Movies and ROI

My friend Becky recently wrote an article about the dubious nature of the marketing slogan “The #1 Movie in America!”. Every week (especially during the summer) a different movie blazes commercials across our television screens, newspapers, and radios proclaiming itself the #1 movie in America.



Lee Zion wrote a thoughtful response to Becky’s article, elaborating on how absurd some of the numbers the studios come up with are. It absolutely blows my mind that box office grosses completely fail to indicate the total number of tickets sold. Given the absurd uptick in ticket prices over the past decade, it’s not surprising that the vast majority of the highest grossing films of all time have come in the past 10 years.



Which bring me to (in my mind) and even more interesting question. Which films gave us the most bang for the buck? Specifically, which films reaped the biggest gross in proportion to how much they cost to make? Could it have been the Blair Witch Project? According to IMDB, the film was shot on a $35K budget and raked in a domestic gross of $140,530,114. That represents a 401,400% return on their investment. Pretty sweet, huh?



How about Titanic, the highest grossing film of all time? Well, IMDB says it’s budget was $200 million and it’s domestic gross was $600,779,824. That equates to a relatively paltry 200% return on their investment.



So, what does this mean? Shit if I know, but the lucky movie exec who can wrap his brain around it will be sitting pretty.