Since Sucker Punch failed to conquer the box office, there’s been lots of speculation about why it was a box office failure. Was it too stylized? Was it the reviews? Did it fail to appeal to women or older adults?
Actually, there’s a very simple reason why Sucker Punch won’t make back its money, and why its box office returns are disappointing. Are you ready? Here it is:
It’s because Sucker Punch cost $82 million to make. If it had only cost $30 million to make, it would be considered a triumph.
(Actually, there are different estimates of the movie’s budget out there — people have cited numbers anywhere from $75 million to $85 million, but Box Office Mojo says $82 million, so let’s go with that.)
In the aftermath of its $19 million opening weekend, box office experts have been saying that relatively low gross is not that much lower than they were expecting. After all, this is a non-franchise movie without any huge stars in it (sorry Vanessa Hudgens), from a director who has a cult following but not a huge mainstream following. And it had an off-the-wall concept that was hard to convey in posters and trailers. You’d have to be a wild-eyed optimist to expect that film to make more than about $20 million in its opening weekend.
So the question isn’t, “Why did Sucker Punch only make $19 million in its opening weekend?”, it’s “Why did it have such a huge budget?”.
This is true of a lot of movies that people consider flops — it’s not really that the movie bombed, it’s that it cost too much in the first place.
I was mildly surprised, the other day, to realize that Batman Begins made almost exactly the same amount of money as Superman Returns — yet, the Batman film is regarded as a huge hit, while Superman Returns is regarded as a flop. The difference: Superman Returns cost between $270 million and $350 million to make, while Batman Begins cost only $150 million to make. (But actually, Superman Returns’ budget included $65 million in write-offs for previous failed Superman films, including Tim Burton’s. Thanks to Robert Meyer Burnett and Silas Lesnick for pointing this out.)
I get the sense, from reading the trades and talking to people, that we’re moving away from the era of over-inflated movie budgets a little bit. We reached a kind of high-water mark with the Pirates of the Caribbean films — the second Pirates cost $225 million to make and the third cost $300 million to make. By contrast, the fourth Pirates movie is being made for a slightly more modest budget.
Here’s a partial list of movie budgets, based on publicly released information — obviously, these numbers aren’t entirely ironclad, and they disagree with other sources, like Box Office Mojo. But it does give the sense that a lot of movies were being made for $200 million-plus even a couple years ago, and a budget in the $100 million-$150 million range was considered normal. Now, with movie attendance falling, expectations may have been scaled back somewhat for films, unless they’re a sure thing — and sometimes even then.
https://gizmodo.com/are-we-witnessing-the-death-spiral-of-the-hollywood-blo-5748577
X-Men: The Last Stand cost around $150 million to make, but I’ve seen a budget of $80 million being bandied about for X-Men: First Class. Reportedly, a big reason why Sony decided to do a Spider-Man reboot, instead of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 was because the reboot with a new cast and director could be a lot cheaper. Captain America was made for around $140 million, way less than the Iron Man movies. And there were reports, a few months ago, that Marvel was forcing Joss Whedon to work with a much lower budget for The Avengers than he’d hoped for.
One reason the Bioshock movie hasn’t happened, reportedly, is that director Gore Verbinski wanted a bigger budget than Universal was willing to cough up.
(Of course, Hollywood accounting is a thing of wonderment in its complexity, so all of these numbers are make believe to some extent.)
https://gizmodo.com/how-much-money-does-a-movie-need-to-make-to-be-profitab-5747305
Sure, you don’t want the studios to cut corners to the point where movies start looking cheap and silly — a big reason why superheroes and aliens have been making such a huge impact on movie screens in recent years is that we can finally make them look cool instead of tacky. Plus, Inception wouldn’t have been nearly as cool a film if Christopher Nolan hadn’t had so much money to play with.
But it’s really hard to argue that so many movies need to cost $200 million — or that a personal project like Sucker Punch needed to cost $82 million, for that matter. The simplest way to keep a film from looking like a collossal failure is to be honest about what sort of film it is, and give it a budget that makes sense.
To be honest, even though I’m dying to see Guillermo Del Toro’s At The Mountains of Madness, it’s probably true that an R-rated, $150 million H.P. Lovecraft adaptation starring Tom Cruise would lose buckets of money. It would be a fantastic, epic film, but a box office failure.
Anyway, as you hear people talking about Sucker Punch having been a collossal failure, just bear in mind that they’re only saying that because the budget was so huge. It actually did just fine for a small film from a cult director, that wasn’t based on any well-known source material. So to the extent that we all enjoy playing Monday-morning quarterback about box office stuff, the real question is the film’s inflated budget, not its box office.
