Deadpool & Wolverine with $53.7M. The execution in its Mad Max-meets-Tank Girl look was too gonzo for fanboys, many of whom who were also turned off by two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett going out of her zone as a bounty hunter. Reshoots on this Eli Roth-directed movie were handled by Deadpool director Tim Miller, and that swelled the budget even more to $120M.
Said Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer about the Borderlands misfire an earnings call: “Nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong: it sat on the shelf for too long during the pandemic, and reshoots and rising interest rates took it outside the safety zone of our usual strict financial models.” Ultimately, these bombs make money in their fifth and sixth cycles, not the first phase, which all of our P&L modeling reflects. At the time Borderlands deep-sixed we heard from a Lionsgate insider some good news: Eight years after its release, the Gerard Butler disaster Gods of Egypt finally broke even.
The Box Score
The Film
FURIOSA: A MAD MAX SAGA
Warner Bros
Net Loss: $119.6 million
George Miller has a Mad Max universe mapped out. However, in the wake of rebooting the franchise with Tom Hardy for Mad Max: Fury Road ($380 million global box office, $150M production cost, six Oscar wins), the Australian filmmaker decided not to go with a sequel but rather a prequel centered around Fury Road’s female hero Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. But the prequel didn’t have Theron reprising her role, one of the reasons why the movie didn’t reach an equal-sized audience — this a despite Furiosa starring the MCU’s Thor, Chris Hemsworth, as the villain. Miller rolled the dice on The Queen’s Gambit streaming sensation Anya Taylor-Joy in a younger version of Furiosa as he didn’t want to CGI Theron’s younger self. Marketing looked too similar to Mad Max: Fury Road, thus not spurring want-to-see, not to mention people couldn’t make head nor tails of all the noise in the trailer. Despite a standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, 90% Certified Fresh reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and a B+ CinemaScore on par with Fury Road, the big takeaway was that Mad Max pictures have a limited audience, even if they’re positioned as the big film over Memorial Day. The solution? Make them for considerably less than $168M net in Australia.
The Box Score
The Film
JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX
Warner Bros
Net Loss: $144.25 million
Before Deadpool & Wolverine, Warner Bros/DC’s Joker was the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever at $1.1 billion with two Oscar wins, including Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the Travis Bickle-like Batman villain. Director Todd Phillips found a way for a sequel, and Warners committed to the craziness of it at an opulent spend of $200M. When it came a budget that high for a movie that didn’t possess a lot of CGI, why so serious? Because Phillips has delivered Warner Bros’ hundreds of millions of dollars over the years with The Hangover franchise, Joker and more. Add in Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, and that’s a home run, right? Not quite. With a D CinemaScore, nobody wanted to see a Joker sequel that had the sensibility of a Stephen Sondheim musical.
The Box Score
Source link
