Discuss The Thing
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A great example why box office was a crappy measuring stick
posted by DRDMovieMusingsSTAFFMOD on July 2, 2021 at 1:11 PM
"Box office" was one measure of the "success" of a movie (from a producer's financial point of view), but it was never a good measure of how good a movie is or not.
The Thing is a terrific example.
Widely regarded as one of the greatest horror movies of all time, it barely broke even, paying an uninspiring $1.31 in revenue for each budget $1. Compare that to another 1982 horror movie, Friday the 13th Part III, which paid a handsome $9.17
In my movie ROI database, with over 1,100 titles from 1926 to present, the current average ROI is $4.09 and, filtered for movies with the horror tag, that upticks to $5.31. For comparative purposes only, I simply use gross (or box office)/budget (G/B), and not the "Insider's Fomula" (G/2-B) for two reasons:
a) it's an extra step I don't need to get a comparative number for all movies in the set. Anyone can go ahead and take that extra step themselves; and
b) it derives its answer in dollars , which, to me, is not as useful as a rate of profit that better supports apples to apples comparisons of profitability and loss. For example, if two movies made $100M of profit, in dollars, and one was made on a budget of $1M (so, revenues of $101M, ROI of $101) and the other was made on a budget of $95M (so, revenues of $195M, ROI of $2.05) , which would you have preferred to be a producer/investor in? Those $100M in real dollars only tell part of the story; the other part of the story is how much had to be risked in order to make that money, so rate of return helps show that more clearly.
Any way you slice it, $1.31 is criminally low for such a respected movie.
As streaming continues to disrupt theatrical release and we make the paradigm shift away from box office, it'll be interesting to see how movies are received and perceived without the influence of box office numbers.
Reply by tmdb82469342
on July 2, 2021 at 4:36 PM
Just say it's a great film that eventually found its audience and spare us stupid equations.
Reply by jorgito2001
on July 6, 2021 at 5:41 PM
This is my daughter's favorite horror movie! We saw this when theaters reopened and were playing "classics" during COVID. It was SO cool finally seeing this in a theater!
Blame dumb, dumb, dumb Universal, for releasing The Thing, not only, the same year, but a VERY short 2 weeks AFTER a little known, heart warming Alien film called "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" that OWNED the box office for pretty much the rest of 1982, into 1983, not to mention the hearts of moviegoers... NO ONE wanted to see an "evil" alien film, they wanted to rewatch, re-rewatch, then re-re-rewatch E.T.!
Saddest part is it negatively affected John Carpenter as a filmmaker...he put his heart and soul into a movie he thought was his masterpiece. The bad reviews (at the time) as well as the terrible box office....some argue he never truly recovered!
Reply by DRDMovieMusings
on July 6, 2021 at 6:41 PM
Yep. Again, it may not be a bad thing that "box office" is receding into obsolescence. Getting tagged a "bomb" or "flop" discourages people from giving a movie a chance. If that is no longer there, word of mouth from a friend might carry more weight.