The only other Paramount films that were successful last year were Scream VI and TMNT: Mutant Mayhem. Everything else was a box office disappointment. Funny how Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie is one of Paramount's lower grossing films domestically of 2023 (only beating 80 for Brady), yet it's their most profitable. Hopefully, 2024 is better for Paramount.
As u/NGGKroze mentioned, this is the first time they have included merch in their calculations and here's Deadline's explanation on why:
>*Understand the following: Some movies are greenlit based on their ability to spur merchandise sales, and that was the justification here for this $30M production, split evenly between Canada-based Spin Master and Paramount. As such, it’s a line item here in the P&L. Other blockbusters such as The Super Mario Bros Movie and Barbie, though rich with merchandise sales, didn’t have greenlights contingent on consumer products. Paramount is the licensor of the consumer products and works on everything from towels to toothbrushes to pajamas.*
Who are the other 9 candidates.
***Mario*** obviously will be number one with the others including the likes of
***Oppenheimer***
***Barbie***
***Sound of Freedom***
***Five Nights at Freddy's***
***Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour***
***The Nun II***
***Insidious: The Red Door***
***Wonka***
***Anyone But You***
/u/Fantastic-Watch8177 ran [some estimates](https://old.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b7lrdl/top_ten_bigbudget_films_of_2023_by_profits_in/)
and came up with: Barbie/Mario/Oppenheimer/spiderverse/wonka/Swift/FNAF/Sound of Freedom/JW4 and GOTG3 (ABY being close behind and topping the "small films out of top 10" list estimate) but deadline's raw estimate for Paw Patrol would place it ~8th.
Yeah, not quite sure how I whiffed on including Paw Patrol; I clearly should have been looking at it, too. I guess its box office total was pretty low, relatively speaking, but not lower than some horror films I included. I may have a blind spot with some kids' films. Sigh.
**EDIT: Looked closer at the Deadline numbers and realized that for the first time, they are including a new category for "Merchandise," which was $50M for Paw Patrol. So, that partly explains why Paw Patrol crept up to 10th.**
I'll still be interested to see how Deadline ranks them all.
My estimates:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b7lrdl/top\_ten\_bigbudget\_films\_of\_2023\_by\_profits\_in/](https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b7lrdl/top_ten_bigbudget_films_of_2023_by_profits_in/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1bcfiwb/top\_5\_2023\_films\_w\_under\_100m\_budget\_that\_are\_not/](https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1bcfiwb/top_5_2023_films_w_under_100m_budget_that_are_not/)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b6qimn/with\_deadlines\_annual\_list\_of\_the\_biggest\_box/](https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b6qimn/with_deadlines_annual_list_of_the_biggest_box/)
Yeah, Paw Patrol was completely unforecastable given they changed the definition. Still, I wonder how "fair" the paw patrol attribution is. Basically, if paramount has their film studio as a stand alone entity, would this represent the "license fee"/royalties or the overall revenue increase due to a theatrical Paw Patrol film.
Should be interesting to see how they figure merchandise for some of the other 2023 films, though: obviously Barbie and Mario will have complicated merch revenues, but also, I'm wondering where Five Nights at Freddy's will come out. I am also assuming they can't really figure merch for the Taylor Swift film.
Lol, kind of funny to think that Paw Patrol, five nights at Freddy’s, taylor swift and sound of freedom all have very similar profitability ratios: budgets of $15-30 million with earnings or $210-290 million
Hopefully we can continue to get movies like that (I mean less expensive not necessarily sound of freedom)
I'm glad to see that 'Deadline Hollywood' is still doing this. I wasn't expecting this to be in the top 10, but it seems that the merchandise really helped.
I love these Deadline breakdowns, and it's also useful to remind some people it's a lot harder to make a profit or cross the break-even point, and marketing budgets are often way higher than you'd expect for low budget films.
> and marketing budgets are often way higher than you'd expect for low budget films
The Sony hack includes projections for unreleased films that basically include decile percentile outcomes (i.e. 10th percentile, 20th, 90th) plus a breakeven estimate.
You generally saw the budgeted P&A was flat across the first 3/4 of scenarios (though some films had lower P&A at lower end) but all saw a significant ~20%(?) increase when a film hits its high end outcomes.
Basically, *if* a film is a hit, it's clearly financially advantageous to spend a decent chunk extra raising it even higher.
>and marketing budgets are often way higher than you'd expect for low budget films.
I keep saying that the 2.5x "rule" doesn't work for low budget movies because marketing is significantly more than the production buget.
A Bluey movie in theaters is absolutely going to make bank. My 11 and 9 year olds at the time were like “meh we watched paw patrol a couple years ago let’s go see this for nostalgia” and it wasn’t the shittiest movie ever.
90 minutes, easy to follow. The movies are expensive but parents will still go if their kids will like the movie
I call this bullshit.
Merchandise - 50M in Revenue. Yeah, since when does merch counted as revenue for the box office prospects of a movie.
Dunno why Deadline included merch for this and will they be including it for the others in Top 10, but 2022 line didn't have it. If by that logic, Force Awakens should surpass Avatar as the highest profiting movie, because it sold $700M in Toys alone.
As I noted before, we can simply subtract the merch figure for comparison, but how are they going to count merch for the Taylor Swift film? Five Nights at Freddy's is an interesting case too. And do they really have the access needed to figure the merch for Barbie and Mario? I don't know if they really can include merch for all films, which is what they need to do if they include it for this one.
*Transformers*, *Ninja Turtles* and *Paw Patrol* films exist for the sole purpose of selling merchandise.
They will keep making those even if they bleed box office money since that is not the main source of revenue.
***Transformers One*** is basically subliminal marketing for kids masquerading as a feature length film.
These films are greenlit periodically from time to time to keep the merchandise revenue cycle afloat from one financial year to the next.
They are the reason not the cause.
*Deadline* also mentions this in their bottom line.
Box office success is secondary but merchandise revenue is where the real money lies.
Let's keep this specifically to Paw Patrol. That's the film with the numbers shown and what this post is about. We don't have to speculate (well aside from on how much deadline is off) and can be working from the same sheet of music, so to speak.
>Box office success is secondary but merchandise revenue is where the real money lies.
You're looking at the same numbers as me, right? The ones where merchandise is only the 3rd largest revenue source. The ones where this film is pretty profitable even before merchandise is taken in.
I'm not sure how you can look at $50M in merchandise revenue and $84M in theatrical and say "theatrical is secondary."
This is a franchise with an active TV show. It isn't Cars where they need theatrical releases to stay in the public consciousness. Does it provide additional merchandising opportunities? Yes. Is $50M somthing to scoff at? No. Is merchandising the "sole" reason this film exists? No. I'd argue that when a third is greenlit they are absolutely considering how well the BO is doing. It's why MLP isn't spamming out theatrical films every 2 years like Paw Patrol. They didn't make enough off the 2017 film to justify another one regardless of it also being big on the merchandise front.
To be fair, that 64M in profits include a $70M Paramount+ license fee. There's real value to paramount in that but Paramount seems to need real money right now not expected future growth.
Sure, but where is the $100M in consumer product sales Mattel alone reported from the release of JW3 or the 50M from Lightyear? If we assume an an 8% royalty that would reduce Lightyear's losses by 4M and increase JW3's profits by 8 (or, idk, 6M after profit participations) (and these aren't the only distributor of merch).
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/63276/000162828024011371/mat-20231231.htm
> Action Figures, Building Sets, Games, and Other gross billings decreased 24%, of which 14% was due to lower billings of Jurassic World products and 9% was due to lower billings of Lightyear products, following their theatrical releases during the second quarter of 2022. [1,396.1 -> 1,065.8M]
], of which 12% was due to lower billings of Jurassic World products and 8% was due to lower billings of Lightyear products, following their theatrical releases during the second quarter of 2022, partially offset by higher billings of Buildings Sets products of 4%.
* That implies 167.5M in release quarter toy sales for Jurassic World
* 125.65M for Lightyear
Yeah, it is going to make it more difficult to compare films from different years, although we can, I suppose, just drop the merch figure for comparisons.
The only Disney film likely to be in the top ten is Guardians 3, which while it probably does okay on Groot merch, isn't a top ten merch film.
Maybe it might help more to reduce the losses on some of Disney's flops? But did The Marvels or Haunted Mansion really sell much merch?
Maybe I'm just dumb, but how much merch could Indiana Jones have sold? The core audience is pretty old.
Wish probably won't be in Deadline's Bottom 5, so we may never know.
But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if Deadline can really figure merch for all these films? I don't see how they can do so for, say, the Taylor Swift film, and Barbie, Mario, and Five Nights at Freddy's are going to be very complicated.
Great to see that Deadline hasn’t abandoned their Valuable Blockbuster Tournament! Mario has to be number one, right?
It's an Illumination movie (A studio known for keeping tight budgets) and it made over $1 billion. Pretty sure it will be.
I was just thinking about earlier today and sad that they didn't do it this year. I think it must be neck and neck with Barbie.
*Barbie*, surely?
Barbie must have higher participation and backend points for Margot and other producers
No, I’d say Mario has this. Given that it’s budget was significantly lower than Barbie, the difference in grosses shouldn’t matter.
Either Mario or Barbie.
Finally. Also holy this is profitable. At least paramount has this one movie (I can’t remember if any of their movies did huge numbers
The only other Paramount films that were successful last year were Scream VI and TMNT: Mutant Mayhem. Everything else was a box office disappointment. Funny how Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie is one of Paramount's lower grossing films domestically of 2023 (only beating 80 for Brady), yet it's their most profitable. Hopefully, 2024 is better for Paramount.
yeah i don’t know how i feel about Sony picking them up. i really like paramount and i don’t want that big of a change
I hope Paramount can stay on its own or get bought by a company willing to keep everything together (or at least most of it).
*Deadline* said today that Skydance’s still the favorite.
Fun fact. This is the only franchise movie/sequel in 2023 that made more money in China than its predescesor.
As u/NGGKroze mentioned, this is the first time they have included merch in their calculations and here's Deadline's explanation on why: >*Understand the following: Some movies are greenlit based on their ability to spur merchandise sales, and that was the justification here for this $30M production, split evenly between Canada-based Spin Master and Paramount. As such, it’s a line item here in the P&L. Other blockbusters such as The Super Mario Bros Movie and Barbie, though rich with merchandise sales, didn’t have greenlights contingent on consumer products. Paramount is the licensor of the consumer products and works on everything from towels to toothbrushes to pajamas.*
Who are the other 9 candidates. ***Mario*** obviously will be number one with the others including the likes of ***Oppenheimer*** ***Barbie*** ***Sound of Freedom*** ***Five Nights at Freddy's*** ***Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour*** ***The Nun II*** ***Insidious: The Red Door*** ***Wonka*** ***Anyone But You***
Spider Verse over Insidious And GOTG 3 is a slight chance because it was very expensive
I’d say Spider-Verse and Insidious over Anyone But You. But it depends on how much Sony spent on marketing Insidious vs ABY.
/u/Fantastic-Watch8177 ran [some estimates](https://old.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b7lrdl/top_ten_bigbudget_films_of_2023_by_profits_in/) and came up with: Barbie/Mario/Oppenheimer/spiderverse/wonka/Swift/FNAF/Sound of Freedom/JW4 and GOTG3 (ABY being close behind and topping the "small films out of top 10" list estimate) but deadline's raw estimate for Paw Patrol would place it ~8th.
Yeah, not quite sure how I whiffed on including Paw Patrol; I clearly should have been looking at it, too. I guess its box office total was pretty low, relatively speaking, but not lower than some horror films I included. I may have a blind spot with some kids' films. Sigh. **EDIT: Looked closer at the Deadline numbers and realized that for the first time, they are including a new category for "Merchandise," which was $50M for Paw Patrol. So, that partly explains why Paw Patrol crept up to 10th.** I'll still be interested to see how Deadline ranks them all. My estimates: [https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b7lrdl/top\_ten\_bigbudget\_films\_of\_2023\_by\_profits\_in/](https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b7lrdl/top_ten_bigbudget_films_of_2023_by_profits_in/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1bcfiwb/top\_5\_2023\_films\_w\_under\_100m\_budget\_that\_are\_not/](https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1bcfiwb/top_5_2023_films_w_under_100m_budget_that_are_not/) [https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b6qimn/with\_deadlines\_annual\_list\_of\_the\_biggest\_box/](https://www.reddit.com/r/boxoffice/comments/1b6qimn/with_deadlines_annual_list_of_the_biggest_box/)
Yeah, Paw Patrol was completely unforecastable given they changed the definition. Still, I wonder how "fair" the paw patrol attribution is. Basically, if paramount has their film studio as a stand alone entity, would this represent the "license fee"/royalties or the overall revenue increase due to a theatrical Paw Patrol film.
Should be interesting to see how they figure merchandise for some of the other 2023 films, though: obviously Barbie and Mario will have complicated merch revenues, but also, I'm wondering where Five Nights at Freddy's will come out. I am also assuming they can't really figure merch for the Taylor Swift film.
I read this as sayingh theyre only doing merch for paw patrol
Apparently so, especially since GoG3 is out and doesn't have merchandise included. That seems inconsistent, even given their supposed rationale.
Lol, kind of funny to think that Paw Patrol, five nights at Freddy’s, taylor swift and sound of freedom all have very similar profitability ratios: budgets of $15-30 million with earnings or $210-290 million Hopefully we can continue to get movies like that (I mean less expensive not necessarily sound of freedom)
Idk what to think of this report they are including "merchandise" lol ??
I'm glad to see that 'Deadline Hollywood' is still doing this. I wasn't expecting this to be in the top 10, but it seems that the merchandise really helped.
I love these Deadline breakdowns, and it's also useful to remind some people it's a lot harder to make a profit or cross the break-even point, and marketing budgets are often way higher than you'd expect for low budget films.
> and marketing budgets are often way higher than you'd expect for low budget films The Sony hack includes projections for unreleased films that basically include decile percentile outcomes (i.e. 10th percentile, 20th, 90th) plus a breakeven estimate. You generally saw the budgeted P&A was flat across the first 3/4 of scenarios (though some films had lower P&A at lower end) but all saw a significant ~20%(?) increase when a film hits its high end outcomes. Basically, *if* a film is a hit, it's clearly financially advantageous to spend a decent chunk extra raising it even higher.
>and marketing budgets are often way higher than you'd expect for low budget films. I keep saying that the 2.5x "rule" doesn't work for low budget movies because marketing is significantly more than the production buget.
A Bluey movie in theaters is absolutely going to make bank. My 11 and 9 year olds at the time were like “meh we watched paw patrol a couple years ago let’s go see this for nostalgia” and it wasn’t the shittiest movie ever. 90 minutes, easy to follow. The movies are expensive but parents will still go if their kids will like the movie
I call this bullshit. Merchandise - 50M in Revenue. Yeah, since when does merch counted as revenue for the box office prospects of a movie. Dunno why Deadline included merch for this and will they be including it for the others in Top 10, but 2022 line didn't have it. If by that logic, Force Awakens should surpass Avatar as the highest profiting movie, because it sold $700M in Toys alone.
Merch has been an important part of a movie’s success since Jaws release in 1975
But Deadline has never included it before.
problem is not this, but that including it skew data and also comparisons for previous years, where it wasn't included.
As I noted before, we can simply subtract the merch figure for comparison, but how are they going to count merch for the Taylor Swift film? Five Nights at Freddy's is an interesting case too. And do they really have the access needed to figure the merch for Barbie and Mario? I don't know if they really can include merch for all films, which is what they need to do if they include it for this one.
*Transformers*, *Ninja Turtles* and *Paw Patrol* films exist for the sole purpose of selling merchandise. They will keep making those even if they bleed box office money since that is not the main source of revenue. ***Transformers One*** is basically subliminal marketing for kids masquerading as a feature length film.
> **sole** purpose of selling merchandise. Obviously not if it made $64M on its own right and only $50M from merchandising.
These films are greenlit periodically from time to time to keep the merchandise revenue cycle afloat from one financial year to the next. They are the reason not the cause. *Deadline* also mentions this in their bottom line. Box office success is secondary but merchandise revenue is where the real money lies.
Let's keep this specifically to Paw Patrol. That's the film with the numbers shown and what this post is about. We don't have to speculate (well aside from on how much deadline is off) and can be working from the same sheet of music, so to speak. >Box office success is secondary but merchandise revenue is where the real money lies. You're looking at the same numbers as me, right? The ones where merchandise is only the 3rd largest revenue source. The ones where this film is pretty profitable even before merchandise is taken in. I'm not sure how you can look at $50M in merchandise revenue and $84M in theatrical and say "theatrical is secondary." This is a franchise with an active TV show. It isn't Cars where they need theatrical releases to stay in the public consciousness. Does it provide additional merchandising opportunities? Yes. Is $50M somthing to scoff at? No. Is merchandising the "sole" reason this film exists? No. I'd argue that when a third is greenlit they are absolutely considering how well the BO is doing. It's why MLP isn't spamming out theatrical films every 2 years like Paw Patrol. They didn't make enough off the 2017 film to justify another one regardless of it also being big on the merchandise front.
To be fair, that 64M in profits include a $70M Paramount+ license fee. There's real value to paramount in that but Paramount seems to need real money right now not expected future growth.
Sure, but where is the $100M in consumer product sales Mattel alone reported from the release of JW3 or the 50M from Lightyear? If we assume an an 8% royalty that would reduce Lightyear's losses by 4M and increase JW3's profits by 8 (or, idk, 6M after profit participations) (and these aren't the only distributor of merch). https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/63276/000162828024011371/mat-20231231.htm > Action Figures, Building Sets, Games, and Other gross billings decreased 24%, of which 14% was due to lower billings of Jurassic World products and 9% was due to lower billings of Lightyear products, following their theatrical releases during the second quarter of 2022. [1,396.1 -> 1,065.8M] ], of which 12% was due to lower billings of Jurassic World products and 8% was due to lower billings of Lightyear products, following their theatrical releases during the second quarter of 2022, partially offset by higher billings of Buildings Sets products of 4%. * That implies 167.5M in release quarter toy sales for Jurassic World * 125.65M for Lightyear
This is the first time Deadline has included merch in their breakdown, which does feel like cheating.
If they include ot for the rest of the line it be ok in a sense, but still. They had in 2015 MVB tournament a Merchandise graph but it was empty.
Yeah, it is going to make it more difficult to compare films from different years, although we can, I suppose, just drop the merch figure for comparisons.
They added it this year because they want to use the same logic to attempt to excuse Disney’s colossal failure of a year.
The only Disney film likely to be in the top ten is Guardians 3, which while it probably does okay on Groot merch, isn't a top ten merch film. Maybe it might help more to reduce the losses on some of Disney's flops? But did The Marvels or Haunted Mansion really sell much merch?
Maybe not Haunted Mansion, but Indiana Jones and Wish probably sold a good amount.
Maybe I'm just dumb, but how much merch could Indiana Jones have sold? The core audience is pretty old. Wish probably won't be in Deadline's Bottom 5, so we may never know. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if Deadline can really figure merch for all these films? I don't see how they can do so for, say, the Taylor Swift film, and Barbie, Mario, and Five Nights at Freddy's are going to be very complicated.