Most Profitable Films of 2011

Yesterday, The Bitter Script Reader analyzed 2011′s Top 20 grossing films, and what that means for us as screenwriters. The summary is, not surprisingly, a bitter one, pointing out that 18 of the top 20 are either franchises, adaptations, animated films, or some combination of all of the above. And as BSR points out, these categories represent  ”the three types of scripts that it’s nearly impossible for an aspiring screenwriter to break in with.”

As I was looking at the numbers, though, I realized that most of these top-grossing films also had enormous budgets. Which got me thinking: which films were the most profitable - i.e., had the highest box office return as a percentage of their budget?

Movie	Budget	US Gross	Profit Margin (Domestic)
Insidious	$1,500,000	$54,009,150	3601%
Paranormal Activity 3	$5,000,000	$104,007,828	2080%
Courageous	$2,000,000	$34,088,360	1704%
Like Crazy	$250,000	$3,372,100	1349%
Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain	$750,000	$7,706,436	1028%
The Help	$25,000,000	$169,499,546	678%
Justin Bieber: Never Say Never	$13,000,000	$73,013,910	562%
Jumping the Broom	$7,000,000	$37,295,394	533%
Bad Teacher	$19,000,000	$100,292,856	528%
Bridesmaids	$32,500,000	$169,106,725	520%
Our Idiot Brother	$5,000,000	$24,814,830	496%
50/50	$8,000,000	$35,016,118	438%
Apollo 18	$5,000,000	$17,686,929	354%
The Ides of March	$12,500,000	$40,850,788	327%
The Hangover Part II	$80,000,000	$254,464,305	318%
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II	$125,000,000	$381,011,219	305%
Limitless	$27,000,000	$79,249,455	294%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules	$18,000,000	$52,698,535	293%
No Strings Attached	$25,000,000	$70,662,220	283%
Super 8	$50,000,000	$127,004,179	254%

Before I go any further, let me mention that I got my data here, and there were some conspicuous omissions – including six of the films from the Top 20 grossing list – but after collecting the data for those films manually, I discovered that of those six films, only one made it into the top 20 most profitable, so I think this list can at least give us some useful information. It’s also worth noting that films released late in 2011 won’t make this list, though they may very well be headed in that direction. For example, War Horse has yet to make back its budget, but it was only released a week and a half ago.

The first thing I notice is that of these films, 4 are horror films (Insidious, Paranormal Activity, Apollo 18, Super 8), 9 are comedies (Laugh at My Pain, Jumping the Broom, Bad Teacher, Bridesmaids, Our Idiot Brother, 50/50, The Hangover: Part II, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, No Strings Attached), and 5 are dramas (Courageous, Like Crazy, The Help, 50/50, The Ides of March). Fourteen of them had budgets under $20 million, none were animated, and only 6 were adaptations or sequels (Paranormal Activity 3, The Help, The Ides of March, Harry Potter, Limitless, Diary of a Wimpy Kid). All of this, I think, is good news, as these are the films that make people’s careers.

The worldwide results admittedly look much more like the franchise/adaptation/animated features list that BSR posted about, as does the list of films in places 21-60 (the 100-200% of budget range). But I think this is an interesting point: comedies and horrors sell well on spec, and can launch a career, as can a good drama.

What do you think?

Limitless’s Limits

I watched Limitless last night. It’s a great movie, and really cool in a lot of ways, but when I was done my wife and I both noticed that although we enjoyed it thoroughly, we weren’t terribly engaged throughout the film. When I started thinking of the reasons why that might be, I came to a couple of conclusions.

I want to preface this by saying that I don’t believe in following all the rules all the time. But at the same time, when there’s a clear weakness in something, some of the filmmaking rules prescribed by others may provide a useful place to look.

1. Save the Cat. Of course, this is the famous one by Blake Snyder – the idea that the hero has to save a cat, or feed a homeless person, or do something else early on in the story for us to sympathize with him. This, I think, was the biggest thing that was missing. Although the hero had some very admirable qualities, we weren’t really rooting for him all that hard, because we didn’t see his heart of gold early on. All we felt at the beginning was pity and maybe some empathy. I think this is particularly important for a superhero story, which this is – we need to know why he’s deserving of this power, and we didn’t really get that.
2. No real villain. The fact that the thing giving him his power was also killing him was a pretty powerful dilemma, but a superhero story is only as good as its villain, and here we didn’t have a really strong one. There was really no point where we were thinking “How the heck is he going to get out of THIS one?” since the villains he was up against were actually less powerful than him.

I think these are the big two. One of the dangers in this kind of story is for the superpower to form the focal point, rather than the character. What I mean by that is that when the climax hits, the superpower is what gets him out of it, rather than the character forsaking his flaws so that he can accomplish his goal without the superpower. And I think that had these two components above been in place, it would have provided the opportunity to overcome that obstacle in a stronger way.

Again, I don’t want to give off the impression that this was a bad movie, because it wasn’t. It was really a lot of fun, and my wife and I both came out of it saying, “I wish I had NZT …”. But it’s still interesting to look at the shortcomings to see what could have taken it to the next level.