I was just turned on to this link fromanother board. It's amazinging how much they sink into these movies, and how much they make.
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/budgets.html

Hmmm...some of the numbers don't jibe. How can a movie budgeted at $115M, that earns a worldwide gross of over $70M, be listed as almost an $80M loss?

Boy, you have an eye for details!

Yeah, some of those number are out of whack. But, even if they made a whole "0" of a mistake the producers of Blair Witch have gotta be smiling. Love or hate the movie you can't argure with a 354,614.29% profit margin, hell if it was only 35 000 or even 3500% you still gotta give credit where it's due. Those guys should be studied by marketing students for that effort.

For an explanaition of how movies can make millions and still "Not make a dime" read FATAL SUBTRACTION

It's the story of the Art Buchwald lawsuit over "Coming to America" with Eddie Murphy. That's the lawsuit (Or suits) that exposed the funny bookeeping, that never yields a NET for a movie. A terrifyingly good read.

Check out the footnote:

"The profit and loss figures are very rough estimates based on the assumption that 50% of box office receipts were returned to the studio."

So a $70 million dollar gross means a $35 million dollar return. $115M cost - $35M return = $80 M loss.

A year or so ago, I took some traveling-road-show class on producing movies (a two day course that travels around). It was interesting and I learned a lot about the money end of business, though it doesn't pertain to me (I just wanted see what it was like)!

However the instructor said that whenever Hollywood says that a movie cost $100,000,000 to make, you can estimate that it only cost a fraction of that, sometimes 75% less - and that the quoted figures is for business and publicity.

Any validity to that?

You can get a feel for how "true" something is by looking at the state of politics today.

The cost of a movie is an "undefined" term, in the legal sense. This is why there are so many lawsuits of "net" profit deals. There's never any net.

If you really want to know how Machiavellian the big studio accounting can get... read FATAL SUBTRACTION. It's really entertaining AND enlightening.

I may do that, Richard. Sounds like an interesting read. I doubt anyone would admit to inflating costs anyway!!! :)