Box Office Success: What Does It Even Mean Anymore?

There’s been a lot of discussion this summer, with movies like Man of Steel and Pacific Rim making less money than fans and studios had hoped or expected, about how exactly we’re meant to define financial success in today’s movie landscape.It’s a bit of a moving target.It used to be that domestic box office was the number that “mattered”–that if a movie didn’t make its money back in the U.S., the film was considered a “flop,” because international grosses weren’t a major factor in the way studios talked about their films.Now, of course, it’s not quite that simple. That’s still a rule of thumb for studios and journalists to use, but at the end of the day it’s a lot more complicated than that–especially as you start to get movies like Pacific Rim, which made far more money overseas than it did here.It’s also not true that because a movie doesn’t line up with studio expectations, it will be considered a “flop” by anyone who particualrly matters. Kick-Ass is a classic example of a movie that wouldn’t have had a sequel if not for strong box office and, staying just in the comic book arena, it seems as though there’s a possibility of Dredd 2 getting greenlit for similar reasons. And, if projections are right and the film doesn’t take the #1 slot, or beat the first movie’s opening weekend, it could raise a whole new conversation about that franchise. After all–it makes sense from almost any point of view you look at it to make a third film adapting the currently-in-progress Kick-Ass 3 comic book that rounds out the series–unless the film proves it can’t make its money back in theaters, which could make it a hard sell to the studio, especially after they reduced the production budget from the first film to the second in the hopes that just this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.