What Makes a Film a Success (Or a Flop?)

The success of Sinners, the horror-thriller from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, has inspired some strange responses from the film industry. Despite the film sitting comfortably at the top spot of the North American box office for two weeks straight, the trades have been keen to put an asterisk next to its success. Yes, the film has a reported budget of between $90 and $100 million and earned ‘only’ $48 million domestically in its opening weekend, but that was also the best start for an original film since Jordan Peele’s Us from 2019. In its second week of release, it saw a mere 6% drop in gross from its opening, which is a minor miracle in Hollywood. As of the time of writing this piece, Sinners has earned over $163.2 million worldwide.

Gauging a film’s status as a success or failure seems like it should be pretty easy. Did it make money? Then it’s a hit. But this is an industry built on the smoke and mirrors of the world’s savviest accountants and an ever-changing battle over what audiences want versus what they’re willing to leave the house and pay money to see. Arguments over whether the cinematic experience is still relevant have been waging for the best part of a decade. Whatever the case, it’s clear that the entertainment industry is still driven by a now-traditional notion of what constitutes a hit, and that dictates what gets made. But it doesn’t guarantee results.

The old logic, and the one that is still widely used to judge a film’s success, is that a title has entered the black when it earns, at least, two and a half times its budget, to offset marketing and publicity costs. The reported budget of the live-action remake of Snow White, for instance, was between $240 and 270 million. So far, it’s brought in about $200 million worldwide. I think it’s safe to say that Disney will write off this as a financial disappointment at their next board meeting.

One of the biggest issues of the success/flop debate in 2025 is that film budgets have ballooned. It was once considered a headline-making rarity for a movie to cost over $100 million. Now, that’s considered a ‘modest’ cost for a tentpole title. We see more and more films with budgets breaking that $250 to $300m+ barrier, and questions forever surround whether or not such costs are fully earned, especially in the aftermath of both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. On a basic profit level, making back that kind of money is hard. For every Barbie or A Minecraft Movie, there is a Joker: Folie a Deux or Black Adam.

But there is an argument to be made that financial profit is but one sign of success and maybe not even the most crucial one. If a film makes a ton of money and people stop caring about it very soon after seeing it, does that lack of a cultural footprint matter? It certainly does if you’re a savvy studio head who wants to extend the lifespan of an IP. Trying to flog a dead horse can be costly, as evidenced by several Disney live-action remakes that clearly existed for no reason more worthy than to strengthen a pre-existing brand. Making people excited for the work pays off in the long term.

Then again, maybe a long-lasting fandom is overrated. We all spent years laughing about how nobody was invested in James Cameron’s Avatar but that sequel still became one of the highest-grossing films of all time. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that one should never bet against Cameron, a man who is scarily good at beating expectations and making all of the money.

Streaming has moved the success goalposts repeatedly since becoming a default form of entertainment. Largely, this means that publicists and vibes dictate a hit more than verifiable data. Netflix can claim that their latest original movie received hundreds of millions of views but what does that actually mean? Did every single one of those views come from people who watched the entire thing? Did they stop after 20 minutes? How many of them signed up specifically to watch it? The almost ephemeral quality of these streaming originals doesn’t help matters. Yeah, The Electric State cost a reported $320 million and Netflix claims to be happy with its numbers but it disappeared from our cultural consciousness after less than a week (as it deserved to.)

It’s hard to escape the sense that the film industry of 2025, or at least the major studios that have a monopolistic grip over it, has no idea what they’re doing. They’ve never been ahead of the curve in predicting what audiences want but things feel more behind with the times than ever. Chasing after social media trends and forcing AI across the threshold only increases the flop-sweat panic of it all. It feels like they never learn the right lessons from those hits. Barbie should have told them that there’s a hunger for strongly defined stories by female creators with a vibrant vision, not that the world is clamouring for more movies based on toys.

And, of course, there are the intersections of race and gender to consider. We know that, historically speaking, women and people of colour love going to the cinema and typically do so more frequently than their white male counterparts. These are demographics with the power to make or break a movie. Yet the films they love often get stuck with that ‘but’ next to their name. Oh, was it just a fluke? But what about white dudes? Is it all sustainable? It’s ridiculous that the default mode of thinking for studios in 2025 remains focusing on white men aged 18 to 35, especially as the ‘anti-woke’ brigade forces its way to the forefront. It’s certainly tough to separate the ‘skepticism’ around Sinners’s success from this barrage of anti-diversity tactics.

I’m a cultural optimist who thoroughly believes in the power of organic hype and playing the long game. It’s always satisfying for me to see a film that was considered a commercial and critical failure upon release get its dues many years or even decades later. This has been the case for many of my favourite films. Whether or not that matters to the corporate entity that released it is of little consequence to me (unless it impedes their desire or ability to offer a physical release of said work, which is a major problem in 2025.) I also just find it exhausting how much the numbers game of Hollywood has been giddily adopted by outsiders and fans. Why should we be so obsessed with grosses, Rotten Tomatoes scores, and Letterboxd averages? Boiling any piece of art down to a series of statistics is both tedious and insulting.

For Ryan Coogler, becoming an A-List director whose name pulls in audiences well beyond that of a recognizable IP is a grand achievement in an industry in flux. He will get the rights back to Sinners in 25 years, and before that happens, he’s only going to accrue more clout and respect. Audiences want more from him and that has only grown in the face of concern-trolling headlines about the grosses. If you want one unshakable sign of success, there it is.