Box Office Bomb cleanup

No, there's no good reason I can think of to have the subpages do indexing.

Someone added Black Adam to the Box Office Bomb page. Just wanted to check and make sure it actually doesn't count before removing it. I don't even think it's done in theatres yet, and there is an actual question as to whether the movie made money or not (based off of Johnson's possibly inaccurate numbers). Should I delete it or keep it?

Edited by Arctimon on Feb 6th 2023 at 11:13:52 AM

Ghostbusters 2016 was a confirmed 70 million dollar lose. Shouldn’t it be kept? Mortal Engines is the biggest confirmed loss in box office history so it should be kept. John Carter lost at least 140 million so it should be kept. Can we make an exception for films confirmed to have lost 50 million or more since that is still a catastrophic failure? It is absolutely preposterous to not have films that lost hundreds of millions not be listed just because they technically made back 75% of their revenue at the box office, especially since that doesn’t take into account marketing or revenue splits with theaters. Movies need to make back 250% of their budget on average to break even after all.

Edited by TheLivingDrawing on Feb 7th 2023 at 12:53:23 PM

Well, this this trope is called "Box Office Bomb", not "Box Office Underperformance". While the ones we are keeping go *BOOM*, the one we are removing are more like *poof*. There is apparently a difference.

How is losing hundreds of millions not a bomb?

Wouldn't that mean you'd have to go back and add all the movies that lost an equivalent amount when adjusted for inflation?

From what I can tell, Box Office Bomb solely focuses on the flick's box-office performance.

When I think about it, it might have been easier to rename this trope as "Box Office Underperformance", edit the main page accordingly, and leave it like that. Anybody agree?

That requires TRS.

I don't mind your suggestion because I feel it fits more than the current name. However, besides, you'd need to do a wick check first.

There's also the fact that underperforming is considerably more broad than bombing.

This entry was just re-added to the Trivia.Fantastic Four 2015 page:

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $155 million (not counting marketing costs), $200 million (counting them). Box office, $56,117,548 (domestic), $167,397,693 (worldwide). The film was expected to lose 20th Century Fox $80 million to $100 million — and in terms of domestic gross, the movie could not match the first Tim Story movie's opening weekend gross until its tenth week.
  
  From the outset, the film had its work cut out for it. Fans and copyright holder Disney/Marvel were already annoyed at Fox's ill-fated attempt to hold on to the Fantastic Four franchise despite the middling performances of the 2005 film and its sequel. Word of the movie's Troubled Production cast a shadow over conversation about the film before any footage could be released, with Marvel Entertainment seemingly doing everything in their power not to promote it, and the evisceration by the critics, fans, and general audience led this to be the worst-performing superhero-based movie since The Green Hornet. It didn't even get to be the #1 movie of its opening weekend, losing to Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which premiered a week prior. Its nuclear failure morphed Fox's entire fiscal year into a severe financial loss, crushed their plans for a sequel (along with a proposed crossover with the X-Men Film Series), and may have indirectly led to Fox's acquisition by Disney.

Since it did make back its budget, I removed it, citing this thread. Thoughts?

Edited by gjjones on Mar 9th 2023 at 2:48:25 PM

Full disclosure, I was the one who added a modified version of the Fant4stic entry back after it was removed several months ago, since I had incorrectly assumed that someone went with the mistaken belief that a movie matching its production budget in ticket sales equals a movie turning a profit (more on that in a second). However, I didn't see the thread justifying it being removed in the first place as part of a larger cleanup project, so I apologize. That being said, now I know that this thread exists, let me explain as to why I think that the entry should be there. (Wall of text warning.)

I personally do not think that a movie "making back its budget" in ticket sales should prevent a movie from counting as a bomb, when the rule of thumb by most box office analysts is that it takes a movie making at least two times its budget in order to break even — just on the production budget. This is because theaters get a cut of the box office; for example, if a movie makes $10M in domestic ticket sales, then it only ends up getting $5M in profit. (Ad costs are another thing to factor into profit and loss equations, and are much harder to properly measure, but considering that this process is nebulous, I don't think that this should be factored into whether or not the movie is counted as a bomb or not.)

I think that the original post in this thread had a point to make when talking about how The Wizard of Oz merely made under its budget in 1930s money, but that was back when movies were much less expensive. And in all likelihood, how the box office worked was different back then, too. Even so, the Acclaimed Flop entry pointed out that the movie did struggle financially and it wasn't until TV factored in that it became successful, and that is worth noting.

The thing is, movies are now regularly made for hundreds of millions of dollars, so the threshold for profit and loss is much more stark than it was then. I think that when there's outright media reporting that a movie is set to lose tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, then it should, in theory, be listed as a bomb here — regardless of whether or not it "made back its budget" in the most literal terms possible (not accounting for theater takes). And, well... Losing a substantial amount of money on a movie is the exact definition of what a Box Office Bomb is, is it not?

For a fairer comparison between superhero movies released around this time, X-Men: Apocalypse domestically underperformed relative to its budget, but due to strong international box office, that film turned a profit with over $543M in global revenues against a $178M budget (which is more than the over $155M it made in the USA). So that should not be listed as a bomb, and that example was right to be removed, but I believe that something like Fant4stic — which had revenues of just over $167M, a budget of $155M, and reported losses of $80M to $100M (which were so bad that Fox cancelled plans for a previously-announced sequel and early talks for a potential X-Men crossover) — should be counted.

I will not be adding the entry back, just so we're clear... But I feel like there might need to be a clearer definition of what a bomb is and is not as far as TV Tropes entries are concerned, because I think the idea that "the movie made its budget back, so it's not a bomb" doesn't make a lot of sense. Citations might be a good idea for more contemporary cases, as they can help separate movies that came short of breaking even to entries that gave a movie studio a lot of red ink. For example...

• Solo: A Star Wars Story had a production budget of over $250M, but only made $392M. The movie's underperformance caused Lucasfilm to put future spin-off films on hiatus. According to Deadline, Solo lost over $76M.

And then you could go into all the reasons as to why the movie underperformed to the point of being a noteworthy loss for the studio from there. I'm totally open to talking about this in a TRS thread if anyone is willing to make one, and adding some version of this wall of text there.

Edited by KingClark on Mar 12th 2023 at 2:39:21 PM

I think mega-budget blockbusters should stay if it’s confirmed that they lost a massive amount of money.

No hard feelings.

Edited by gjjones on Mar 19th 2023 at 6:18:12 AM

Eraser and Edge of Tomorrow, which were stated as not lossy enough to qualify, are stil on the 'E' page, can someone cut them?

Heads up, someone unilaterally changed the criteria for Box Office Bomb to require a film produce more than twice its budget in order to be not considered a bomb. Actually, they've entirely rewritten the description of the trope without consulting either this thread or the definition improvement thread.

That's me, I'm the someone...

I apologize, I had no idea this thread was here and wasn't getting any responses on the Discussion page, and it seems like I committed a major faux pas. I made my alterations to try to offer an explanation for what I thought the consensus page definition already was.

Prior to my edits, someone had already put that a film needed to make back twice its production budget on the main page, and since dozens of entries on the Bomb pages already used that criteria rather than "lost X amount of money" or "didn't make back the production budget", I believed that was the accepted definition already. It seems like it was not?

Edited by Claystripe on May 4th 2023 at 4:53:53 AM

ja029673 was the one who added the 2x budget thing in there.

At this point, the entire page needs to be reverted back to what it was before this edit (unless someone wants to manually revert it).

Edited by Arctimon on May 4th 2023 at 9:39:09 AM

Sorry, the discussion pages usually aren't the best form of communication because hardly anyone uses them. Yes, this thread was created to sort out all the misuse.

Given the number of changes, I think a mod revert is probably best. I went ahead and hollered this post asking for one going back to this edit's version of the page, which was the edit before all the definition changes.

We may need to comb through on-page examples again to double check any new additions.

I fully accept reverting all of my edits and awaiting consensus, but I have to say: Most of the Top 10 costliest films ever- The Lone Ranger, John Carter, Sinbad, Tomorrowland- and the ones responsible for entire film studios collapsing or reforming- Cleopatra, Golden Compass- all made their production budgets back but lost their studios the GDP of a small nation when accounting for their total budget or other factors.

If we're not allowed to account for those costs under the current rules, I'd say the page needs to go into TRS.

I honestly wonder if their was another trivia trope the above could go under. When box office fails cause massive issues for a studio.

The closest we have is Creator Killer, but many of the movies listed obviously didn't kill their studios

Maybe we could have a trope like Shocking Underperformance (the polar opposite of And You Thought It Would Fail)

The two times the budget thing seems to be more a precise definition that 'less that it's budget thing'.

Because we seem to have instances of where it made more than it's budget but still lost the studios plenty of money, I would call that bomb myself?

The thing that's really key to emphasize is that the box office gross is split between the studio and the theaters. Take Battleship, which grossed $300 million against a $220 m budget. That sounds like a hit if the studio received all of the gross, but if the theaters receive 40% of that total (which would be the most generous option), then the studio only made $180 m. With global marketing and distribution costing somewhere between $50-$100 m, that would mean the studio likely took a nine-figure loss on the project- which is why The Other Wiki lists Battleship as not just a bomb but one of the ten biggest box office failures ever.