WatchmenComicMovie.com Forum

If this belongs in another thread, please merge.

My question is, we can see in pure dollar signs what the Watchmen film made... but for the director, and the studio, and the production company, was this film an economic success or failure?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen_% ... #Reception

I'd say it was a failure. Sure, it made the budget and a bit extra, but didn't really even make over $200,000,000.

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It was a smashing economic success.......for Fox.

Look... just because it made what it cost doesn't mean WB even made its money back. After theater cuts and advertising/promo costs and everything else, the investors would have been better off keeping their cash in their mattresses.

In order to make a successful movie, you have to be able to subtract all the BS costs, theater cuts, etc., and still leave your investors more of a return than they could have gotten in a CD or other conservative investment. If you just make your money back, you actually lost money due to inflation and money tied up that could have been in a profitable investment.

There are only two reasons to make a movie:

1. You believe it will make money.
2. You believe in the themes of the movie and are obsessed with these themes finding an audience.

If reason 2 is your reason, you must never tell anyone because it means you are a thief of your investors' money.

Which, officially, leaves only reason 1.

It's showBUSINESS.

No business. No show.

Theatrically, Watchmen is a loser. With DVD... nobody's a loser. But nobody's a winner.

Except Fox.

Realistically it's too early to say.

Sure, from the standpoint of box office, then, yes, unquestionably, the movie did not show a profit. But when does a movie cease to gain revenue? With DVD, blu-ray releases up the wazoo (and more on the way), games, the merchandising that was done for the film, TV, Cable, Overseas rights and on and on, the movie is one that can show a profit over the long haul.

Heck, they're even renting out the New York backlot for TV shows and movies -- some of that has to go WB's way. Also the deal with Fox granted WB most, if not all, of the revenue from these streams. Fox only hijacked the box office, if I'm not mistaken.

WATCHMEN, being a period piece, will have a long shelf life and will find an audience when the mainstream comic movie folks get tired of superhero films. I'm guessing that will happen sooner or later since so many keep coming out.

Short term: WATCHMEN failed.
Long term: the movie is looking good in my opinion.

Time will tell.

I would only add a pearl of wisdom that I learned from CHUD's resident box office expert (and fellow Portlander), Andre Dellamorte:

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This is truly a madhouse. And I'm the lunatic running it. I've spent three years wondering if I should be proud or ashamed.

We'd have to define success. If you mean "successful in reaching its box office goals," then the answer seems to be that it was certainly not a success. There's no denying that it was a box office disappointment. It grossed less than expected or hoped for.

It made a profit. But by Hollywood standards, making a profit does not make something a success. Dumb, but true.

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"Computer unnecessary."

Let's say that you invested $100K in Watchmen. And that money got tied up for a couple of years... and then it started to roll back in just recently... but Fox had to get their money... and the studio had their BS accountants skating it out over thin ice... and you finally started to bring in a smattering of cash. OK.

Now, you could have put that money in other movies... or investments to include real etate... or let's say you would simply have gotten a CD.

You lost money. You sunk it into Watchmen.

And even if it made money overall, it lost money for the investors.

And you are an investor.

And now you can't send your kids to college or buy a new house.

And some screwy little geek is whining on the web about fidelity to the graphic novel

And you can't get laid and your kids are going to bag groceries and shovel dog shit for the kids of your friends who invested in Transformers 2 (even with Megan Fox's ugly thumbs).

Oh well.

No... Watchmen was a disaster. It needs a reboot on HBO as a series... or to be left completely alone. It doesn't work as a movie. Period.

No, you don't. Hollywood has already defined success: Butt-tons of cash.

Which Watchmen did not deliver.

FAIL.

I fail to understand how we can answer the question of "Was Watchmen a financial success?" without first defining what success is. However, as ROR-SHACK and Vynson both point out, Watchmen (un)fortunately does not define any of Hollywood's established definitions for financial success.

Yes, it's true that the box office gross plus the revenue from the various DVD releases are technically more than the reported budget. Barely. But as Vynson repeatedly points out -- and as my quotation from Dellamorte alluded -- there's a lot of financial wizardry going on behind the scenes that we don't know about.

When you hear the reported budget of any given movie, you have to assume that it's at least partially a bullshit number. A movie always comes with excess costs that the financiers fudge over or deny publicly. With Watchmen, for example, we have the TotBF animated short and the UtH featurette, not to mention the motion comic. You think the budgets for those were included in the $130 million reported budget? If not, how much did WB spend and lose on them?

Then, of course, there's the matter of where movie studios' income goes. Movies take a small army of producers, writers, directors and actors to make, all of them sticking their hands into the box office gross right beside the studio execs. Once they all get their share, how much is the studio left with? It probably differs with every movie and I don't know if such information would ever be made public. And of course, Watchmen has the unusual situation of being forced to share part of the revenue with Fox, which is an expenditure that WB and Paramount certainly didn't plan on making while development was underway. I don't know if the amount of Fox's cut was ever publicly announced and if it was, it was assuredly a bullshit number.

The bottom line is that ultimately, we probably will never know how much money went where. The only things we can really know for sure is that 1) due to Lawrence Gordon's incompetence, the greatest income-to-cost ratio from Watchmen will go to Fox, and 2) the advantage of Watchmen's global box office over its reported budget is so small that Watchmen was most likely not a financial success for WB.

But in the end, to repeat, Hollywood accounting made public is an overly sanitized and simplified falsehood that corporations roll out to keep the public pacified and distracted from the complex money-making process that operates as a closely guarded secret. You know, like a shopping mall Santa Claus.

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This is truly a madhouse. And I'm the lunatic running it. I've spent three years wondering if I should be proud or ashamed.

I absolutely agree about shady Hollywood financing. Two famous examples that I can think of are the shady bookkeeping that sunk Orion Pictures (where they counted film costs as profit to continue getting money from investors until it all crashed like a deck of cards), or even the Peter Jackson/New Line lawsuit.

I think for me, financial success boils down to a few key indicators:

1) For the public, what is the reported cost and reported take, worldwide? Even if it's off and inflated, it's a decent indicator of what the studio thinks of the film.

2) For the filmmakers (directors and producers), are they going to be able to continue to get big funds for their next films?

3) Will the studio brag about the film, at least respect it for artistic grounds, or kind of ignore it?

Two interesting things:

- I've not seen any Watchmen merchandise remaindered. At least not yet! I don't know if it means that those items actually sold well, or if they've been bought up by collectors hoping they'll be worth much more in coming years.

- It seems like Morgan and Haley's careers as actors have gotten big boosts with the film. I'm not sure if it's had much effect either way for the others.

Hey, speaking of money, what happened to this guy?:



Remember that we talked about how he should be fired and all that?

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Never give you up
Never gonna let you down

English not very good. Forgive me.

http://www.ghondar.blogspot.com
Because people on the internet think that I'm somewhat funny.

A touch off topic, Ghondar, but still a good question. I was the one who brought him up anyhow, wasn't I?

I don't see anything in his Wikipedia page about future projects and his IMDB page only lists involvement in one upcoming movie. It appears to be a giant shark movie, but I can't seem to find any information on it aside from a 2011 release year and a writer/director.

It would appear that Meg -- if it's ever completed at all -- will be Lawrence Gordon's last picture. So long, Larry. Thanks for all the great movies, enjoy your retirement and don't come back.

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This is truly a madhouse. And I'm the lunatic running it. I've spent three years wondering if I should be proud or ashamed.