Box Office Round Up – July 1 – July 3, 2016

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Get behind the numbers of the last weekend’s box office! This week, Chris Neumer revels in unique box office trivia and how it relates to the 70s sit-com Sanford and Son. It was an interesting weekend at the box office to say the least.

by Chris Neumer

I’m a big fan of good trivia. Probably my favorite bit of entertainment related trivia revolves around the 70s TV show, Sanford and Son. Star Redd Foxx was 49 when the show first went into production. 49! He played a 65-year old character who had been widowed for 25-years, was looking to retire, walked with a pronounced limp, constantly feared having a heart attack and had grey/white hair… and yet, he was only 49! Or, in other words, about a year older than Jennifer Aniston is right now.

That is crazy! I mean, that’s insane! Especially if you’ve ever seen an actual episode.

Well, I learned something today that I consider to be comparable to that: in 2016 so far, there have been more $300 million movies released than $100 million movies. There are five $300 million hits at present (Finding Dory, Deadpool, The Jungle Book Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Zootopia) and there are only three $100 million hits (X-Men: Apocalypse, Kung Fu Panda 3 and The Angry Birds Movie).

This will definitely change in another week when Finding Dory crosses the $400 million mark and Central Intelligence and The Conjuring 2 enter the $100 million mark, but right now, there are five $300 million movies and three $100 million movies.

If you want to look at that from an even crazier perspective, you can. Nine movies have been released this year that have grossed more than $100 million domestically. Two thirds of those films (6) have done more than $300 million.

On one hand, it seems like the studios would love this. I mean, what studio executive wouldn’t be drooling at the prospect of learning that there are 66% more $300 million movies than $100 million movies?

On the other hand, this scenario is so outside the norm, that I’m not sure studio executives would be able to wrap their heads around it. Since the year 2000, there have always been just as many or more $100 million movies than $200 million movies and more $200 million movies than $300 million movies. There was only one instance where there were more higher grossing movies than lower grossing movies: 2013. That year there were three $400 million films (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Iron Man 3 and Frozen). There was only one $300 million movie, Despicable Me 2.

However, even 2013 made sense, because Frozen earned a total of $400,738,009 at the box office. If it had earned just $800,000 less, it would have been in the $300 million category and all would have been right with the world; there would have been just as many or more $300 million films as $400 million films. When you realize that less than a quarter of one percentage point of a film’s gross was all that stood between this type of situation literally always being the case, it puts an even more extreme outlier status on what’s currently going on.  The tally for 2016 so far is:

1 – $400 million film

5 – $300 million films

0 – $200 million films

3 – $100 million films

Logically, this grouping of numbers should never exist. In a vacuum, the distribution should look like a pyramid with the lower numbers existing in much higher concentrations than the highest grossing films.

We are not, however, living in a vacuum. What these numbers merely shine a spotlight on what industry insiders already knew to be true: the studios are at a position in time where they only care about the mega-hits and franchises.

I wrote last year about how the studios seemed to be squeezing out the middle class films, what I didn’t quite realize was that, in Hollywood, $200 million grossing movies are now considered ‘middle-class’.

The studios are operating now like a baseball player who either hits a home run or strikes out while looking ridiculously foolish. There’s no in-between. Here is a list of all the films that are currently in release whose budgets are listed. All of them.

Captain America: A Civil War                                              $250 million

Finding Dory                                                                          $200 million

The Legend of Tarzan                                                          $180 million

X-Men: Apocalypse                                                               $178 million

The Jungle Book                                                                    $175 million

Alice Through the Looking Glass                                         $170 million

Independence Day: Resurgence                                        $165 million

Warcraft                                                                                 $160 million

The BFG                                                                                 $140 million

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows        $135 million

The Secret Life of Pets                                                          $75 million

Central Intelligence                                                              $50 million

Free State of Jones                                                                $50 million

The Conjuring 2                                                                    $40 million

Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates                                 $33 million

Me Before You                                                                       $20 million

The Shallows                                                                         $17 million

The Purge: Election Year                                                     $10 million

The outlier there is The Secret Life of Pets. It’s the only film with a reported budget between $50 million and $135 million.

I have long since stopped trying to figure out how animated film budgets work. Finding Dory and The Secret Life of Pets are both computer generated, both have a running time of roughly 1:45 (The Secret Life of Pets is 7 minutes shorter) and have about the same level of A-list voice over talent. The animation looks about the same in both cases—though I could be convinced that the leads in The Secret Life of Pets have a little bit less detail—and yet, there is a $125 million chasm between their budgets. Is that the Pixar difference? I have no idea.

If we break down the budgets like this: $0 – $50 million is small, $51 million – $100 million is medium, $101 – $170 million is big and $171 million and up is enormous, we’re again looking at a scenario where there are more big (and enormous) budgeted films than small or medium films.

More interestingly still, while there aren’t a lot of patterns that can be seen in the budget numbers, there are two that are very obvious. The first is that the two biggest successes of the summer, Finding Dory and Captain America: A Civil War also have the two biggest budgets. The second is that all of the merely ‘big’ budgeted movies have flopped spectacularly. The five films with the ‘big’ budgets (Alice Through the Looking Glass, Independence Day: Resurgence, Warcraft, The BFG and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows) have budgets that are a combined $770 million. They have currently grossed $333 million domestically.

Nothing about Hollywood’s current release habits is sustainable long-term. Something is going to have to give and it will be very interesting to see what that is.