Showtime
Your Friend In Time
- Joined
- May 10, 2005
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Yes and no. Speculation on my part but i think that if you're talking about small budget numbers ( say in the area of 10-90 million) then yes , the studio don't look at foreign numbers. Often the movie can make make enough money based on the domestic sales alone ( theatrical prints /dvd /rental).
Becomes a different thing when your talking about massive budgets. 150 million and higher . The studios are definately looking at the foreign numbers because those are important for the studio to break even/make a pofit. If that weren't the case , i doubt we'd be seeing budgets of 256 million for spider-man 3 and 300 million for POTC 3.
However i will agree with you that the domestic numbers do play a important part when studios decide if they want to continue with a franchise or not. Look at Golden Compass. The movie bombed in the US but was a hit in foreign markets. Ultimately the movie made back ít's budget. WIll the studio consider making a sequel. Doubtful.
It also depends on the film or franchise. A franchise like Bond is expected to play well overseas because the character is more of a WW character rather then just an American character. I'm not saying that studios don't appreciate, want, or need a movie to perform well overseas. Of course they make money off it, and DVD Sales & Rentals are more important then ever. Not to mention TV Sales/Rights as Antonello pointed to, and merchandising. It is more of an appearance factor. If a movie isn't even making it's budget back domestically, it is going to be tough for a studio to justify greenlighting a sequel or calling it a complete success.
Superman Returns was supposed to get a sequel up to a couple of months ago, when Robinov saw the numbers from "The Dark Knight" and thought that a Superman movie should make those same numbers.Someone should explain to him that not all the superhero movies could reach those peaks and that the movie was not that successful simply because it was dark.Anyway SR surely turned a profit that WB had to share with Legendary and Singer. For the next movie, I'm sure they'll try to make a different kind of deal with the new director.I have the strong suspicion that they're making things difficult for Singer because they don't want to pay his share as a director in a new movie.
Actually, I can't argue with what you are saying here. You're not far off from what happened and not far off from what is going to happen.

Hell have finished Avatar and doesn't have any other pressing commitments. It's a long shot, but here's to hoping. I think he would also enjoy the challenge of creating another great film courtesy of one of the most universal characters: Superman.
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