"Boys Don't Cry"

I'm reading "Killer Films" by Christine Vachon, and she produced "Boys Don't Cry". Looking at the stats, it cost $2 million to make, but it brought in over $11 million to date. So it must be a successful movie, though "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" cost $5 million and brought in over a quarter billion, which made the producers of the latter movie fabulously wealthy.

Am I right?
 
I'd say it could be considered a successful movie, but it can be hard to say. $2 million is listed as the production budget - we don't know what was spent on marketing, distribution, etc. With a budget that low I wouldn't be surprised if the marketing alone ran several times that number. That number may also only be the original production budget, it's not uncommon for a film like that to have further post work done after it's picked up for distribution to prepare it for theatrical release. Wikipedia mentions that the film had to be re-cut for general release to avoid an NC-17 so there clearly was some additional work there.

Of course the $11 million is just domestic box office, and it's likely it made far more on DVD, international theatrical, etc - especially after getting nominated and winning an academy award.

From a studio standpoint though I'd have to say it wouldn't be considered a success - it's just not a big enough number. A studio would have to release 10+ films like 'Boys Don't Cry' just to match the domestic box office of 'Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked'. So what's a success for the producers may not be a success for the distributor.
 
From a studio standpoint though I'd have to say it wouldn't be considered a success - it's just not a big enough number. A studio would have to release 10+ films like 'Boys Don't Cry' just to match the domestic box office of 'Alvin & The Chipmunks: Chipwrecked'. So what's a success for the producers may not be a success for the distributor.

But, if they had a dozen of those, they would have a pretty decent profit, wouldn't they?

What's your take on Greek Wedding?
 
Sure, but the overhead of producing and promoting a dozen of those is a lot more than producing just one big blockbuster sequel. And odds are that they'd have to produce a lot more than a dozen to get a dozen hits of that size - which means they'd need even more hits to cancel out the ones that don't do well. It's too much work, too much overhead, too much risk for too little reward. Just not worth it to make a dozen or more films to gross $100 million - the top 5 studios each made that much or more last month alone.

Greek Wedding's a big success by any measure - it's one of the rare few indies that actually became a true blockbuster. It's certainly what everyone hopes for, but it's not repeatable - not predictably, at least.

http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/widestindie.htm?page=WIDESTINDY&sort=gross&order=DESC&p=.htm

You can see it's an extreme outlier - second highest box office for an independent theatrical release, only the top two have broken $200 million. There's only another 9 or so that are over $100 million, and only about 100 films total that have broken $20 million, and that's on a list of all wide release indie fllms over the past 30 years. To top it off - look at the titles on that list. While they're all independently produced by small production companies instead of studios, many of them still had relatively large production budgets - Robocop, Dances With Wolves, The Expendables, Passion of the Christ, etc. So there's very few true independent films that ever get even close to something like Greek Wedding.
 
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Vashon is a good writer with a knack for getting involved with the right indie films and hustling to get these films in the black. Very few people have this skill set and are able to duplicate her success.

As for Wedding, as donned said, an extreme outlier. One might as well put their money in Powerball for a better chance of duplicating that success.
 
Of course, Greek Wedding is the extreme example, but so is the Blair Witch Project and Terminator, not to mention Star Wars. That's true in any business, to have a small project hit it big. The question is not if these are the extremes; the question is what is the relationship between box office gross, production costs, and profit.

Perhaps I should speak to an accountant and lawyer who specializes in the business. Does anyone know any such people?
 
As was noted with these small production budget films, the marketing costs probably far exceed the production budget. The relationship between box office gross, production costs, and profit will vary widely from film to film. Did that film with a 2M production budget and 20M box office spend 10M in marketing? It's very hard to find those answers.
 
As was noted with these small production budget films, the marketing costs probably far exceed the production budget. The relationship between box office gross, production costs, and profit will vary widely from film to film. Did that film with a 2M production budget and 20M box office spend 10M in marketing? It's very hard to find those answers.

Those are the answers I'm looking for. And I think accountants and lawyers in this business would know.
 
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