How much money does a movie need to make to be profitable?

[Anonymous]

[hahahmm]

That's not an easy question to answer because the public never really knows the true cost of the movie. When a big studio makes a movie they typically spend at least the same amount of money marketing the movie as they did to produce the movie OR MORE. So a movie they say costs $100 million probably needs $200 million to break even at a minimum. But then there's expenses they don't even want to talk about like how much did they pay to bribe some movie reviewers or influencers? How much did they have to bribe some government official in certain countries to keep the movie from being banned? Or take Netflix... they wanted to make shows and movies about cartels. Next thing you know they are making a business deal with cartel associates to start a new movie studio where Netflix pumped a bunch of money but no actual production happens. Or Netflix says, "yeah we paid a bunch of money for security in that country" translation, we bribed the right people or paid the right cartel taxes.

Movies that aren't produced by big studios are different. A movie could be produced for very little money but then it gets 'sold' to a big distributor and the distributor takes care of all the marketing. In that case all the costs is usually going to be lower.

Do the studios/distributors even tell the truth about sales numbers? Sometimes they pay theaters to pretend that more people bought tickets. So on paper the theater says 1,000 people paid to see the movie when in reality maybe only 10 did. This is another form of marketing but they're not going to write that down as being money spent on that particular movie.

It's all simpler when people actually want to see the movie and word of mouth tells more people to see it then when the studio produces garbage and tries to trick and force people into watching it. Most of the movie business today is garbage.

[Kaneki05]

The rule is always double.
Though if you want to think of as percentages, honestly anything over 50% is profit however it won't be that much of a successful profit especially if you have other costs that still apply even after the costs the movie needed to be made.
So the good spot is probably 70% or above.

[Anonymous]

I thinks it's generally considered a success if it surpasses it's budget, in profit. I would imagine different productions have different expectations. For example look at string of Marvel movie successes. It has become such a successful franchise that the studio will spend hundreds of millions making them now. But if it doesn't make at least a billion it would be considered a failure probably. Because now budgets are so high but also so are the expectations.

[ManOnFire]

It needs to be much more than it cost to make it. If you only rake in as much as it cost, all you'll be doing is just recovering that cost. You have to bring in a significant amount of money.

[gorydetails]

$1 more than it costs to make/produce/promote the movie.

[shortster]

Theaters generally take half, most have an adult revenue equal to the cost of the movie. So generally 4 times the cost of the movie.

[Anonymous]

About triple to start paying royalties to those involved

[virtualwasp]

Roi plus taxation anything exceeding is profit

[slatyb]

More than it cost to make.

[ChicoFromThe305]

Depends on how much you waste to make it

[jahaims]

It depends on how much they spend obviously

[Asker]

If they spend 250 million, how much profit should they make?