A disaster is them make a huge loss. They will make their money back even if they have to wait from residuals from TV (they'll make their money back well before then) the question is how they proceed from here? Do they spend less money on the sequel? Do they aggressively expend the Spider-Man universe in the hopes it brings in a new crowd to fill the void of the general audience that are done with the franchise?
I would argue they aren't making money on this film. Not with the much higher cost, very low domestic total and a large portion of the overall boxoffice coming from China.
Lets be conservative and say they only need to cover $500m in terms of budget, marketing, licensing, and distribution. Lets say I am giving them credit for $100m in corporate partners. So then they need to make $400m.
The film is going to end up around $200m domestically, and they get about half of that, so $100m.
China, the split is between 25% and 30%, so say I give you the higher amount. The film is going to end around $100m there, so that is another $30m.
The rest of OS can be all over the place, though clearly less then domestic, but lets say a split of 45% to give it the best possible chance. The film is going end up around $420m everywhere other then China. That is another $190m.
So best case, using these numbers, we are talking around what, $320m in box office? Unless they somehow produce the home media for free and sell more then TASM, neither of which will happen, I just don't see it.
This movie is hardly a disaster. Look at Pacific Rim, a sequel was just greenlit. It's production budget was $190 million vs. TASM2 $255 million.
It only made $101.8 domestic and $309 overseas for a $411 million total, $111 million of which was from China (more than TASM2).
According to how your treating TASM2, Pacific Rim this was a way worse "disaster" financially and would have lost money (which I doubt it did). Yet it is enough for the studio to go for a sequel. As if there is any doubt about TASM. Just looking at past Spidey films, yes the box office has declined, but compared to other films, the franchise is still doing exceedly well, enough so that they would be crazy not to continue on confidently. There is plenty of wiggle room to adjust budgets and reignite domestic box office with a shared universe approach so Sony really has nothing to panic over.
I'd love a PR 2. I loved the first film and am a big GDT fan, but that is still all smoke right now. Pacific Rim lost money, a good chunk of money. Though what saved PR from being a huge disaster was WB cutting the marketing budget substantially before release. They apparently used less then a third of the original marketing budget. That cut the spending significantly. Still, it lost a lot of money for Legendary and WB. The sequel might happen for the same reason the Hellboy sequel happened, hoping for a boost after the first film being well received.
And no, it is not doing exceedingly well. The Hunger Games, the Avengers, Despicable Me, those are franchises doing exceedingly well.
