13. The film’s total revenues of $52 million were approximately five times the domestic box office. If the domestic and foreign video had been fully accounted for rather than on a royalty basis, the total revenues would have been over $70 million, or seven times the domestic box office.
APPENDIX II
WARNER BROS.
DISTRIBUTION REPORT #4
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,
September 30, 2009
The Warner Bros. September 2009 distribution report for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix shows that even in one of the most profitable franchises in history, a movie loses money in its theatrical run. Of the $938.2 million worth of tickets sold for this Harry Potter sequel, Warner Bros.’ distribution arm got only $459.3 million. Out of that sum, it reimbursed itself the out-of-pocket costs. These cash expenses came to a staggering $182.6 million, including $29.2 million paid to labs for the prints, $131.1 million paid to TV stations, newspapers, and other media for ads, $8 million paid in taxes to foreign governments, $5.6 million paid to dubbing studios, and $3.5 million paid to UPS and others for shipping films abroad to get the film into 7,000 theaters around the world and drum up an opening night audience in fifty countries. What remained after these expenses was just $276.7 million. Since the negative cost for the film was $315.9 million (which included the payments to the author and other gross players), the film was in the red after its theatrical run. As theaters are only initial harvest of money, the profits came from harvesting the back-end, which included the DVD market, Pay-TV (HBO), and TV network and cable licensing.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edward Jay Epstein studied government at Cornell and Harvard universities and received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1973. His master’s thesis on the search for political truth (Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth) and his doctoral dissertation on television news (News from Nowhere) were both published. He taught political science at MIT and UCLA but decided that writing books was a more educational enterprise. The Hollywood Economist, which originated as a column on Slate, is his fourteenth book. He lives in New York City.
www.edwardjayepstein.com
The Hollywood Economist 2.0 Page 15
