It’s an understatement to say that Disney’s Marvel Studios department has lost some of its strike force in recent years.
In 2019, it seemed that the studio could do nothing by releasing Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame, both of which grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office, and the latter grossed 2. 8 billion dollars, making it the highest-grossing film in history. However, since the start of the pandemic, none of Marvel’s films has grossed more than a billion dollars and the organization has released a number of productions that have been criticized.
In March, Marvel fired its visual effects manager, Victoria Alonso, and last month, overworked at its former branch, voted for the first time to unionize with the International Alliance of Theater Employees.
Despite those clouds, all financial statements filed for Marvel films released since early last year show that they have hedged their box office production prices, including the much-hated Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
In fact, research into the thirteen Marvel films that were publicly recorded on their monetary returns shows that only two ended up in the red. That’s perhaps the studio’s biggest gamble.
The pandemic has put Disney on the ropes. It raised the curtain on the films it produced, suspended its cruises, closed its outlets that promoted its products, and closed its theme parks and cinemas where they screened their films. For a while, the media giant’s main business unit, its streaming platform Disney, and this posed only one problem.
Disney was more popular than the mouse could have ever imagined, and just one year after the platform’s introduction in 2019, it had 73. 7 million subscribers, more than it initially predicted through 2024. Each paid $6. 99 a month, or $69. 99 a year received their money’s worth.
Disney subscribers get unlimited access to the studio’s entire library, as well as any new content released on their subscription according to this period. So, although Disney has a fake profit stream, it can’t be attributed to individual productions on the platform. The payment is consistent with the movie, so adding a new movie to the platform does not directly generate profit.
This proved to be a specific challenge for the nascent platform during the pandemic, as Disney had a portfolio full of videos but no rooms to screen them. If I had put them directly on Disney, it would have made the platform even more attractive, but it would have allowed subscribers to watch the videos as many times as they wanted, at no additional cost. On the other hand, they would have had to pay several times to do the same if the films had been screened in the cinema.
To address this problem, Disney took the questionable resolution of charging subscribers an additional payment of $ 29. 99 to access new versions for a month. Called Premier Access, it’s far from a dream ticket.
Deadline claimed Premier Access had contributed to the rise in piracy, and when theaters finally reopened, the National Association of Theater Owners blamed it for declining box office revenues. Cinemas aren’t the only ones losing out.
Actors who intended to get a percentage of the film’s box office were also affected by the resolution to put the new releases directly on Disney. That prompted Scarlett Johansson to sue Disney in July 2021, with sources telling The Wall Street Journal that she lost more than $50 million due to Marvel’s Premier Access release strategy for her Black Widow movie earlier in the year. Johansson settled his lawsuit in October 2021, but until then, he had already dissuaded Disney from Premier Access.
As the first Marvel movie released since the pandemic, Black Widow had a few box office moments. . . [ ] Office
As we revealed, Black Widow didn’t hit its box office production prices, but it was left in the dark thanks to over $125 million in online earnings from Premier Access. The settlement payment to Johansson reduced that amount, so it’s no surprise that Marvel dropped Premier Access for its next film that ended a month after the deal. Called Eternals, it was released in November 2021 exclusively in theaters still recovering from the pandemic. That’s not the only explanation for why it’s perhaps Marvel’s biggest bet.
Eternals is named after a group of human-like extraterrestrial beings from the planet Olympia who have been genetically engineered to be the best and have been hiding on earth for centuries. Therefore, the story goes that they have been locked in a war against the evil Deviants for thousands of years, even though they have the same author: a tough ancient race known as the Celestials.
On paper, the film was lucky enough thanks to its brilliant all-star lineup headed by Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Richard Madden and Kit Harington. It even featured the appearance of song sensation Harry Styles.
The film seemed to be in smart hands, as it was directed by Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao, whose film Nomadland won Best Picture at the 2021 Oscars. However, Eternals divided fans, with some criticizing its confusing plot and flashy character costumes that seemed incongruous with the real-life setting of many other Marvel films.
Others praised him for his inclusivity, as he also starred South Korean actor Don Lee as the mighty Gilgamesh, while Pakistani-born Kumail Nanjiani played Kingo, an eternal man who can extract cosmic power from his hands and possesses the tight ego of a Bollywood movie. star. . In particular, deaf American actress Lauren Ridloff also played the role of Marvel’s first deaf hero, the ultra-fast Makkari.
The darkness of the characters made the film a gamble, despite the caliber of its stars, and this did not escape the great boss of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige. In 2019, he told The Hollywood Reporter that “it’s a wonderful movie. “”It’s a much-loved film. And we do it because we’re in [Zhao’s] vision and what those characters can do and we think we want it. “Keep growing, evolving, replacing and advancing our gender,” she added. “It’s a threat if I’ve heard one before. “It didn’t work.
Black Widow and Eternals failed to match their production prices at the box office
The film has become one of the biggest mistakes of Marvel’s 32 films, as it was the first to be rated “Rotten” through review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Importantly, it also had the fourth-lowest worldwide profit of any Marvel movie with revenue of $402. 1 million according to industry analyst Box Office Mojo.
The amount Disney earned is known commercially as a rental payment and differs by territory and even by movie. Documents filed through theater chain AMC state that “rental payments are based on the box office functionality of each film, in certain cases and less. “Frequently, our rental payments are based on an ongoing, mutually agreed upon rate.
“In some European territories, movie rental rates are set weekly and some licenses use a consistent profit-sharing agreement with the user, paying a fixed payment per ticket. “
However, it would not be representative to base the studio’s box office percentage on data from a single film channel, as they all have other degrees of exposure. AMC, for example, has no theaters in primary markets such as France and Japan.
It is generally understood that the percentage of box office paid to studios is 55% domestically, while China accounts for about a portion of this price and an average of about 43% in overseas markets. Many big blockbusters don’t release in China, and when they do, the gross receipts are low, so they don’t tend to have a curtain effect on the overall distribution.
Taking an average of 43% and 55%, we get a roughly 50-50 split of the workplace between cinemas and studios, reflecting the findings of film industry representative Stephen Follows. It surveyed 1235 film professionals in 2014 and concluded that, according to studies, cinemas keep an average of 49% of revenue.
That gave Disney about $201 million worth of Eternals and to calculate if that covered its production cost, we want to know how much was spent on the film, which would be a well-kept secret. In fact, studio currency statements mix up the prices of all their films without detailing the amount spent on each.
Movies filmed in the UK are an exception and Eternals is one of them. Studios settle for higher degrees of disclosure when filming there in order to gain benefits from the UK government’s Film Tax Relief programme. This provides studios with a coin rebate of up to 25% of the coin they spend in the UK, as long as it represents at least 10% of the total cost of the film.
To prove this to the UK government, studios have created separate corporations to make each film and will have to record financial statements that include everything from the number of employees, salaries and costs, to the amount of money reimbursed they receive.
Companies have code names so as not to attract the attention of enthusiasts when they apply for permission to film outdoors. Eternals was made through a Disney subsidiary called Olympia Productions UK in a nod to the heroes’ homeworld and, according to their most recent monetary statements. , spent a whopping $292. 2 million (£241. 6 million) on the film. That was about $100 million more than what was intended to be charged for the film and the documents reveal that “the estimated final cost exceeded the production budget. “t due to Covid.
The pandemic pushed the film back from its initial November 2020 release window, but it didn’t have a significant impact on its prices as production had almost ended when Covid began to spread.
Principal photography was done from July 2019 to February 2020 at Pinewood Studios, on the outskirts of London, as well as on location around the city. Harington’s character, Dane Whitman, works at the Natural History Museum in London, where he meets Sersi, an eternal Played by English actress Gemma Chan and endowed with superhuman strength, speed, endurance, reflexes and healing ability. Sersi can also adjust the material, which makes sense in London’s trendy Camden district, where it turns a classic red double-decker bus into rose petals. a war opposed to the Deviants.
The English countryside has also replaced other parts of the world to show where the Eternals are hiding. Black Park, near Pinewood Studios, the site of an Aztec pyramid, while Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire is the setting for a South Dakota ranch and Swinley Forest. at Berkshire it replaced Alaska.
Chloé Zhao and Richard Madden film in the UK
Filming in the UK boosts employment and monetary statements reveal that $19. 2 million (£15. 9 million) was spent through the production team, which peaked at 228 employees, not even adding the freelancers and freelancers who make up the majority of a film’s film crew. Film production also generates business for UK-based apparatus and apparatus centres, as well as special effects studios. The bus scene at Eternals was created through the London facilities of German company Scanline, while Disney’s British Industrial Light department
In exchange for filming in the UK, Eternals won a $38. 6 million (£31. 9 million) refund from the government. This reduced the film’s net expenses to $253. 6 million and was covered through Disney’s $201 million theatrical revenue percentage. This is just the beginning of the story.
Box office percentage is not the studio’s only return to a film, so compensating for it with the prices reported in the financial statements does not make it clear whether the film generated a profit or an overall loss. production (such as DVD/Blu Ray sales, marketing, etc. ). It does not reflect the overall profitability of the film,” a Disney spokesperson said. Similarly, the currency statements also do not show the marketing prices of the film, so there is There is no guarantee that money coming from products and home entertainment will turn a movie that records a box office loss into an overall profit.
Offsetting Disney’s share of movie ticket sales with expenses on monetary statements only shows whether the film hedged its box office production prices. In the case of Eternals, Disney’s $201 million box office percentage resulted in a loss of $52. 6 million after deducting its net expenses of $253. 6. million.
Eternals received no help during its launch amid the pandemic, though that didn’t stop Sony’s superhero show Spider-Man: No Way Home from grossing $1. 9 billion just a month later.
Similarly, five months later, Disney introduced Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which charges about $30 million more than Eternals, but generated a profit of around $190 million, as we recently revealed.
This explains why another Doctor Strange movie is reportedly in progress, while Eternals turns out to be a one-off movie. This may be a sadness for hardcore Marvel fans, but Disney shareholders will breathe a sigh of relief.