Joker: Folie à Deux (2024)

Arbitrary said:

Now I'm confused. The percentage of money that a theater gets versus what the studio gets changes week to week. The more time goes by the larger the share for the theater. What good are estimates based on the amount of money it needs to make at the box office to break even when a ticket today is not the same value as a ticket next week which is not the same as the value of a ticket the week after that?

40m opening weekend means it's going to need a fuck load more than 450m to break even because all the math changes every week. I see how I misunderstood what the break even estimate was relative to cost to produce and market but thinking about it more it makes even less sense.

edit -

‘D’ Spells Disaster - Audiences Heckle ‘Joker 2’ Off Box Office Stage

The seeming failure of their latest comic book film hints that even sequels to Batman-branded blockbusters might not be able to save Warner from audience DC-brand apathy.

www.forbes.com

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As others stated "50% domestic" is just a crude estimate, decent rule of thumb. Studios also take anywhere from 25-35% of foreign box office as well which is why world wide numbers are no where near as good as domestic numbers and films like Deadpool and Wolverine or Black Panther which did close to 50% of their total in the domestic market ran laps around shit like Furious movies or Jurassic world movies that do only 20-30% domestic, in terms of profit.

but the truth is the individual theatre chains have specific deals with studios so there is not real hard and fast rule of thumb. I think AMC is mostly revenue share, but I know others like Cinemark are not. We say 50% split between studio and theatre (for the first few weeks at least, it does start to favor the theatre chain the longer the film stays in theatres) but it is not an actual percentage split.

Theatres buy or rent films from studios (and different formats have different costs, which is why imax/etc costs more per ticket), and then they recoop that investment cost based on ticket sales. There is some additional profit sharing that takes place on the books later on, so technically there is somewhat of a revenue split but its not some 50/50 straight up split like you imagine.

Once the theatre rents or buys the film they can show them as many fucking times as they want, there isn't some jew with a ticket counter in his hand clicking away counting the number of ppl that go in to the theatre and expecting a check based on head count.

So when you see a film did 40million in its opening weekend but it opened in 4k theatres and each theatre paid 10k dollars to rent the film the studio actually made 40million bucks and the threater made shit except for what it made in concessions, they just broke even on the fucking rental. But if it does another 40million in the next 2 weeks the studio made 0 dollars and the theatres are now making 40mil in profit, so yeah you can say in the first few weeks its 50/50 split, but not really. that 3rd and 4th week are all gravy for the theatre so ultimately the "split" starts to favor the theatre chain rather than the studio but again most movies really start to fall off in weeks 3-4, and its not an actual split per ticket sale.

Depending on the chain after about a month the theatre has to decide if they want to rent the film for another month or not, of course the costs get adjusted but if the film is shit they opt to drop it and use the slot for something else that might make them some money.

Some chains straight buy the film instead of rent but they operate differently and typically they keep the film in theatre longer and then move it to their own offbrand dollar theatre after it stops putting people in seats.

edit: There isn't some flat rate for rentals btw, studios charge more for films they expect will do really well vs films they know won't have an impact. Which is why movies doing as well as predicted is super important for the theatre chains much more so than the studios. A cheap film that does far better than expected is better for theatres than a blockbuster that does exactly what was expected on opening weekend then falls off the face of the earth. I want to say that movie "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" was the most profitable movie in movie theatre history, for theatres, not so much for studios. Shit stayed in theatres selling tickets for almost a year and it cost them basically nothing.