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
A Fast & Furious spinoff with blockbuster stars — Dwayne Johnson as renegade lawman Hobbs, and Jason Statham as sly Shaw — would seem like a slam dunk at the box office, and it was on a global level. But it was a bit less so stateside given the fact spinoffs often make less than the core franchise sequels. As the final event film of last summer, Hobbs & Shaw posted a solid but OK $60.8 million opening weekend at the domestic box office over the Aug. 2-4 weekend, pulling in the Fast & Furious brand’s diverse set of moviegoers including close to a third Hispanic and African American crowds, respectively. The bigger play was overseas, with the worldwide start at $180.8M, beating the $155.8M global start of Tom Cruise’s 2018 Mission: Impossible – Fallout, another late-summer sequel the year before. China, in particular, where the automobile action movies always work (as do Johnson and Statham), yielded an awesome $201M final take, repping 26% of Hobbs & Shaw‘s $759M global box office. Among all Fast & Furious movies at the global B.O., Hobbs & Shaw is the fourth highest grossing ever behind Furious 7 ($1.5B), Fate of the Furious ($1.2B) and Fast & Furious 6 ($788.6M). Recently, Johnson told fans on social media how losing out to Tom Cruise for the lead in the Jack Reacher movies opened a door for him to take on the part of Hobbs, a character he created with Fast & Furious franchise scribe Chris Morgan. Morgan is already penning a Hobbs & Shaw sequel.
THE BOX SCORE
Here are the costs and revenues as our experts see them:
THE BOTTOM LINE
Johnson and Statham get a huge chunk of change here, which can whittle profit despite the big grosses. Johnson alone can command as much as $20M upfront, which is part of the movie’s $200M production cost, and around 25% of cash breakeven, monies that are included in total participations of $30M. All in, global revenues across home entertainment and TV were just over a half-billion dollars. Subtract $454M global costs, including $140M P&A, and Hobbs & Shaw walks away with a net profit of $84M.