Francesco

This is my first forum post and I'm sorry that it's mostly smartassing around but I reached my breaking point today. So before I go into my correction let me start with the fact that I love the show, period. But after listening to Paul repeatedly calling movies box office hits when they clearly are not for years I just had to chip in my two cents and break down why Perfect Stranger was not a hit. WARNING: there is math involved but I'll try to keep it as simple as possible. According to my info (which comes mostly from Screen Junkies' Charting w/ Dan) about 52 % of the domestic gross go back to the studio. Internationally it depends on the specific deals within the different markets but on average about 38 % of the gross go back to the studio. The rest is swallowd by local distributors and theaters. So, looking at Perfect Stranger we have the following numbers: Budget: $60,000,000 Domestic gross: $23,984,949 International gross: $49,105,662 Total gross: $73,090,611 Now, if you look at the part of the gross the studio actually gets to keep, it looks like this: Budget: $60,000,000 Net domestic gross: $12,472,173 Net international gross: $18,660,151 Net total gross: $31,132,324 If you compare the budget and the net gross you get a deficit of $28,867,676. So this movie lost a whole chunk of cash. In short: the movie cost $60 mill to produce, it grossed about $73 mill worldwide of which the studio got to keep around $31 mill and lost about $29 mill. And that's without factoring in marketing and distribution costs. But since this was distributed by Columbia (so, basically Sony) I guess they can write it off somehow. This is to the best of my knowledge. I'm sure this stuff is way more complex than I explained. But what I'm trying to say is, a movie that barely makes back its budget is not a hit. It should, like, double its budget to get out of the red. Of course this totally ignores home video, rentals, VOD, pre-sales into other markets etc. - I believe at the end of the day Perfect Stranger made a buck or two. *Please excuse any grammatical mistakes, English is my second language. Thanks and, again: love the show.