ily &hearts
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I find Box Office Mojo a little confusing on that, but The Little Mermaid's total gross during its release was $84.3 million, making it #13 for movies released in 1989. It's important to note that the first Batman and the third Indiana Jones movie were released in the same year, which kind of skews that whole chart, but I'm going to go back slightly on my earlier agreement with Old Guy and say The Little Mermaid was a box office hit. Maybe not a blockbuster, but certainly successful and popular enough. If you believe this dollar calculator, that comes out to about $151.89 million in 2010 dollars, which would have made it a moderate hit for 2009 releases.
If a movie actually cost $100 trillion ($100,000 million) and only made $140 million at the box office, it WOULD be a huge failure because it would have lost a colossal amount of money. Your point is well taken (as long as you drop a few zeros from your budget
), but like any business, bigger profit margins are better. A movie that costs $100M and makes $105M is not going to be viewed as favorably as a movie that cost $40M and makes $45M, simply because the latter has a much more favorable return on investment. It ties up a lot less money (it ain't easy to get funding to the tune of $100M, especially these days) and gives you more back for each dollar you spend. This is one reason why Robert Rodriguez continues to work in Hollywood, even though he's only got the Spy Kids movies as moderate blockbusters in his body of work. He consistently turns in movies on time and under budget and more have made back their budget than less.
While I generally agree that Hollywood has become far too enamored of the blockbuster, it's important to remember that it is a business run by largely public companies who have shareholders to answer to. The point I make in part 2 about Disney's conversion from a media company to a merchandising company strikes at the heart of that. If Disney sad, "We're abandoning or reducing the Princesses marketing franchise so we can focus on making better movies," the major shareholders would turn out the board of directors and the entire senior executive team in a heartbeat.
EDIT: And there I go again, getting beaten to the punch for looking up references...
That's kind of the point of that section of the article. Disney Princesses is a merchandising phenomenon, but it doesn't sell movies. It sells bedsheets, notebooks, dolls, clothing for the dolls, and (I believe) DVDs. It fundamentally didn't help the box office because the audience has been trained to think of Princesses as merchandise, not movies.
In some ways, this might also mean that the relatively disappointing box office for P&tF is irrelevant if it means they can sell more Disney Princess merchandise. Cars is the other example of a movie that did moderately well at the box office but was a total merchandising phenomenon (and which I believe was the movie we were arguing about in that other thread
).
I'm just going by the article I linked to, which states that Ariel is their perennial favorite.
If a movie actually cost $100 trillion ($100,000 million) and only made $140 million at the box office, it WOULD be a huge failure because it would have lost a colossal amount of money. Your point is well taken (as long as you drop a few zeros from your budget
), but like any business, bigger profit margins are better. A movie that costs $100M and makes $105M is not going to be viewed as favorably as a movie that cost $40M and makes $45M, simply because the latter has a much more favorable return on investment. It ties up a lot less money (it ain't easy to get funding to the tune of $100M, especially these days) and gives you more back for each dollar you spend. This is one reason why Robert Rodriguez continues to work in Hollywood, even though he's only got the Spy Kids movies as moderate blockbusters in his body of work. He consistently turns in movies on time and under budget and more have made back their budget than less.While I generally agree that Hollywood has become far too enamored of the blockbuster, it's important to remember that it is a business run by largely public companies who have shareholders to answer to. The point I make in part 2 about Disney's conversion from a media company to a merchandising company strikes at the heart of that. If Disney sad, "We're abandoning or reducing the Princesses marketing franchise so we can focus on making better movies," the major shareholders would turn out the board of directors and the entire senior executive team in a heartbeat.
EDIT: And there I go again, getting beaten to the punch for looking up references...
That's kind of the point of that section of the article. Disney Princesses is a merchandising phenomenon, but it doesn't sell movies. It sells bedsheets, notebooks, dolls, clothing for the dolls, and (I believe) DVDs. It fundamentally didn't help the box office because the audience has been trained to think of Princesses as merchandise, not movies.
In some ways, this might also mean that the relatively disappointing box office for P&tF is irrelevant if it means they can sell more Disney Princess merchandise. Cars is the other example of a movie that did moderately well at the box office but was a total merchandising phenomenon (and which I believe was the movie we were arguing about in that other thread
).I'm just going by the article I linked to, which states that Ariel is their perennial favorite.
