'Battleship' Sinks Universal Profits By Over $80 Million

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by Kevin Jagernauth
August 1, 2012 1:37 PM
2 Comments

While studios have been moving toward a model where instead of investing a handful of different movies and a variety of budgets and expectations, they put all their money into a few make-or-break movies per year, the risk of that approach is beginning to be more than apparent. Disney is still wiping the egg off their face from "John Carter," the debacle of a film that they've gone on record as saying lost them $200 million bucks. Oops. And now over an expensive folly over at Universal has also affected the balance sheet.

Their parent company Comcast released results of the last quarter, and while their earnings went up 30%, at Universal Pictures the failure of "Battleship" caused an $83 million loss of cash flow (versus a $27 million profit last year). So yes, a film that earned $302 million worldwide lost the company money -- but that will happen when you spend over $200 million to produce a movie based on a board game starring Rihanna, a swimsuit model and that guy from "Friday Night Lights." But at least this mistake won't happen twice, at least not with movies based on Hasbro properties, as the studio paid the gamemaker a hefty multi-million dollar sum to get out of their development deal. So everything is rosy then, right?

Not really. We'd like to think suits will learn their lesson from this, but the blockbuster culture with sequels, movies based on toys, video games, kids books and reimaginings/reboots is only going to grow and continue. Why? Because with movies like "The Avengers" making $1 billion at the box office alone, and lord knows how much in merchandising and more, that roll of the dice is always going to be a gamble studios are willing to make. And in the eyes of Comcast, what's $80 million when they've raked in $1.3 billion in the last quarter alone? Just a drop in the bucket. So yeah, "Battleship" still sucks, but it doesn't mean more ill conceived blockbusters will stop here. [Variety]

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Roark | August 1, 2012 2:38 PMReply

An $80 million loss on the theatrical release is hardly ideal, but with on demand/dvd & blu ray, network sales, etc they probably end up near profitability on the film long term...
KT | August 1, 2012 1:58 PMReply

Damn... anyone with half a brain could tell you 'Battleship' wasn't going to turn a profit or create a series of sequels. What blows my mind is that everyone seemed to know this leading up to the film's release. I know the film industry can be a crack shoot but come on...

These people have hundreds of millions of dollars to play with... and this is the stuff they CHOOSE to put out? No. I don't feel sorry for them.