Pajiba

Oops...
I think you made a mistake.
Didn't anyone [including myself] ever notice this before?

e.g. "15. Gone with the Wind (Budget: $3.9 million; Revenue: $390 million) 4,906.73%"

They made 100 times what they invested.
Isn't that 10,000%?

Correction. Should be:

(gross-cost)/cost * 100

My bad. Your right OldSchool60... even using the correct math, your films should still be on the list.

Does the budget figures above include the cost of marketing the movies? The first list includes mostly "big" movies which were promoted. The second list movies are mostly tiny indie movies, with word-of-mouth promotion (mostly).

CNBC seems to have taken a simple ratio of revenue to budget --> (revenue/budget) * 100%. However, the calculations for LOTR don't come out as published with that method. Its revenue would have to be 1,118,880,000 or 1.11888 billion to get 1008%.

For the life of me, I can't figure out Dustin's method, and I'm used to deciphering some fairly numerical shenanigans.

One additional note... when you're working with numbers with magnitudes in the neighborhood of 10,000%, you probably don't need the two places to the right of the decimal.

was that, that star wars any good?

I think Mel Gibson used mainly low-cost enslaved Israelites to make The Passion of the Christ.

So, it's the Numbers whose numbers are screwy, but less screwy (it seems?) than CNBC's, right? Is that the gist?

Okay, so that citation helps clear it up a bit...

From The Numbers lists:
"Note: The profit and loss figures are very rough estimates based on the assumption that 50% of box office receipts were returned to the studio."

So with that justification, The Numbers's calculations are basically:
(Worldwide Gross / 50) / Budget = Return on Investment

Whereas the CNBC list is:
Worldwide Gross / Budget = Return on Investment

It also complicates things that The Numbers is citing different production budgets than CNBC, but at this point everyone has stopped reading anyway. So in conclusion, BOOBIES!!!!!

I'm inclined to agree with your conclusion, branded, but would like to see some kind of photographic support of this idea. Otherwise, it's likely to have never occurred.

Maybe they don't count bullshit numbers like Tarnation being made for $218 dollars (is it a budget if it isn't discussed before the film is made). Looking at your list, very few cracked 100 million. However, I don't think anyone could argue with The Blair Witch Project belonging on CNBC's list.

Dustin, it's a good thing you're so pretty, cuz you suck at math. (At least, that's what my mom told me.)

Paultera: Just read below each table.

Note: The profit and loss figures are very rough estimates based on the assumption that 50% of box office receipts were returned to the studio. They don't include ancillary (video, TV etc.) earnings, and serve only as a guide.

As I recall, this itself is a rule of thumb that Dustin's used in other posts - and would explain why something like Poseidon would count as a money-loser, even though its box-office take was larger than its budget.

As for CNBC: They're all films with budgets over about $5m in 2010 (the lowest budget being My Big Fat Greek Wedding at $6m). More to the point, they're all contemporary (i.e., in the past 35 years or so) movies with those inflation-adjusted budgets, as Gone With The Wind would have qualified with an ~$60m inflation-adjusted budget.

The other quirk is that I'm guessing that they're not adjusting box-office for inflation - which hurts Gone With The Wind (by nuking its ROI to ~650% with CNBC's methodology and 225% with The Numbers).

teal deer: Dustin did his math right - he just based his calcs off of what he estimated went back to the studio from box office. CNBC itself may be a bit wonky - the way it did things biases heavily to newer movies because they adjust the budget for inflation, but perhaps not the box office.

oops, worldwide revenue, 248M

When it comes to calculating return on investment, inflation has nothing to do with it. Your looking to find a ratio between dollar spent and dollar earned. The money made by older movies is less than the money earned by newer movies, but so is the money spent. The two cancel each other out. If you were to take Mad Max and turn both its Gross and Cost into todays dollars and do your calculation, the numbers would come out the same.

That assumes that the money you earned comes back relatively soon after the initial investment. If your investment comes back years down the road, both inflation and the possible interest earned in other investments needs to be taken into account. Gone With the Wind would be very tricky to genuinely calculate because its grosses were accrued over the many years of repeat showings.

That said, it seems as if Dustin's numbers did indeed come from dividing the box office numbers in half before calculation return investment and that CNBC only looked at movies that had a minimum budget. Mystery Solved

While I was at one point an economist, I am now a magnificent scientist. My skills have grown rusty and all I said may be wrong.

The supposed budgets of most low-cost indies are misleading anyway. If a studio film supposedly costs $100m, yes, that's not including marketing, but it presumably does include everything done to get the movie in a releasable form. Not so with the guerilla indies.

So sure, Robert Rodriguez only spent $7000 to get a version of El Mariachi in the can, but Columbia spent that again several times over to get the movie to a point where it could actually be released. Clerks may have cost Kevin Smith only $27,000, but Miramax paid over $200k to acquire it and then would've spent at least the movie's budget again on music rights alone. So the very idea that Tarnation, once it was actually released, only cost a couple of hundred bones is pretty silly. At the very least the acquisition cost should be taken into account.

Hey True_Blue. If you calculated the way you suggest, that would actually lower the profitability of each movie on their list....as factoring in marketing money would increase the cost, thusly driving down the amount of profit.