I would like to start this new thread where we can collect production budgets of current and upcoming movies.
Best sources for budgets are the trade papers VARIETY and THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, plus the L.A. Times and BOM and IMDB and SBD (complete access).

This week's openers:
$115m HELLBOY II
$60m MEET DAVE
$60m JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH
according to The Hollywood Reporter
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/con ... 23ddf6f306
These differ with the IMDB budgets ($72m/$100m/$45m) but I'm pretty sure IMDB will update those numbers in a couple of days...

Is that right about Hellboy 2? I have a hard time believing they will greenlight the movie with that budget. Ive been hearing more about Meet Dave's budget being 100 million that the source you listed

Wasn't Hellboy relatively low-budget?

I'm not gonna believe Hellboy 2 cost $115 m. Never on Earth! That's bullshit.
Variety says "U also was caught off-guard after they aggressively courted Guillermo Del Toro, the filmmaker behind "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Hellboy." The studio gave him a first-look deal, picked up a sequel to "Hellboy" with a budget of more than $80 million, and even bought the rights to his dream project, the H.P. Lovecraft epic, "At the Mountains of Madness." This looks more real. Hellboy 1 was not that successful to warrant a sequel for almost twice as much as its budget ($60-66 m) - it didn't even break $100 million WW. That's against all the world's business logic.

It's a really good topic though, but I think we should have more like a range of available numbers.

P.S. Hey mark, if the movie is a sequel, can I suggest that we have budgets of the previous movies listed as well just for comparison?

Hellboy II's budget is around $65-75 million. Otherwise Universal wouldn't have greenlit it.

Actually Hellboy 2 costed 80 million. Several reviews mention this figure.

L.A. Times claims a $85m budget for HB2 and $60m each for DAVE & JOURNEY

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 5453.story

So now we have for HELLBOY 2:
$115m The Hollywood Reporter
$85m L.A. Times
$72m IMDB

I think it's best to assume that the THR figure includes marketing costs. So be careful about that possibility when doing this.

That was my initial thought. Do you think they might include mktg? Because ~$30 m for mktg kinda makes sense.

BOM goes with the L.A. Times budget of $85m for HELLBOY 2...

Wall-E: 180 Million

DARK KNIGHT:
BOM: $180m
IMDB: $150m

MAMMA MIA!:
IMDB: $65m

SPACE CHIMPS:
IMDB: $37m

I would like to re-start this thread...

The L.A. Times:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/enterta ... carol.html
"nearly $200-million" XMAS CAROL
"little under $25 million" GOATS
"$25 million" BOX

This thread makes me sad.

That Carol number looks WAY too high.

$200 million? Zemeckis hasn#t learned is lesson from Beowulf.

Ah well, I see this being big. At least $160 million domestically and $300 million worldwide and will definitely become quite a DVD seller.

It really wouldn't shock me. That expenditure is way more justified than Beowulf's budget, though.

zemeckis hasn't learned his lesson? i would say the studio hasn't learned its lesson. It's not the directors fault that studios give him big budgets

The danger of accepting a budget number -- even one quoted in various publications or sources -- is that it's almost certainly wrong. Reputable reporters will try to get various figures and then determine which one seems most accurate (or they'll take the median figure of all the numbers). Rival studios will give out higher estimates, the producing studio will give out lower ones, and the producers sometimes even can't give an accurate figure.

So, for general purposes, the numbers you see are fine -- but let's not take them for gospel.

(Marketing figures are even more inaccurate, and a huge cost that most don't take into account when trying to figure out if a film's gonna turn a profit. Most high-profile, big budget movies, for example, have marketing budgets that can (and regularly do) exceed $100 million).

Anyone knows how much studios get from the overall gross of the movie and how much goes to cinemas? Is it 50-50?

I don't remember the percentages, and I'm sure there might be variation with different movies, but the divide is different early on as opposed to later run. On the opening weekend studio gets the great majority of the money, and the longer the film is out, the bigger percentage the theatre chains get.

That's also a important reason why studios tend to prefer big opening weekends as opposed to long legs. Legs benefit more theatres than they benefit studios. Then again, strong legs also mean good WOM, and greater DVD sales, and a potential sequel.

But the 50-50 rule is true on *average*. It's not really true if you look at a single movies, but then again we don't really have precise information on the distribution deals for each and every movie, and counting the percentages on a day-by-day basis would be very hard to do.

50-50 is close enough to the truth. As close as we are going to get without any new and more accurate sources to count the percentages.

I think the rule is more 55/45 (in favor of the studios) in the long run, though I may be wrong.

When I worked at cinema I tried to get info on this but nobody knew from the managers.

Only once I managed to hear info about one movie that was in 3D ( can't remember which one ) and it was 20PLN for distributor and 12PLN for cinema. And that was for the whole run.

BOM agrees:

$200m XMAS
$25m GOATS
$25m BOX
$10m PRECIOUS

According to this article - http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/con ... 714d06fc7b

New Moon - $50M
Eclipse - $60M

That's extremely low. Such a cheap series. They might go the HP/Hobbit route and split the final movie into two parts to earn extra $$$$$.