Movies - List of films generating losses

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	Movies - List of films generating losses

This is a list of movies for which the revenue retained by the movie studio was grossly outpaced by production and marketing costs.

Calculation

The retained revenue from box office sales are ~50% and from DVD sales and other revenue perhaps ~50% as well. So if the gross sales aren't double the production and marketing cost it probably made a loss. The "Worldwide DVD Gross" and eventual other revenue figures are more difficult to determine.

According to Regal Cinemas in 2004, the average production cost of films it showed averaged about US$63.8 million, and the average marketing cost was about $39.0 million. The averages were $29.9 million and $14.1 million, respectively, in 1993.

Note that the monetary grosses listed below are not actually received by the movie studios. The gross is merely the sum of all the movie tickets sold. The movie theater keeps around 45% of this amount, and the remainder goes to the movie studio as the film rental fee.

Background

Financial success is the primary reason that studios make movies. However not all films are guaranteed to be successful. A good indication of the success of a film is to look at the budget of the movie and then see what the gross income of that film was. Studios expect that a film's "domestic" (which the film industry defines as the United States and Canada)-- as well as the overseas-- box office gross will exceed production costs.

If it recoups this cost, then it can be considered a success; otherwise, if it fails by a significant margin (usually 10% short or more), then it is often referred to as a box office bomb. It should be noted that different genres of film are subject to different standards of success. For example, action movies typically have higher production and promotion costs than romance movies.

Examples

In the most dramatic cases, a single film's poor performance can push a studio into bankruptcy or equivalent financial ruin, as happened with United Artists (Heaven's Gate), Carolco Pictures (Cutthroat Island
), and Squaresoft's Square Pictures (Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
). Some have even changed a company's agenda, such as Walt Disney Pictures's decision to make only 3-D animation which stemmed from the failure of Treasure Planet
.

Typically, the most notorious flops are summer blockbusters, which often entail huge costs to produce and face a highly competitive market, circumstances that can lead to enormous success or disastrous failure. Additionally, advertising costs are not included in a movie's production cost, and frequently make a bomb's failure all the more crushing for the studio.

It is also notable that many of the movies listed below are ones with very extensive use of CGI and/or other special effects and/or expensive sets. Films which rely on weather conditions, such as those set on the ocean or in the desert, also tend to have increased costs, which could impact their appearance on the list.

Depending on the studio and in reference to CGI, it could be argued that despite the failure of a particular film to realize box office expectation, the studio benefits from the advances in the technology and expertise of their CGI team, which in turn helps the quality of subsequent films, as well as their profitability.

Box office bombs are also sometimes referred to as flops or turkeys.

List of Financial Bombs (Numbers are in US$)

U.S. Box Office Gross refers to U.S. and Canadian box office revenue

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