Will Donahue ‘24
Chief Copy Editor
It goes without saying that 2023 has not been kind to movie theaters – but of course, I’m going to say it anyway. Since February, we have seen back-to-back-to-back failures at the box office, from The Flash to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to recent examples like Wish. Quality is surely somewhat of a factor here; I know the middling reviews for Wish certainly dissuaded me from seeing it in theaters. Quantity is another one; with the sheer amount of media at our fingertips these days, we cannot possibly pay attention to every movie on the market. But all the blockbuster flops of 2023 share one major commonality: an unnecessarily large budget.
Thanks to these inflated budgets, movies that should otherwise see success are failing to turn a profit. Consider Fast X, which grossed $704 million worldwide last summer; an impressive number, to be sure, but it looks a lot less impressive against a monstrous budget of $340 million. For reference, because of marketing costs and sales cuts allocated to cinemas, the “break even” point for any theatrical release is roughly 2.5 times the production budget. By this measure, Fast X would have had to make a whopping $850 million(!) before becoming profitable. Even for a tried-and-true franchise like Fast and the Furious, that’s a pretty daunting task.
On the flipside, you have The Hunger Games: The Ballad Songbirds and Snakes – a movie with a comparatively lower box office reception, currently sitting at $243 million worldwide after two weeks in theaters. Its gross is roughly a third of what Fast X earned, but it’s already on track to turn a profit, thanks in large part to its budget of only $100 million. Sure, Songbirds and Snakes is still far cry from the heights of the Hunger Games box office craze (Catching Fire pulled $865 million back in 2013), but its budget affords it some breathing room. $100 million movies don’t need to make all the money in the world to be successful.
The rise of these inflated budgets begs the question: where does all the money go? Some of it goes into actor salaries; for instance, Killers of the Flower Moon (which cost $200 million to produce) came with a $30 million salary for Leonardo DiCaprio. Other times it goes into extensive reshoots and COVID protocols, which are estimated to have cost hundreds of millions across all of Hollywood (Deadline). And sometimes, the money goes nowhere at all. Netflix has spent $55 million on a Sci-Fi series called White Horse which has yet to be produced; allegedly showrunner Carl Rinsch (whose sole directorial credit consists of the critically panned 47 Ronin) has gambled away “a large chunk” of that sum on stocks and cryptocurrency (NYT).
That said, I am hopeful that the box office will return to form in the coming years. The string of bombs we’ve seen in 2023 is unprecedented – particularly for Disney, who only managed to put out one substantial success this year with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (Deadline). Especially in the wake of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes shining a light on Hollywood’s dysfunction, I can imagine these failures are forcing studio executives to reassess their strategies. Fewer reshoots, more sparing use of CGI, and more tight, high-quality scripts would inevitably lead to more contained budgets and stronger box office results. We can only hope such changes are implemented soon; the survival of movie theaters may depend on it.
Photo Courtesy of OpenVerse
Leave a Reply