A flop will be defined here as a movie that does not recoup it's production costs 3 months after it's release date.
I will be primarily using boxofficemojo.com and https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets/all to make this determination. If the answer is not obvious based on these two sites, especially with regard to production costs I will use widely reported numbers. If there is ambiguity regarding the production costs due to conflicting reporting that puts the profitability in doubt the answer will resolve to "Yes". Any movie that barely breaks even is in effect a flop.
When adding movies please include the release date in the answer.
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I'm fairly sure inside out 2 will be a smashing success, but Disney Pixar has undermined customer value from movie theaters by shortening the theatrical exclusivity window (or sending films straight to streaming, even with "pay gates")
Inside out 2 cost $200mm to make, which is just high enough that some of their recent films like Soul or Onward would not have hit the target.
It will probably be great, but I'm not >95% certain it will crush that number. What if it's bad?
Totally fair! A few weeks ago, I was actually a bit bearish on Inside Out 2 (I still thought it'd crush $200MM worldwide, but compared to Deadpool & Despicable Me 4, I was a bit less confident in it, and thought it might disappoint, in a relative sense, maybe $85M opening domestic).
But the more recent tracking/early sales have been super strong, and IO2 is going to be huge. It'll probably do >$100M domestic OW, and should be above $200M WW within a week or so. So not just that it'll cross $200M, it's a lock to go way above $500M (way above fwiw, just even assuming it falls off a cliff).
but totally fair that a few bets might not have updated from that latest data
tbh—not sure!
fwiw, while i was grinding the box office markets hard for a while, last few weeks i've been totally tuned out & i've never had much advantage with farther out predictions (outside of checking the tracking).
with that context, at the start of the summer, twisters would have been my pick for blockbsuter most likely to flop (among realistic choices, ignoring e.g. horizon or etc). as best as i can tell, the original was a "right place right time" mega hit based on showing off cool new tech (many such cases from the 90s), so the IP has basically no relevance to modern audiences. and i don't think a generic-ish disaster movie has much of a shot (good cast, but compare it to e.g. the fall guy). plus deadpool is gonna demolish it in the 2nd weekend. so tldr, without seeing any data, i'm very bearish on twisters.
that being said, 200M WW is a very low bar? Ghostbusters FE reached that after ~44M domestic OW, & Ghostbusters is super domestic heavy. my gut says that twisters will have a strong international balance, because disaster action movies (i.e. not dialogue reliant) tend to travel overseas very well. so I think if twisters can even reach ~45-50M dom OW, it has a solid shot at >200M WW.
so i bet a bit NO on twisters because i like the odds i was getting (i.e. even if the median result is like ~200M WW). i've only barely glanced at the tracking, which doesn't look great but it's still very far out. there will be a better guess from tracking in early july. for now, i think it's a tossup, but I'd lean towards it passing $200M WW.
(and yes re: other bettors, pls stop betting YES on inside out 2 lol, it looks like it may blow past $200M WW within its first weekend lmao)
@G_ Great. Looks like Bad Boys 4 can already resolve NO (or just wait a few days to make it even more final).
Current WW BO = 105M (and growing quickly)
Reported budget on TheNumbers = 100M.
Generally (to the market at large), these probabilities all seemed too high? conventional wisdom is that movies need to do a lot more than their budget WW to turn a profit. E.g. Furiosa is an unabmiguous, huge commercial flop, but it might still get pretty close to its budget in WW gross.
@Ziddletwix but like inside out 2 has basically 0 chance of not surpassing its production budget in WW gross, i'm just not betting it down crazy low in case i'm still somehow misunderstanding the question (and i'm mostly bearish on inside out)