Does anyone have any data about the total operating budgets for WB, Fox, etc.? I'm just curious to know what amount of money the studios have every year to go around.

They have a lot of financing available to them aside from this, but I could find some info about Fox's operating profit for 2009:

Doug Creutz, analyst at US investment bank Cowen & Company, said the film (Avatar) is expected to help News Corp’s film division to make an operating profit of $1.26 bn in its full-year to the end of June, about $160m than first thought. It would mean film would account for one third of News Corp’s operating profit compared to a quarter in most years.

If you want to get a better idea about studio's operating info, it's probably best to look at the earnings reports for their conglomerate larger companies. That'll give you a rough idea on a year to year basis what type of profits they have to work with. But say a film studio like Universal clearly has a lot saved up as they've been having a rough 5 years on and off.

I don't know much on this topic though.

I just checked out Disney's annual report for 2009, and it didn't give much info, because Studio Entertainment includes DVD sales, etc. and it was largely about revenues.


I guess I'm looking for budget and marketing costs for all films in production in a given year.

Studios won't be giving their budgets and marketing costs at least publicly for some of their high profile films so unfortunately I'd say that there won't be any definite figures available for the total budget costs.

That's why there's so much speculation how much high budget films actually end up costing. If they made it publicly available that they had a $250 m film on their hands that say only made $175 m, it just wouldn't look good to their investors. Instead any budget figures you can probably find are very skewed. Ex. a $200 m budget for a film, is actually after local and national tax subsidies accounted for, additional promotional partnerships with other companies, etc.

At the end of the day, the money that counts is how it helps out the conglomerate's earnings...