When it comes to evaluating the financial performance of top movies, it isn’t about what a film grosses at the box office. The true tale is told when production budgets, P&A, talent participations and other costs collide with box office grosses and ancillary revenues from VOD to DVD and TV. To get close to that mysterious end of the equation, Deadline is repeating our Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament for 2019, using data culled by seasoned and trusted sources.
THE FILM
Annabelle Comes Home
New Line
After basically furnishing the dollhouse by writing the first two Annabelle films from a pitch by The Conjuring creator James Wan to hatch a prequel, screenwriter Gary Dauberman got his chance to make his directing debut on the third installment of the fright franchise. Back for a cameo are perennially haunted paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, with a haunted house, their daughter, a babysitter and the title doll. For our purposes, the results were robust — $231.2 million in worldwide box office — though not equal to the other films in the wildly profitable franchise. Maybe it was too much Conjuring, as Annabelle Comes Home released one year after the 2018 spinoff The Nun, or maybe it was the way that Disney frightfully suffocated early summer rivals with Aladdin and Avengers: Endgame. Fans didn’t like Home as much as previous sequel Creation, giving the latest movie 2 1/2 stars on Comscore/Screen Engine’s PostTrak to its predecessor’s 4 stars. Still, Annabelle Comes Home was one of the few horror movies to work at last year’s global box office.
THE BOX SCORE
Here are the costs and revenues as our experts see them:
THE BOTTOM LINE
Even though Annabelle Comes Home is at the bottom of The Conjuring film line, the sequel was a cash cow for New Line thanks to a low production costs of $27M before P&A. Participations of $10M, much of that to producer Wan, are also a factor. Total global revenues across all ancillaries were $207M, yielding a net profit of $64M. That’s below The Conjuring ($161.7M in profit), The Nun ($155M in profit), Annabelle: Creation ($108.7M profit) and The Conjuring 2 ($98.3M profit).