His dark materials

I liked the books but I agree that the film adaptation of The Golden Compass was, for the most part, dull.

It's a shame because I'd like to have seen the remaining books translated to the screen. :( Maybe it's for the best though because if they could botch Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, I dread to think of the hash they'd have made of the final book, The Amber Spyglass.
 
As I understand it whilst the domestic opening returns was way down on the studios estimates it performed well abroad and made about double what it had cost to make (about $180 million). That wasn't bad, but it wasn't anywhere near what the studio wanted. This was further soured because the way the studio chose to finance/sell the movie turned out to be a very bad decision and meant that a lot of the profits went to other people rather than them.

If you upscale The Fellow of the Rings budget from 2001 - 2007 it cost $109 million to make but went on to make $871 million. In contrast The Golden Compass cost $180 million and made $380 million.

So they basically decided it had performed badly (by film standard), needed a lot of up-front investment and generated a lot of flak from the Catholic church. It wasn't worth the hassle and so they bailed out and scuppered any talk of future films.
 
Its far worse than that. The figures you are quoting are ticket sales, not profits. Even if they took 50% of the ticket sales that's barely breaking even. Marketing is generally not part of the quoted budget and adRAB tens of millions to the total cost, making this film a probable money loser. The last nail in the coffin was us domestic performance, it made a paltry 70 million, if they can't rely on the american audience, there's just no one willing to take the risk based on foreign support alone.

Further more sequels tend to cost more, and make less. And those are in cases where the audience was wowed by the first film and are eager for more. Golden compass is more like once bit, twice shy.
 
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