When it comes to evaluating the financial performance of top movies, it isn’t about what a film grosses at the box office. The true tale is told when production budgets, P&A, talent participations and other costs collide with box office grosses and ancillary revenues from VOD to DVD and TV. To get close to that mysterious end of the equation, Deadline is repeating our Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament for 2019, using data culled by seasoned and trusted sources.
THE FILM
In the wake of Sony teaming with Disney’s Marvel to fold Spider-Man into the latter’s Avengers movies, the Culver City, CA studio has reaped great spoils with Spider-Man: Far From Home becoming their highest grossing move of all-time with $1.13 billion, beating their former B.O. champ MGM’s 007 title Skyfall ($1.1 billion). Far From Home followed Avengers: Endgame’ on the calendar by two months, launching over the July 4th holiday — brilliant timing for the webslinger as Marvel fans were still thirsting for more after that mammoth hit. Involving Marvel boss Kevin Feige on the last two Spider-Man movies was a great key to their success, and he partnered again on the Sony sequel with indie filmmaker Jon Watts. Sony and Disney clashed over terms for a bit in the wake of Far From Home‘s success on future Spider-Man movies, eventually agreeing to a third one starring Tom Holland whereby Disney would co-finance 25% for a 25% stake of the next film (versus Disney’s previous deal which was 5% of the first dollar gross on Spider-Man: Homecoming and Far From Home). In addition, Holland’s Spider-Man would appear in another Disney/Marvel movie with elements of the Sony-Disney shared Spider-Man mythology to be sprinkled into the Culver City studio’s further extension of the Spider-Man franchise.
THE BOX SCORE
Here are the costs and revenues as our experts see them:
THE BOTTOM LINE:
Far From Home yields $339M in net profit after $787M total global revenues against $448M total WW costs, which is more than Homecoming‘s $200.1M profit (no. 7 in the 2017 Deadline profit tournament). Disney owns the merchandise rights on Spider-Man, and those are not factored into pic’s financial rundown here. The estimated participations of $40M include Sony’s set of low single digit profit share (~5%) after cash breakeven for Holland and Jake Gyllenhaal in addition to extra monies for producers Feige and Amy Pascal. Far From Home was also responsible for Sony seeing a 73% rise in its 2Q 2019 profits for the July-September period, the third straight Q2 to see significant increases in its film segment.