The movie Billion Dollar club

Umbran · Jun 23, 2015

tomBitonti said:
And the rankings. These are very different in comparison to the initial list.

Note that Morrus' table is worldwide gross, while yours is adjusted *domestic* gross.

This can be incredibly important. Avatar made $760 million in domestic lifetime gross. It made an additional $2 *billion* in foreign markets.

delericho · Jun 23, 2015

Dog Moon said:
It's more like:

<snip>

Ah, I see. I can see how that could be annoying.

tomBitonti · Jun 23, 2015

Umbran said:
Note that Morrus' table is worldwide gross, while yours is adjusted *domestic* gross.

This can be incredibly important. Avatar made $760 million in domestic lifetime gross. It made an additional $2 *billion* in foreign markets.

Hi,

Yeah, I noticed that, but after I made my last update (grr, and I still didn't fix all of the blank lines problem). Unfortunately, the site doesn't seem to have a ranking of adjusted worldwide values. Would a quick fudged adjustment be worth looking at? I could determine the adjustment ratio for domestic values and apply it to the international values. All sorts of problems with that, but it would give an approximate value which might still be useful.

Any sense of the impact that 3D and IMAX sales is to the dollar amounts? Here locally, second run go for about $5, first run $8-12, and IMAX and/or 3D get up to about $18. Are the ratios the same in other markets? I would expect the values overall to be higher in larger metropolitan markets. I'm more interested in the ratios of ticket prices.

I'm curious now about the proportion of sales comparing domestic with international markets, and how that has changed over time.

I'm also curious as to whether there are any other countries with large selling movies? These are all US titles. But, does that mean anything? The studios may be based in the US, but production occurs all over the world. What non-US "big movie" studios are there?

Thx!

TomB

Morrus · Jun 23, 2015

tomBitonti said:
I'm also curious as to whether there are any other countries with large selling movies? These are all US titles. But, does that mean anything? The studios may be based in the US, but production occurs all over the world. What non-US "big movie" studios are there?

Yeah, the UK makes a lot. James Bond (Skyfall's one of those $1billion flicks), and Harry Potter are the Just in the last year there was stuff like Theory of Everything, Kingsman, 50 Shades of Grey (hey, I didn't say they were all good!), Imitation Game, etc.

There's a formula they use. It takes into account funding, directors, crew, cast, writers, locations, etc. to determine what country of origin a movie is designated as. I don't know how the formula works exactly, but many movies with British casts and crews, or which film at Pinewood, tend to be listed as US/UK.

As a couple of random examples, Full Metal Jacket or Nolan's Batman trilogy. Or Interstellar, and Inception. Superman: The Movie (and Man of Steel). Many, many movies! The Lord of the Rings movies (NZ is in there, too).

Look at the list of the biggest worldwide movie franchises. You have Marvel at the top, then a cluster which includes Harry Potter, Bond, Batman, and LotR, all of which are UK or co-UK, with Star Wars in there to break them up a bit.

tomBitonti · Jun 23, 2015

Wow, lots more here than I realized.

All but a couple of the Bond movies were produced by Eon, which is listed as being located in Great Britain (GB).

The Harry Potter movies are produced by Warner Bros (US) and Heyday (GB).

The Lord of the Rings was produced by WingNut Films (NZ) (New Zealand).

Figuring out the producer information is a bit trying, as the several films that I looked at generally had several producers involved. Then, there is the distributor, which is a whole different layer of companies.

I did find information about "Major Film Studios", see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_film_studio

This all leaves me wondering how best to understand where movies are produced, and how meaningful a question this is.

Thx!

TomB

Morrus · Jun 23, 2015

tomBitonti said:
This all leaves me wondering how best to understand where movies are produced, and how meaningful a question this is.

Their wikipedia entries always note their country of origin.

It would be interesting to find out how that formula works. I mean, even people like the caterers count. There are so many people involved in a movie. The methodology must be available online somewhere!

I don't even think, with mighty multinationals, that the place where their headquarters is located even matters that much to anybody except the tax office when they do business worldwide.

tomBitonti · Jun 23, 2015

I was thinking that the listed country was where the home office was located. As far as where the work is actually done, I was thinking it would often be a few folks from the home office, perhaps a small proportion of folks doing the work.

I presume that the overall production will have folks all over the world: Actors and stage crew arriving from their place of origin. Local crew at each filming location. Post-production potentially in a lot of places. Especially graphics stuff, which could be done anywhere. The same for edits, which might be done just about anywhere.

There are probably more steps; I'm not a film buff, so can only describe a few steps. I'm sure there are more.

Thx!

TomB

Morrus · Jun 23, 2015

tomBitonti said:
I was thinking that the listed country was where the home office was located.

No. The listed country is based on the formula I mentioned which takes into account all the things I listed above.

Scott DeWar · Jun 24, 2015

Morrus said:
There's a formula they use. It takes into account funding, directors, crew, cast, writers, locations, etc. to determine what country of origin a movie is designated as. I don't know how the formula works exactly, but many movies with British casts and crews, or which film at Pinewood, tend to be listed as US/UK.

and for the record, this is what he is referring to

Deset Gled · Jun 24, 2015

Morrus said:
It would be interesting to find out how that formula works. I mean, even people like the caterers count. There are so many people involved in a movie. The methodology must be available online somewhere!

Whose formula exactly are you referring to?

For the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, I think it's less of a quantified formula than you say. Consider the (original) film "The Vanishing". It was rejected by the Academy as an option for the Dutch submission for Best Foreign Film because it has too much French in it. But it has more Dutch than French, so it couldn't have been accepted as French either. To them, I guess it's technically a film without a home country.