Captain America: Brave New World

[battlewraith]

28 minutes ago, ZacKing said:

 

No, it's not doing well.  

 

100 million is about 1/10th of what this movie will need to make just to break even.  It's done better than The Marvels (which honestly isn't hard to do), but worse than Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.  Given the very lackluster reviews, we can fully expect the box office numbers for CA: BNW to crater the following weekend. 

 

 

No way this film comes close to breaking even. 

 

I said SO FAR. I would say given the controversy and troubled production history, these numbers are pretty good. Definitely better than I expected. I said nothing about it breaking even or anything like that. 

[Techwright]

1 hour ago, ZacKing said:

 

No, it has not beaten the opening weekend numbers for Winter Solider. 

 

Winter Soldier - $95,023,721

BNW - $87,800,000

 

And for Winter Soldier, that's 2014 dollars, which were 33% more valuable than today.  So had it come out this past weekend, Winter Soldier would have made $126,681,034.85 against a budget of $170,000,000.  (2025: $226,635,788.39)

 

Brave New World's budget, though, I'm not going to be able to put down cleanly, at least for the moment.  On the one hand, it is publicly stated by Marvel/Disney as $180,000,000.  But there's a lot odd about that.  First, it's a lot lower in today's dollars than Winter Soldier, for example.  (Additionally, Captain America: The First Avenger is generally considered the least expensive of the series and it comes in at $196,429,698.72 in 2025 dollars) Second, there's been, from what I've read, extensive reshoots.  Reports just 8 months ago were stating figures of up to $100 million for just one major reshoot.  The stated budget previously was $275 million before reshoots.   In trying to be fair, I'll point out that several of these reporting sites sounded more like ones who like to egg on a train wreck, and likely had very light insider knowledge with much more guess work.  

 

Some of you have ties to the films industry.  Can you tell me definitively if a company states what the budget for a film was, must it legally be a straightforward, honest statement?  Or is there a lot of tricks and wiggle room used in the reporting?

 

 

EDIT:  Apologies if you see any duplicates of this post.  The connection to the forums went crazy when I clicked the save button.  I think I've cleaned them all up though.

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 12:50 AM by Techwright

[UltraAlt]

On 2/3/2025 at 10:13 PM, biostem said:

That makes me wonder - just how important was the vita-ray exposure part of the process, and how was Red Skulls serum administered.  From a poetic standpoint, I interpret Red Skull's appearance as reflective of his inner evil, but what about...

 

After this happened:

"...Timely's corporate successor Atlas Comics relaunched the character in 1953 in Young Men #24, where Captain America appears alongside the wartime heroes Human Torch and Toro, which was followed by a revival of Captain America Comics in 1954 written by Stan Lee and drawn by John Romita.[28] In the spirit of the Cold War and McCarthyism, the character was billed as "Captain America, Commie Smasher" and faced enemies associated with the Soviet Union.[29] The series was a commercial failure, and was cancelled after just three issues.[29] Romita attributed the series' failure to the changing political climate, particularly the public opposition to the Korean War; the character subsequently fell out of active publication for nearly a decade, with Romita noting that "for a while, 'Captain America' was a dirty word" ..." - wiki

 

There was a retcon to explain away "Captain America, Commie Smasher".

I think it was long these lines:

It wasn't actually Steve Rogers. It was someone else that had been given the secret soldier formula but he wasn't bathed in vita-rays. Without the vita-rays to stabilize the formula, the "Commie Smasher" Captain America was driven insane and that was what made him believe that what he was doing was correct (supporting McCarthyism).

 

The Bucky that ran around with "Commie Smasher" Captain America later shows up knocking on Steve Rogers door ... and I'm sure you can figure out how Steve reacted to that.

[Troo]

3 hours ago, ZacKing said:

No, it's not doing well.  

 

100 million is about 1/10th of what this movie will need to make just to break even.  It's done better than The Marvels (which honestly isn't hard to do), but worse than Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.  Given the very lackluster reviews, we can fully expect the box office numbers for CA: BNW to crater the following weekend. 

 

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2597421825/?ref_=bo_hm_rd

 

I love folks trying to armchair quarterback Disney. Really?!

Folks think Disney is losing money? 

Even on movies you and I may not like, they are making money. Even when they spend more than they bring in they are making money. 

It's just they are playing 3d chess while us knuckle draggers are playing checkers.

 

 

Edited Tuesday at 02:24 AM by Troo

[ShardWarrior]

22 minutes ago, Troo said:

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2597421825/?ref_=bo_hm_rd

 

I love folks trying to armchair quarterback Disney. Really?!

Folks think Disney is losing money? 

Even on movies you and I may not like, they are making money. Even when they spend more than they bring in they are making money. 

It's just they are playing 3d chess while us knuckle draggers are playing checkers.

 

No one here will ever know the real numbers involved, so you are "armchair quarterbacking" just as much as anyone else.  With that said, if you believe Disney only spent only $180 million to make this film, I have a bridge and some swamp land you may be interested in.  It has been widely reported and confirmed this film went through multiple re-shoots (at least 3), and it is widely reported now that the budget Disney is sharing publicly is the budget for the re-shoots only, not the entire film or its marketing.  

 

Of course studios like Disney can do all kinds of creative things with their bookkeeping to make a film look like it made a lot of money or made very little or lost money.  Film studios do this all the time and why many directors and actors dislike the idea of getting a percentage of a films gross because studios use their creative accounting to make a film look like it lost money so they do not have to pay anyone their cut.  I have seen many interviews with various actors, directors and producers over the years who have discussed this very topic. 

 

As for CA: BNW, I do not see this film doing well.  Reviews look to be "meh" at best.  I expect we will see a huge drop off in ticket sales for next weekend. 

[Troo]

36 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

No one here will ever know the real numbers involved, so you are "armchair quarterbacking" just as much as anyone else.

 

really, 'just as much as anyone else'. thats what your are gonna hang you hat on? 🙂 

 

and you seemed to have missed my point while basically agreeing with it.

 

Edited Tuesday at 03:29 AM by Troo

[Luminara]

17 minutes ago, ShardWarrior said:

No one here will ever know the real numbers involved

 

I can find out.

 

I'll need a private jet, a particle accelerator and sixteen heads of broccoli.

 

I'll start rounding up the cats right now.

[Troo]

dont forget the cat sitter and the person who gathers the cat milk for you.

[InvaderStych]

2 hours ago, Techwright said:

Some of you have ties to the films industry.  Can you tell me definitively if a company states what the budget for a film was, must it legally be a straightforward, honest statement?  Or is there a lot of tricks and wiggle room used in the reporting?

 

Tough to say without so much conjecture as to render the discussion effectively hypothetical. Also, this isn't my area of expertise, but I'll take a stab at it ...

 

Generally speaking a published "It Cost This Much To Make" statement shown the the general audience may or may not include the costs of the script which could have been written for hire (likely with a Disney property like this) or acquired directly from a writer, it probably includes post-production budget but is unlikely to include distribution costs (which no longer involves printing lots of reels to send to theaters, but does still cost money), rarely they include the costs of marketing, advertising, cutting trailers, press-junkets, and all the assorted things related to that (but I've seen them where that is included and the associated statements say so), and almost never publish what sort of tax incentives they'll be claiming after the fact from filming in places that incentivize such things along with other assorted write-offs and accounting trickery they can and do use to spend less money in actual fact that they're telling the public it cost them to make the thing.

 

I don't think they're under any obligation to tell the general public exact numbers/details, but they are beholden to the accountants, the unions (for paying cast and crew according to the various agreements), and of course the tax collectors.

 

@ThaOGDreamWeaver is most likely far more knowledgeable on that side of things than I am - I was just a "below-the-line" grunt for the most part. 😉 

[BrandX]

6 hours ago, ZacKing said:

 

No, it's not doing well.  

 

100 million is about 1/10th of what this movie will need to make just to break even.  It's done better than The Marvels (which honestly isn't hard to do), but worse than Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.  Given the very lackluster reviews, we can fully expect the box office numbers for CA: BNW to crater the following weekend. 

 

 

No way this film comes close to breaking even. 

 

The budget is at 180 million.   So, 450 to break even (as they say it takes 2.5x the budget for profit).  The movie is currently sitting at 192 million.

 

Now, will it hit that break even spot?  I don't know.  I'm inclined to say not at this point, but had to say.

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

21 hours ago, InvaderStych said:

@ThaOGDreamWeaver is most likely far more knowledgeable on that side of things than I am

I HAVE BEEN SUMMONED... And thanks for the flattery 

 

Now what was that question again...

[peers over glasses]

21 hours ago, InvaderStych said:

Can you tell me definitively if a company states what the budget for a film was, must it legally be a straightforward, honest statement?  Or is there a lot of tricks and wiggle room used in the reporting?

 

 

[staggers back into thread, wheezing, tear-stained with streaks of mascara running down cheeks]

Oh sweet Freya in Asgard. That's great. That's the funniest thing I've... I mean really... I...

...Oh wait, you were SERIOUS? 'Scuse me...

 

 

Okay. OKAY. Right. Answer. Serious DW. Here we go.

The answer to that is somewhere between "no" and "hell to the no".

This is gonna get kinda long, so get yourself a coffee and buckle up.

 

Quantum accountancy* is what keeps Whollyodd going - as I've whinged about too many times before, I've been on the wrong end of it more than once.

Let's start with listed budgets and breakevens.

 

As m'learned coll' @BrandX correctly mentions above, 2.5x to 3.5x budget is industry rule of thumb for "breakeven".

("Bomb" is anything that doesn't go over its own budget, up to about 1.5x-2.5x.

Case in point: our favourite flick Morbius made $165m off a $75m production budget, but is still considered a bomb because it was a large upfront budget, a cape flick and had a proper star. A smaller indie flick doesn't carry that kind of expectation).

19 hours ago, BrandX said:

Now, will it hit that break even spot?  I don't know.  I'm inclined to say not at this point, but had to say.

 

Allow me to introduce you to the concept of the rolling breakeven.

 

A production budget, which would be stated in a press release to IMDB, Variety or Deadline, is widely understood to be the actual line cost of making the flick.

Actors. Directors. Techs. Grips and Best Boys (not the kind from WeHo). Transport and Craft Services. And of course, all the CGI nerds.

 

It's also less widely understood to be

(a) an estimate at the time the PR went out which probably won't have the works wrapped in - fair enough - and

(b) polished a bit to make the studio look good.  Either up, so they can look like they can still afford to make big-buck movies, or down, to hide any mistakes.

 

There are an awful lot of things you can include or exclude to make it look better or worse, depending on who's asking: whether it's your shareholders (better), the actors and any other suckers who took net points (worse) or the IRS (hideous).

 

Or for investors, both at once. You might have noticed that about half the creds on recent flicks are for financing companies. Depending on how these companies and their deals are structured, unless the flick is a Morbius-level bomb, they fully expect to make their money back plus their 5%-15% vig... 

 

...while simultaneously making a line loss that they can write off against investors' tax bills, or get payments/tax refunds from nation/state support. (It can be taken to extremes, depending on your local tax regime. This kind of stuff is what funded much of Uwe Boll's reign of evil.)

 

It all depends on what line items you add and when you report them to who.

For example, does the stated budget and revenue include or exclude:

• Speculative development costs
• Reshoots, post-completion edits, internationalisation/subtitling, airline edits? These are all fairly normal things but where and when you include them matters.
• The cost of upfront financing - loan arrangement fees, bonds, reinsurance?
• The cost of marketing?
• A percentage for the big names who took gross points (a cut of the upfront revenue: famously Alec Guinness, Jack Nicholson and The Rock are big winners here.) 
• Upfront funding from streamers - and do you count those as credits (income), a future cost (loan with interest), or both?
• A "licence fee" for getting it onto a streaming platform - even if you are/own the streaming platform in question?

 

Fun stuff. So, exactly how bad can this mess get?

 

One cape flick we can mostly** agree was both good and a hit was the OG 1989 Batman.

$411m worldwide / $253m domestic at close off a $48m budget - an 8.5x ratio.

 

(And while Marvel may have made a factory of it, the Tim Burton flicks showed you could make a very decent flick from this kind of property, with Proper Actors and Dramatic Stuff an' all, selling a metric flarktonne of lunchboxes, and having Prince write a banging soundtrack for you.

Let's skip quietly over the other two flicks. Even, and I say this advisedly, even the Bat-Nipples).

Profitable, critically successful, birthed a franchise and arguably a genre. Unqualified success.

 

Except it's not a hit, at least on paper. Still isn't 35 years later.

 

Depending on which calculation you use, by 1991, Batman was $35.1m down - and still quietly losing more money every day, thanks to interest charges from loans arranged. (And WB likely charged a fee to the Bat-production company to do so. Again, you'll notice a lot of films are their own prodco, so that their parent studios can charge or credit line items to/from them as they feel the need to.) And when the flick transferred to HBO online and then MAX, more fees can run round the block for streaming rights and/or charges.

 

Similarly, both MIB and MIB2 were palpable hits (6.5x and 4x budget), but to this day, still haven't made an above-the-line profit.

Leaving those who took a "net points" deal, like writer Ed Solomon, with exactly zero revenue. Nada. Nil. Zip.

Same bum deal for Stan on the Sony Spiderman movie (until he sued Marvel) : despite the flick taking over $800m, Sony claimed it never cleared dime one.

And they're far from the most egregious examples.

 

This can also occasionally work backwards. Some of you may have been (un)fortunate enough to see Matt McConaughaughanaghnhey's 2005 film Sahara, which attempted to cast him in the Indiana Jones hero mould. Didn't work so well for him or at the box office, netting $120m off a $160m budget. Ouch.

 

That kind of thing does not make a studio look good - so you can start stripping off chargeable line items like development or financing and hiding them elsewhere. And if you've got multiple different movie prodcos working, you can shift or share line items such as development or FX onto the balance sheet of a successful flick - making a good project less profitable for tax/revenue share reasons, and making your little mistake less of an embarrassment. With these tactics, Sahara's budget magically shrank by nearly $30m.

 

So - and I apologise for the length of this answer - Hollyweird sits on a throne of lies, on seven hills of broken dreams and fantasy bank statements. 

And if you ever go there, have fun, enjoy the ride, but be wary - and always keep your receipts.

 

*Quantum accountancy: money can be in the states of present, absent, in transit, "but it's exposure", or spent on a yacht hire in Cannes to promo something else.

**Look, a lot of people liked it and without it we wouldn't have got Michelle Pfeiffer as the Cat. So shush.

Edited yesterday at 01:32 AM by ThaOGDreamWeaver

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

14 hours ago, ZacKing said:

 

No, it has not beaten the opening weekend numbers for Winter Solider. 

 

Winter Soldier - $95,023,721

BNW - $87,800,000

 

Oddly, we're both right for once. Behold another example of Quantum Accounting.

 

Forbes has your $88m figure.

Empire puts it at just north of $100m domestic, plus $92.4m international.

Confusing, no?

 

But Variety and BoxOfficeMojo point out it's a holiday weekend that included President's Day - so $88.5m over the regular weekend, and another $12m from the Monday.

And by Whollyodd rules, you can count the whole five-day weekend from Thursday late previews - which you can count as part of Friday's take - to end Monday for PR purposes.

(Wish I got five-day weekends.)

 

If we included the Monday after Winter Soldier's release, they'd have been very slightly ahead: but that was a regular Monday, so a much lower take would have been expected.

Edited Tuesday at 01:42 PM by ThaOGDreamWeaver

[ShardWarrior]

11 hours ago, Troo said:

really, 'just as much as anyone else'. thats what your are gonna hang you hat on? 🙂 

 

and you seemed to have missed my point while basically agreeing with it.

 

No idea what you are on about and no, I did not miss your point at all. 

[Techwright]

On 2/18/2025 at 8:42 AM, ThaOGDreamWeaver said:

 

Oddly, we're both right for once. Behold another example of Quantum Accounting.

 

Forbes has your $88m figure.

Empire puts it at just north of $100m domestic, plus $92.4m international.

Confusing, no?

 

But Variety and BoxOfficeMojo point out it's a holiday weekend that included President's Day - so $88.5m over the regular weekend, and another $12m from the Monday.

And by Whollyodd rules, you can count the whole five-day weekend from Thursday late previews - which you can count as part of Friday's take - to end Monday for PR purposes.

(Wish I got five-day weekends.)

 

If we included the Monday after Winter Soldier's release, they'd have been very slightly ahead: but that was a regular Monday, so a much lower take would have been expected.

 

This makes weird sense.  One question: are holiday weekends bound by Thursday to Monday?  I could have sworn  I'd seen some reporting in years past where Wednesday was a starting point.   In similar fashion, what happens if the holiday falls on a Tuesday rather than Monday?  Or if there's a double "holiday": say Christmas Eve (unofficial but often taken) on the Monday and Christmas Day on the Tuesday?

[ThaOGDreamWeaver]

Weekends are generally Fridays (inc Thursday's lates) to Mondays. If a Federal holiday falls within that weekend, they'll adjust to include it.

 

Christmas Day last fell on a Tuesday in 2018, and Aquaman and Mary Poppins Returns both released into that weekend.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3108800001/weekend/?ref_=bo_rl_tab#tabs

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl3263137281/weekend/?ref_=bo_rl_tab#tabs

 

And there you go: it reports both the "normal" weekend and the extended weekend from Friday 21st (including Thursday's lates) to Tuesday 25th.

That takes Aquaman from $67m to over $100m domestic, and Poppins nearly doubles from $23.5m to $41m.