One can make a resonable case that up until 2023 there had been only two good Indiana Jones
movies — the original and
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade — as well as two okay-ish movies —
Temple of Doom and
Crystal Skull. This would be a value judgement based on the quality
of the films rather than a statement of each film's financial success as all four films
were solidly profitable.
Then
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny arrived in 2023. To make matters worse
for Disney, the budget was huge — possibly $300M — with a marketing campaign
to go with it. The intent, clearly, was to hand the franchise baton off to Phoebe Waller-Bridge
so that the franchise could continue to be milked for years to come. That isn't going
to happen.
| | Box Office | | Box Office |
|---|
| Year: Title | Time | Intl | Domestic | Total | I/D Ratio | Budget | vs Budget |
|---|
| 1981: Raiders of the lost Ark | 1:55 | $141M | $212M | $353M | 0.7× | $18M | 19.6× |
| 1984: Temple of Doom | 1:58 | $153M | $179M | $332M | 0.9× | $28M | 11.9× |
| 1989: Last Crusade | 2:07 | $277M | $197M | $474M | 1.4× | $48M | 9.9× |
| 2008: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull | 2:02 | $474M | $317M | $791M | 1.5× | $185M | 4.3× |
|
| 2023: Dial of Destiny | 2:34 | $209M | $175M | $384M | 1.2× | $300M | 1.3× |
- Note that Dial of Destiny has the lowest domestic box office of any of the five
movies not even accounting for inflation.
We can use average US movie ticket prices for the various years to create
adjusted domestic box office totals. In effect, we can calculate a guess
for the number of domestic tickets sold per movie.
| Domestic | Ticket | Tickets |
|---|
| Year: Title | Box Office | Price | Sold |
|---|
| 1981: Raiders of the lost Ark | $212M | $2.78 | 76.3M |
| 1984: Temple of Doom | $179M | $3.36 | 53.3M |
| 1989: Last Crusade | $197M | $3.99 | 49.4M |
| 2008: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull | $317M | $7.18 | 44.2M |
| 2023: Dial of Destiny | $175M | $10.53 | 16.6M |
Domestic ticket price data from here. The
ticket price data is far from perfect, but much better than nothing. The domestic box office drop
off is much starker when viewed this way. The domestic audience had been slowly fading away over
time even before Dial of Destiny and the international box office had saved Last Crusade
and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The worldwide audience collapsed with Dial of Destiny.
- If we assume that marketing and distribution costs total about 50% as much as the
production budget the Disney spent $450M producing, marketing and distributing Dial
of Destiny. If we also assume the Disney gets about 50% of the gross ticket
revenues, then the first four Indiana Jones movies were solidly profitable (profits
in order, of: $149M $124, $165 and $108M) while Dial of Destiny lost around $250M
($450M - ½*$384M = $258M).
Leading up to
The Little Mermaid Disney had been cranking out
successful live action remakes of their animated movies. The box
office returns up through 2019 were great. Then covid hit, Disney
released a few movies straight to streaming via Disney+ and in 2023 Disney
released
The Little Mermaid to theaters. The box office magic
seemed to vanish.
| | Box Office | | Box Office |
|---|
| Year: Title | Time | Intl | Domestic | Total | I/D Ratio | Budget | vs Budget |
|---|
| 1996: 101 Dalmatians | 1:43 | $185M | $136M | $321M | 1.4× | $67M | 4.8× |
| 2015: Cinderella | 1:46 | $341M | $201M | $542M | 1.7× | $90M | 6.0× |
| 2016: The Jungle Book | 1:46 | $604M | $364M | $998M | 1.7× | $175M | 5.7× |
| 2017: Beauty and the Beast | 2:09 | $762M | $504M | $1,266M | 1.5× | $254M | 5.0× |
| 2019: Dumbo | 1:52 | $239M | $115M | $353M | 2.1× | $170M | 2.1× |
| 2019: Aladdin | 2:08 | $699M | $356M | $1,054M | 2.0× | $183M | 5.8× |
| 2019: The Lion King | 1:58 | $1,113M | $544M | $1,657M | 2.0× | $250M | 6.6× |
|
| 2019: Lady and the Tramp | 1:44 | Disney+ |
| 2020: Mulan | 1:55 | Disney+ |
| 2022: Pinocchio | 1:45 | Disney+ |
| 2023: The Little Mermaid | 2:15 | $271M | $298M | $570M | 0.91× | $250M | 2.3× |
- Rounding up a little bit for The Jungle Book, four of the five live action remakes released before
covid grossed $1 billion or more world wide. Dumbo was the exception.
Disney had good reason to expect The Little Mermaid to do well at the box office
though Pinocchio might have provided some warning.
- Dumbo is the only pre-covid live action movie remake released to theaters that
grossed less than about 4.5× the estimated production costs.
Financially, The Little Mermaid did almost as badly as Dumbo, though I expect
it to be more useful to Disney on Disney+ than Dumbo.
- Pinocchio probably would have bombed at the theaters. It received six
Golden Raspberry nominations.
- The Little Mermaid has been criticized for its runtime compared to the
original animated version (135 minutes vs 83, so 60% longer), but
Beauty and the Beast (129 minutes vs 84, so 50%+ longer) did fine. In
addition, live action Aladdin was 128 minutes and also did fine.
- Most of the box office difference between The Little Mermaid and the live-action
remakes of Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast is the international
box office. For Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast the international
box office was 2× and 1.5× the domestic box office. For
The Little Mermaid the international box office is actually less than
the domestic box office. If international audiences had come to see The Little
Mermaid at the same frequency relative to domestic audiences then the world wide
box office would have been about $750M and the movie would be considered a solid
success.
The excess dropoff of the international box office shows up for the Marvel movies, too,
as well as for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
- One hypothesis for why The Little Mermaid did poorly at the box office was
that the lead actress, Halle Bailey
is black and audiences did not want to see a black Ariel. This may be the case, but the
US box office for The Little Mermaid was 85% that of Aladdin: $298M vs $353M. It
was the international box office that collapsed versus Aladdin: $271M vs. $699M.
I favor Aladdin as a comparison for The Little Mermaid instead of The Lion King
because both Aladdin and The Little Mermaid were released before
a Memorial Day weekend (May 24, 2019 and May 26, 2023) and both have human-ish lead characters
rather than animals.
A reasonable hypothesis/explanation is that Disney is losing its international audience.
This seems to be part (but only part!) of the problem with the most recent Indiana Jones movie.
It is part of the problem for the post-covid Marvel movies. Pixar seems uneffected by this.
John Lasseter had been with Pixar since the early days and directed
Toy Story,
A Bug's Life,
Toy Story 2 and
Cars while producing many other
Pixar movies. He left Pixar due to sexual misconduct and the last Pixar movie he
seemed to have been associated with was
Toy Story 4. It may be no coincidence
that this was the last box office hit for Pixar.
| | Box Office | | Box Office |
|---|
| Year: Title | Time | Intl | Domestic | Total | I/D Ratio | Budget | vs Budget |
|---|
| 2016: Finding Dory | 1:37 | $542M | $486M | $1,029M | 1.1× | $200M | 5.1× |
| 2017: Cars 3 | 1:42 | $231M | $153M | $384M | 1.5× | $175M | 2.2× |
| 2017: Coco | 1:45 | $604M | $210M | $814M | 3.0× | $175M | 4.7× |
| 2018: Incredibles 2 | 1:58 | $635M | $609M | $1,243M | 1.0× | $200M | 6.2× |
| 2019: Toy Story 4 | 1:40 | $640M | $434M | $1,074M | 1.5× | $200M | 5.4× |
|
| 2020: Onward | 1:42 | $80M | $62M | $142M | 1.3× | $200M | N/A |
| 2020: Soul | 1:40 | Disney+ |
| 2021: Luca | 1:35 | Disney+ |
| 2022: Turning Red | 1:40 | Disney+ |
| 2022: Lightyear | 1:45 | $108M | $118M | $226M | 0.9× | $200M | 1.1× |
| 2023: Elemental | 1:41 | $341M | $154M | $496M | 2.2× | $200M | 2.5× |
- Onward (2020) was released just as covid was hitting. The box office numbers are down because
theaters were closing just as the movie was released.
- Of the five Pixar movies released to theaters before covid hit, the average world wide box
office gross was about $900M. The median box office gross of the five was $1,029M.
Of the two Pixar movies released since the theaters re-opened, the average world wide box
office gross was $361M ... which is quite a bit lower than the average of $900M/movie before.
- Unlike The Little Mermaid the box office falloff seems to be fairly uniform between domestic
and international. The median international/domestic ratio before covid was 1.5× and the
average of the two post-covid theater releases is similar.
Marvel had spent over a decade building up to the
Avengers: Endgame movie that was successfully
released in 2019. The Marvel movies post-2019 have underwhelmed.
Iron Man (2008) saw a world wide box office of under $600M, but with a budget of $140M
this was successful and profitable. One possibility is that if Marvel intends to 'reboot' the
Marvel franchise (which Marvel very much seems to want to do) they are going to have to accept
that early movies in the reboot will be less successful than the movies that concluded the
last arc. With lower expected box office returns Marvel will need to keep production budgets
more in check — $250M/movie is a lot more than $140M/movie.
Alternatly, Marvel may have been lucky/fortunate on the previous go-around and expecting
to be able to crank out another decade long money machine based on minor Marvel superheroes
may be expecting too much.
| | Box Office | | Box Office |
|---|
| Year: Title | Time | Intl | Domestic | Total | I/D Ratio | Budget | vs Budget |
|---|
| 2008: Iron Man | 2:06 | $267 | $319M | $585M | 0.8× | $140M | 4.3× |
| : | : | : | : | : | : | : | : |
| 2017: Thor: Ragnarok | 2:10 | $540M | $315M | $855M | 1.7× | $180M | 4.8× |
| 2017: Black Panther | 2:14 | $649M | $700M | $1,350M | 0.9× | $200M | 6.8× |
| 2018: Avengers: Infinity War | 2:29 | $1,374M | $679M | $2,052M | 2.0× | $316M | 6.5× |
| 2018: Ant-Man and the Wasp | 1:58 | $406M | $217M | $623M | 1.9× | $200M | 3.1× |
| 2019: Captain Marvel | 2:03 | $705M | $427M | $1,131M | 1.7× | $160M | 7.1× |
| 2019: Avengers: Endgame | 3:01 | $1,941M | $858M | $2,799M | 2.3× | $356M | 7.9× |
| 2019: Spider-Man: Far from Home | 2:09 | $741M | $391M | $1,132M | 1.9× | $160M | 7.1× |
|
| 2021: Black Widow | 2:14 | $196M | $184M | $380M | 1.1× | $288M | N/A |
| 2021: Shang-Chi and ... | 2:12 | $208M | $225M | $432M | 0.9× | $150M | 2.9× |
| 2021: Eternals | 2:36 | $237M | $165M | $402M | 1.4× | $236M | 1.7× |
| 2021: Spider-Man: No Way Home | 2:28 | $1,108M | $814M | $1,922M | 1.4× | $200M | 9.6× |
| 2022: Doctor Strange in ... | 2:06 | $544M | $411M | $956M | 1.3× | $294M | 3.3× |
| 2022: Thor: Love and Thunder | 1:58 | $418M | $343M | $761M | 1.2× | $250M | 3.0× |
| 2022: Black Panther ... | 2:41 | $454M | $405M | $859M | 1.1× | $200M | 4.3× |
| 2023: Ant-Man and the Wasp ... | 2:04 | $262M | $215M | $476M | 1.2× | $200M | 2.4× |
| 2023: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 | 2:30 | $482M | $357M | $846M | 1.4× | $250M | 3.4× |
| 2023: The Marvels | 2:30 | | | | 1.5× | $220M | |
- Production budgets are often educated guesses. In addition, some of
the figures are pre-tax-break and some are not. They should be treated
as rough values rather than assuming precision.
- Black Widow was streamed while it was still in the theaters (drawing a
lawsuit from Scarlett Johansson, who was owed money based on the movie's gross revenue) so the
box office vs budget calculation makes little sense.
- The two Spider Man movies are from Sony and not Disney, and weirdly only
sorta connected to Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe.
I include them because Spider-Man: No Way Home provides a counter-example
to the hypothesis that movie goers are suffering from 'super hero fatigue.'
Marvel fatigue is still a possibility.
- The three Guardians of the Galaxy movies are seeing the box office revenue
hold steady:
| Box Office |
|---|
| Year: Title | Intl | Domestic | Worldwide |
|---|
| 2014: Guardians of the Galaxy | $440M | $333M | $773M |
| 2017: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 | $474M | $390M | $864M |
| 2023: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 | $487M | $359M | $846M |
Guardians of the Galaxy, however, isn't putting out three movies per year along
with a collection of streamed TV shows.
And technically Guardians of the Galaxy is part of the MCU, but it seems to
effectively operate as its own universe and doesn't intereact with Thor,
Captain America, Iron Man, etc.
- The median domestic box office for the Marvel movies in the three years prior to covid
(so not counting Spider-Man: Far from Home) was about $550M. Not
a single Marvel movie 2021 - 2023 (so, again, not counting
Spider-Man: No Way Home) has exceeded $411M at the domestic box office.
In addition, the international/domestic box office ratio has gone from around 1.8×
prior to 2020 to around 1.2× after, with no movie exceding 1.4×
- The Phase One MCU movies (Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2,
Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, The Avengers) weren't doing great
until The Avengers (2012) came out. Box office results per movie were this:
| Box Office |
|---|
| Year: Title | Intl | Domestic | Worldwide |
|---|
| 2008: Iron Man | $267M | $319M | $585M |
| 2008: The Incredible Hulk | $139M | $135M | $265M |
| 2010: Iron Man 2 | $312M | $312M | $624M |
| 2011: Thor | $268M | $181M | $449M |
| 2011: Captain America: The First Avenger | $194M | $177M | $371M |
| 2012: The Avengers | $897M | $623M | $1,521M |
Most of these, as Marvel movies, would be considered flops or borderline flops today.
And the post-covid Marvel movies have better box office results and are considered
to have underperformed expectations.
One hypothesis is that if one is going to build up to a "big"
movie then the box office results of the movies building up to that
movie won't be as impressive.
Another way to say this is that sports playoff games and championship games draw more viewership
than regular season games. If one intends to structure movies this way
then one should expect similar results.
One can also note that Iron Man is clearly carrying the franchise during Phase One.
Both Iron Man movies had domestic box office results over $300M and none of the other
movies were as much as $200M. I don't think the current Marvel phase has an equivalent
character. I think Captain Marvel was supposed to take the role of leading
the franchise. If so, it doesn't seem to be working.
- Ten days into The Marvels theatrical release it is looking possible that
the movie does not even gross enough to match production costs. Ten days in it has
grossed $65M domestically. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny had grossed
$122M by the tenth day and finished with only $174M at the domestic box office.
The Marvels is seeing a much larger box-office drop off than
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, though, so that might be the best
case.
A similar day-10 vs. final ratio for The Marvels would see a domestic box
office of about $92M. This would imply an international box office of something
like $140M and a total box office take of around $230M. That may be the "good"
scenario for this movie.
It might be helpful to examine other franchises to see if there
is some sort of industry wide trend.
The Fast and the Furious
| Box Office |
|---|
| Year: Title | Intl | Domestic | Worldwide |
|---|
| 2001: The Fast and the Furious | $63M | $145M | $207M |
| 2003: 2 Fast 2 Furious | $109M | $127M | $236M |
| 2006: The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift | $96M | $63M | $159M |
| 2009: Fast & Furious | $205M | $155M | $360M |
| 2011: Fast Five | $416M | $210M | $626M |
| 2013: Fast & Furious 6 | $550M | $239M | $789M |
| 2015: Furious 7 | $1,162M | $353M | $1,515M |
| 2017: The Fate of the Furious | $1,010M | $226M | $1,236M |
| 2019: Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw | $587M | $174M | $761M |
| 2021: F9: The Fast Saga | $553M | $173M | $726M |
| 2023: Fast X | $559M | $146M | $705M |
The Fast and Furious box office is down from the peaks of 2105 and 2017, but still holding up well. The
international vs domestic split is very interesting with the 4.7× international vs domestic
split for
The Fate of the Furious being amazingly high.
Walt Disney Animation Studios
With
Wish coming out, Disney's non-Pixar animation studio
is worth examining. Walt Disney Animation Studios, too, is seeing the
same drop off as all the other Disney franchises.
| | Box Office | | Box Office |
|---|
| Year: Title | Time | Intl | Domestic | Total | I/D Ratio | Budget | vs Budget |
|---|
| 2016: Zootopia | 1:48 | $683M | $341M | $1,024M | 2.0× | $150M | 6.9× |
| 2016: Moana | 1:47 | $395M | $249M | $643M | 1.6× | $150M | 4.3× |
| 2018: Ralph Breaks the Internet | 1:52 | $328M | $201M | $529M | 1.6× | $175M | 3.0× |
| 2019: Frozen II | 1:43 | $973M | $477M | $1,450M | 2.0× | $150M | 9.7× |
|
| 2021: Raya and the Last Dragon | 1:47 | $76M | $55M | $130M | 1.4× | $100M | 1.3× |
| 2021: Encanto | 1:42 | $161M | $96M | $257M | 1.7× | $150M | 1.7× |
| 2022: Strange World | 1:42 | $36M | $38M | $74M | 1.0× | $180M | 0.4× |
| 2023: Wish | 1:35 | | | | 0.5× | $200M | |
Unlike Pixar, it is also seeing the International audience drop away faster
than the domestic audience in the same way that Marvel and the live action re-make
movies are seeing.