Explanation of Stats/Columns
Here is a sample chart...
Critics Scores
First of all, all scores from all source are converted into a percentage scale (some number out of a hundred). So, if some site has a score of 3.6 out of 5, that becomes 72.
Rotten Tomatoes has several scores, with the most famous being the Tomatometer. To get that score, RT converts scores from critics to a 100 point scale. Any score that is 60 or higher is considered ‘fresh,’ that is, a positive score. A ‘thumbs up’ as it were. The Tomatometer then reports what percentage of reviews are ‘fresh.’
The Fresh score will tell you how many good reviews the movie got. Which, in some cases, can be misleading. For example, if a movie has a 100% Fresh rating, one would think that this is one of the best movies ever made. But that movie may have all of the critics’ ratings in the 60s and the movie is just OK, but certainly not great. A 100% simple means no critic hated it.
Or, a movie may have a 60% Fresh Rating and that may seem like it’s just OK, but the 60% of critics that gave it a Fresh rating gave it a 100 and the 40% that didn’t give it a Fresh rating gave it a 55. If you had averaged the actual scores from critics, then that would have been an average score of 82, which is very different than a Fresh score of 60%.
And so, in addition to the Fresh Score, I have the next column being the average of the critics’ actual scores, which is then also averaged with Metacritic.
Metacritic’s average critics’ score is a lot like RT’s, except Metacritic ‘weights’ the average to favor more established professional critics as opposed to just some guy with a website. Because of the more ‘established’ circle of critics having more weight, Metacritic scores can be off from RT’s in some ways. For example, Metacritic’s scores are often a few points below that of RT’s for super hero movies. A bit of a snobbery there against that genre. However, Pixar is the darling of critics, and so Metacritic’s scores wind up being usually a few points higher than RT’s. Anyways, there isn’t a significant difference overall, and so, I just average them together, which dilutes, but does not do away with the ‘weighting’ that Metacritic does.
Audience Scores
The next score is an average of audience scores, with ‘audience’ being the members of the
RT and
IMDB websites. Both sites allows its users to add their own rating of the movie. IMDB can sometimes have ten times the number of audience reviews, and so, when I average them, I weight the average based on number of reviews, which often moves the needle closer to IMDB’s score. Note that this is not a scientific polling and is just people self-selecting themselves. But given the large number of people that do so, it means that there’s a stable community of reviewers, who may not exactly represent all people, but it’s helpful to see the scores given in relation to other scores and compare the movies to one another that way.
The next score is the
CinemaScore, which comes from a scientific random-selection polling of the audience that saw the movie in its opening weekend. CinemaScores tend to be high because, presumably, the opening night audience pretty much knows what they’re going to get and are receptive to it. This is especially true for genre movies or franchises. People who like horror movies go to the opening night show and rate the movie higher than what a general audience would precisely because they like horror movies. The same with super hero movies, and princess movies, and Pirates of the Caribbean movies, etc…
And so, it is expected that the movie will be an A or A+. If it’s A-, then there’s some issues there. If it’s B+, it’s polarizing. If it’s a B or below… ouch.
Although, that’s not set in stone. Sometimes the opening night crowd is the ‘wrong’ crowd because they didn’t know what they were expecting. For example, The Nightmare Before Christmas got a B+ from that opening night audience. Not the best score. However, the overall critical and audience score was very high. It’s just that the opening night crowd got something they didn’t know what to do with.
CinemaScores are usually scarily accurate in predicting overall Box Office intake for a movie because they ask about whether people will recommend the movie to a friend. E.g., a movie with an A+ can expect to make about 4.8 times the opening weekend BO take. An A-, 3.6 times. But a C, only 2.5 times.
In order to see the scores and have the very good and the very bad pop out, I color coded them...
Box Office and Profit
First of all, no attempt was made at accounting for inflation… which is a double-edged sword. An old movie that ‘only’ made $2 million dollars may be comparable in today’s dollars as a $100 million profit; but likewise, a $2 million dollar loss would be a $100 million loss today.
Box Office numbers are for a movie’s initial theatrical run. Some movies were rereleased to theaters (sometimes several times) and if you look up the numbers at Box Office Mojo, you’ll see just how profitable they were. But the reality is that they may also have been at a loss when first released. The famous example of that is Pinocchio whose lifetime BO is $43 million. However, it took in only $2 million in its first release and was considered a financial loss for Disney of $1 million.
Re-releasing a movie was common before TV, VHS, cable, and streaming. It was the theatrical version of a rerun. But again, my charts only reflect the initial release (as far as I could tell) and not any re-releases or any after market.
Because I’m not considering the after market, or the ‘post-theatrical window’, the true value of the movie is skewed since some movies create a lot of revenue for its owner after the initial release.
This is important to remember because of what gets called a ‘flop.’ Generally, it means it caused a financial loss to the movie’s owner during its theatrical window without taking into consideration the post-theatrical market. This often gets people confused when a movie has a large BO take, but still gets called a flop. And the main reason that happens is because the movie also had a high budget which was higher than the BO take. People don’t necessarily mean the movie was a failure critically or with audiences or with a post-theatrical window, they just mean that in its initial release, the movie didn’t make a profit.
Another confusing thing is that there are hidden
budget items. When a movie’s budget is revealed (Wikipedia will tell you), that’s the cost of production, i.e., the actual filming and actors’ salaries. But then there are other costs such as advertising and post-production administration. In general, as a ballpark figure, the extra hidden costs are about half of the production budget. So, if you see that the production budget was $100 million, the actual cost to the studio is $150 million.
Then there is the Box Office figure. That’s the cost of tickets sold. But, the production company shares that figure with the theaters. In the U.S., the production company winds up with a little more than 50%. It used to be that the production company would get a much larger cut in the first few weeks and then lesser as the movie ran in theaters, but that practice is pretty much gone now (please check with current industry websites that are up to date before you try to argue that with me… thanks!). Overseas, studios get less than 50% of the BO take. So, as a ballpark figure, I split the difference and use 50% of BO going to the studio.
So in order to figure out
profitability for the studio, you take the BO, divide it by 2, and then subtract one and a half the production budget. Again, that’s just a ballpark figure, but, it’s one industry journalists use. So if a movie made or lost about $10 million, it can pretty much be called breaking even, since the numbers aren’t exact. In other words, don’t point to a $2 million dollar loss (for a modern movie) and call it a flop. It’s +/- about $10 million.
The ROI is Returns on Investment comparing the cost of the movie to how much actual profit was made once you get your money back. If you had a few million dollars and wanted to invest in ‘the biz’, which studio would you risk your money on?
- Perhaps you have a soft spot for Disney Films? Since 2010, their ROI is… a 13% loss.
- OK, how about Disney Animation? Since 1990… 21% return.
- Pixar then? A respectable 44%.
- OK, then, well Marvel has billion dollar films so how about them? Well Marvel also has $200 million dollar budgets, so, only 51%.
- But can one do better? Fox/Blue Sky Animation’s ROI is 78%. And that’s the power of low budgets. The Ice Age franchise is 150%.
Each section will usually total and average the important figures.
