Disney made an estimated $296.4 million loss at the box office on just two of its Marvel superhero movies in 2023 according to analysis of recently-released financial statements.
They reveal that the cost of making The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania came to a staggering $762.4 million (£609.3 million) before Disney banked $124.9 million (£99.4 million) in government incentives bringing its net spending on the movies down to $637.5 million. They both bombed at the box office.
According to industry analyst Box Office Mojo, the movies grossed a combined $682.2 million with theaters typically retaining 50% of the takings and the remainder going to the studio. This reflects the findings of film industry consultant Stephen Follows who interviewed 1,235 film professionals in 2014 and concluded that, according to studios, theaters keep 49% of the takings on average. It would give Disney just $341.1 million from The Marvels and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. No expense was spared on them.
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Disney does not publicly discuss how much it spends on specific productions and did not respond to a request for comment. Budgets are usually a closely-guarded secret. This is because studios combine the costs of individual pictures in their overall expenses and their filings don’t itemize how much was spent on each one. Films made in the UK are exceptions and both The Marvels and Quantumania fall into this category.
Studios shoot in the UK to benefit from its Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country.
To qualify for the reimbursement, at least 10% of the production costs need to relate to activities in the UK. In order to demonstrate this to the UK government, studios tend to set up a separate production company in the country for each movie they make there.
The companies have to file financial statements which shine a spotlight on their budgets. They reveal everything from the headcount and salaries to the level of reimbursement and the total costs. Studios directly receive the revenue from theater tickets, streaming and Blu-ray sales and carry the costs of marketing as the function of the UK companies is purely making the movies.
I’m sorry, did I just read that DISNEY received $125 Million in government incentives to make a comic book movie?
Studios shoot in the UK to benefit from its Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit (AVEC) which gives them a cash reimbursement of up to 25.5% of the money they spend in the country.
It’s not like they were handed a blank check, they spent hundreds of millions more paying people and buying stuff in the UK to get that rebate
“As the CEO, if I pay myself $100 million for making this movie, I will get $25 million of that back from government reimbursement.”
No big budget movie will ever make a profit because they make sure the big wigs get paid the amount the profit would have been. It is intentional.
It goes into more detail in the article about how they qualify for that rebate, and no, that’s not how it works.
Easy. I’m the new CEO of the company we set up there. Employee salary is an expenditure, and being a company in that country, it qualifies for that rebate unless there’s more details I’m missing. I was also grossly over-simplifying in my original comment, I’m sure it’s more complicated than that. I also just attribute Hollywood Accounting (see other commenter’s post) to anything listed as a box office loss.
In the UK things like that get checked when it comes to grants, they will usually only be valid purchases if spent with approved companies.
That’s just gouvernement incentives with extra steps.
Wait till you find out the literal billions Georgia (USA) gives away to filmmakers via a tax credit that’s been proven to not be more effective than social programs by a significant margin at generating community wealth…
It’s because trickle down-style policies give more wealth and social power to those at the top while allowing the argument that the economic activity that results from that wealth benefits everyone down the pyramid (which also creates a dependency on more instances of these transfers as businesses grow to accommodate the extra demand).
Social programs do that without giving more wealth or social power to people at the top.
The effectiveness that they care about isn’t the economic benefit or allowing people to become more independent, it’s about funneling money to the rich in the hopes that they will funnel some of it back in a way that won’t look so much like corruption.
Indeed. You’d be shocked the amount of people I’ve spoken with that believe otherwise. They see the positive side of the numbers and don’t think about the long term implications for even a moment it seems.
The company I currently work at is relocating its HQ to Atlanta GA due to similar incentives. I’m slightly curious just how many millions of dollars in incentives they’re receiving to relocate ~30 employees and hire another 30-60 local employees, because apparently Atlanta outbit Dallas TX on the questionable business incentives
“I lost $100 million dollars making this movie. Coincidentally, I also paid myself $100 million to make this movie.”
this only accounts for box office take. when you add in streaming, tv and other broadcast rights, home video, merchandising. they won’t be ‘losing money’ on these two ‘bombs’.
Yeah when the ant man Halloween costume numbers come in at the end of the month I’m sure they’ll be in the black.
Even though this includes the Ant Man film, they put Brie Larson on the thumbnail, they know what they are doing.
I took it as the image looks vaguely like she’s looking at a piece of mail or a paycheck with a concerned expression on her face, befitting of the general content of the article.
Wow! That’s like a sixth of two billion!
No shit. What a bullshit manipulation of numbers by people thrusting their hate boners. “Almost $300m” would have sufficed.
God they had to dig so deep to get these numbers. Looking up tax records? Like Jesus Christ let it go.
This analysis isn’t acknowledging the important fact that The Marvel’s was dogwater in its best moments and pure cringe at all other times.
I liked the Marvels =(
Meanwhile, I’ve heard such bad things about Quantumania that I haven’t watched it yet lol.
I liked Quantumania. Sometimes you just want something fun and it delivered.
I also liked Quantumania. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t “Thor 4” level of bad either.
Hm… Maybe I’ll give it a try sometime then.
That’s kind of how I felt about The Marvels and the other Ant-Man movies. They weren’t mind-blowing, but they were mostly a fun time. Not too long, well paced, pretty light hearts with some creative action scenes that didn’t hit Shang Chi or Winter Soldier heights, but we’re entertaining enough.
The bad guy in Marvels was 100% forgettable. I can’t tell you who it was or what their motives were.
But the main cast had great chemistry.
100%. The villain kinda sucked. The actress was alright but they gave her nothing to work with. Marvel has that problem a lot. They completely wasted Christian Bale in the last Thor movie imo.
I’m a 40 year old dude and thought it was fun. Not my favourite, but it clearly wasn’t made for me. I feel like it’s the kind of thing that will really connect with young girls and later on it will be looked back on fondly.
Dads, watch it with your daughters. You won’t regret it.
Quantumania was fun too. Could’ve been better, but don’t believe all the hate.
I agree on quantamania, it’s a fun turn your brain off movie. Introduces some cool concepts to the universe and has some interesting visuals. Marvel movies aren’t meant to be your forest gumps, people seem to forget that sometimes.
I enjoyed the Marvels but I rate the Captain Marvel highly.
I thought Quantumania was pretty pointless, doubly now Kang has been dropped.
I didn’t mind the Marvels. I thought it had problems, and parts were cringy if you’re not into it. But the biggest flaw was the writing. It’s like they had these ideas for set pieces, and then tried to bring it all together as an afterthought. It wasn’t as bad as certain people wanted it to be.
Quantumania was unfinished. It was like they ran out of money and time and just submitted the minimally viable movie. Paul Rudd is always charming, and the actress playing Cassie/Stature is going to be a net plus to the Young Avengers. I think Michelle Pfeiffer was poorly utilized, and of course Kang became a PR problem. But the writing had some high points. The story was engaging, the stakes were real, and the characters all had arcs. The CG was shit, and the Giant Goof schtick is overplayed. Letting go of the physics is a prerequisite for any Superhero movie.
They did poorly because Disney was rushing. They wanted to generate energy and enthusiasm by deliberately releasing each new movie before the last one was available on streaming. But instead of creating fomo, they fostered indifference because the product wasn’t good enough. Nothing post-endgame felt like must-watch content. The tie-ins were half-assed, because the studio clearly did not have faith that they would ever get to wrap up each dangling plot thread.
The Marvels was better than Eternals. Quantumania was better than Wakanda Forever. None of them are great movies, but none are as bad as anti-woke or anti-superhero critics suggest.
Werewolf by night was lit. I loved that one. Man thing character aside, it was fun and suspenseful.
I do not understand Paul Rudd’s appeal at all. He just seems like a normal dork that isn’t ugly. Nothing against him, I just don’t get the gushing everyone else seems to do.
Have you seen his role as Celery Man?
Have now. Still not seeing the appeal, but then it takes more than seeing someone in something funny for me to like them specifically. I’m far too old to be fanatic about much, and Tim and Eric style silly sketches are hit and miss at best. Sure, the hits are really funny, but absurd is not funny in and of itself to me.
Sounds like most of the marvel movies
That’s completely unfair. There was really good stuff in the first act, the writers played into the tension between the three Marvels quite well. Everything after that was boring and by-the-book, but it wasn’t bad.
Who knew over saturating tired IP would result in a loss of profit?
A) Ant man is such a stupid movie. “He keeps his same inertia even though he’s tiny” <Grown man proceeds to walk on people with no apparent physical effect>
B) Never trust Hollywood accounting
The physics never make sense. Iron Man should be a pink smoothie in a can. Hulk generates mass from nothing and sheds it back to nothing when he changes. Spiderman should be pulling drywall off the studs. Vibranium makes zero sense, either as a shield or as a suit or really any other time. 90% of the fighting Hawkeye and Black Widow do is absurd and would leave their bones shattered.
Thor is all magic, so that gets a pass, but you can’t throw a hammer and the get dragged behind it, and then change directions midair. Thor is flying because magic, let’s just leave it at that.
And it’s not just the MCU. Superman can’t catch a plane by the nose. Batman can’t launch a grapple hook while he’s falling and prevent his death.
Aragorn can’t toss Gimli that far. Luke’s X-Wing doesn’t bank through air in space. The USS Enterprise wouldn’t always be oriented to be upright with everything. James Bond can’t just recover from all those concussions and venereal diseases without brain damage. Indy can’t ride out a nuclear explosion in a fridge.
It’s not that the physics doesn’t match reality, it’s that the physics doesn’t match THEIR OWN rules.
It’d be like if the Hulk was crushing cars with his steps in one scene, but then calmly sitting in a flimsy plastic lawn chair in the next. It’s discongruent within their OWN rules. It doesn’t match THEIR OWN reality.
It’d be like if Superman is suddenly unable to shrug off bullets. It’s dumb.
Stories do not have to be realistic, but they MUST be congruent in order to be taken seriously. It’s much, MUCH harder to suspend disbelief if there are no rules and the good guy magically wins.
If you say, “but that’s Disney Marvel, though”, then perhaps that has something to do with the waning popularity!?
Sure, but also Pym is dumbing down his explanations for Scott, because he thinks Scott is a moron. The exact functioning of Pym particles isn’t at all clear.
It would be like if Superman could tear his S emblem off his chest and throw it at bad guys like a giant cellophane net. Or if Superman could fly fast enough to spin the Earth backwards and reverse time.
Or like if Hulk could be stopped by some crazy loud directional speakers.
Super powers and weaknesses are, and always have been, entirely plot dependent. Vision can phase because he can phase. The explanation that Vision can control his own density makes zero sense. That could make him float, but it wouldn’t make him fly sideways, and it certainly wouldn’t allow him to pass through solid matter. Air is not very dense, but it doesn’t pass through solid stone. The physics of Starlord and Gamora in space make no sense. Groot makes no sense. Yondu’s arrow makes no sense.
Ant-Man can shrink and punch a dude because he can shrink and punch a dude. The only problem is they tried to explain it like it’s science.
All of these great examples, and we haven’t even mentioned The Flash yet.
Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with enjoying your favourite comic book characters on screen, like watching a live action cartoon. Comics don’t make sense all the time, or cartoons, comic book movies don’t have to either.
If that’s not for you, than to each their own.
I’ll also say I haven’t enjoyed many DC / Marvel movies for awhile but not because they don’t follow their rules. That’s their secret… They have no rules.
Okay I may be wrong there but I don’t know offhand one rule a comic story hasn’t broken at a new point. I also don’t read a ton of them but I know they change their mind a whole lot. Also physics goes out the window when you take into account many comic characters. Sure ant man said this, who says ant man was correct?
There’s a great comic panel where ant man is shrunk down to atomic size with another character. Molecules are floating by. He asks “Hey, how are we breathing anyway if we’re the same size as the molecules”. He answered, “don’t worry about it” and continued the discussion.
One thing I like about space fights is you’ll often see them use the 3 dimensions and that they aren’t just upright. But they really are upright to everything almost all of the time otherwise.
For the x-wing banking in space, it could be because that’s how the thrust vectors are lined up. Like maybe it can turn on the y axis (yaw), but it’s much better at turning on the x axis (pitch), so he turns it on the z axis (roll) to line up the x axis with the rotation he really wants to make.
Many space flight sims work this way, though tbf it might be because they are mimicking winged flight characteristics from air-based flight sims.
But I think it does make sense from an engineering and production pov because you can make the yaw mechanism smaller than the pitch mechanism while still being capable of turning in any direction.
Though I gotta wonder how a universe like Star Wars with clearly advanced AIs generally makes them clumsy contraptions and tends to leave flying and aiming ship weapons to humans. It makes sense for the force-sensitive characters, but the millennium falcon should have had a button to press to shoot down all tie fighters in the time it takes the guns to point at where each fighter will be, and the fighters themselves should have been unmanned and shot the falcon from multiple angles before they had a chance to push that button.
It’s not enough to ruin the media IMO, but just amusing to see cool tech in media but also clear signs the writers didn’t realize the full implications of tech like that existing and that nothing exists in a bubble.
The x-wings bank in Star Wars because they were imitating WW2 aircraft
Other games and films that use the same incorrect physics do so because Star Wars did it that way
You had me until the toss, because Aragorn definitely can toss a dwarf that far, but the rest? All made up.
You’re right, it’s bad because the movie about a man that can shrink to the size of an ant is unrealistic, rather than because it was very badly written.
Those are both the case. The bad writing resulted in the movie contradicting itself.
Awww no, poor thing… Does Disney need a hug?
You know, this is kind of a feel good story to me. That money didn’t just vanish into the ether. Disney lost that money to the people working on the movies. Not counting the massively overpaid actors and shit, but that “loss” was just regular people taking money from Disney and I like that quite a bit.
A third of a billion dollars… so far
Less than 333 mil isn’t even close to a billion. I really get tired of click bate headlines.
It also doesn’t take into account how Disney actually uses these movies.
Disney makes the bulk of their pure profit in the theme parks.
They just announced that they were dropping $50billion to upgrade the parks, with an expectation of making that back completely within 2-3 years.
The movies, are seen as giant commercials for new merch and Disney parks.
As long as the movie is seen favorably by the target age group (children who will want to go to Disney world) then it’s seen as a success.
Then scenes from the movie can be used in the theme parks.
As a note, the scenes used in the park, may have been made years before the movie was filmed.
Keep it up!
Genuinely suspect that the people in charge of the money on these projects are stealing a good chunk of it.
“Stealing”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgYYOUC10aM
Much of the budget is megabucks wages for the stars and director and then enormous amounts on “distribution” aka adverts.
They’ve apparently got like $6 billion in cash reserves so they can afford the odd stinker.
Those losses won’t be real losses, because they’ll just pay everyone less on the next movie. They’ll be tax man losses. We haven’t made any money, oh poor us…
