Disney made an estimated $296.4 million loss at the box office on just two of its Marvel superhero movies in 2023 according to analysis of recently-released financial statements.
They reveal that the cost of making The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania came to a staggering $762.4 million (£609.3 million) before Disney banked $124.9 million (£99.4 million) in government incentives bringing its net spending on the movies down to $637.5 million. They both bombed at the box office.
According to industry analyst Box Office Mojo, the movies grossed a combined $682.2 million with theaters typically retaining 50% of the takings and the remainder going to the studio. This reflects the findings of film industry consultant Stephen Follows who interviewed 1,235 film professionals in 2014 and concluded that, according to studios, theaters keep 49% of the takings on average. It would give Disney just $341.1 million from The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. No expense was spared on them.
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Disney does not publicly discuss how much it spends on specific productions and did not respond to a request for comment. Budgets are usually a closely-guarded secret. This is because studios combine the costs of individual pictures in their overall expenses and their filings don’t itemize how much was spent on each one. Films made in the UK are exceptions and both The Marvels and Quantumania fall into this category.
Studios shoot in the UK to benefit from its Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country.
To qualify for the reimbursement, at least 10% of the production costs need to relate to activities in the UK. In order to demonstrate this to the UK government, studios tend to set up a separate production company in the country for each movie they make there.
The companies have to file financial statements which shine a spotlight on their budgets. They reveal everything from the headcount and salaries to the level of reimbursement and the total costs. Studios directly receive the revenue from theater tickets, streaming and Blu-ray sales and carry the costs of marketing as the function of the UK companies is purely making the movies.
I don’t know if you put Watchmen in there.
Watchmen is a perfect example of how Zach Snyder doesn’t understand what he’s adapting. The original story is a deconstruction of the superhero, showing how sad and broken these characters would be in real life: right-wing murders, rapists, schluby middle-age guys with ED…Snyder takes those characters and films them like they’re cool and bad-ass. Aesthetically, it’s a beautiful, shot-for-shot adaptation, but at no point did it occur to him that the guy in a trench coat muttering to himself about filth and whores wasn’t supposed to be cool. It didn’t occur to him that a group of people who completely fail to stop the villian weren’t supposed to have action sequences straight out of The Matrix. It didn’t occur to him that a story about what superheroes would look like in the real world should be realistic.
The part that truly enraged me was a small moment at the very end. In the comic books, after everyone leaves, Dr. Manhattan goes to see Ozymandias one last time before leaving Earth forever. Ozymandias asks him if he was right in the end, and Manhattan tells him, “Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.” Ozymandias asks what he means by this, but Manhattan leaves without answering. In the movie, Snyder replaces Dr. Manhattan with Owlman in this interaction. Ozymandias’ story ends with a character who is essentially God telling him that his entire plan was pointless, and Snyder swaps out God for the story’s everyman character. It’s a perfect distillation Snyder’s inability to understand even the simplest subtext.