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10 Sci-Fi Shows That Don't Get Enough Love
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I guess it is a lot more difficult to make another movie than it would seem from a fan's point of view.
The biggest obstacle to a second movie is the fact that the first one flopped -- and not just by the standards of Hollywood creative accounting. (By way of comparison, Star Trek: The Motion Picture earned twice as much (back when tickets cost half as much), and Paramount still cut the budget for The Wrath of Khan.)
Oooh, Yanni! A film finance discussion, how I love it so. Anyway, taking a quick hack at the figures, box office to film rental is about 55% in the US, lower elsewhere. Let's call it 50% for ease of rough calculation. So $20 million back to the studio from theatrical. Likely an overperform on video given the following. Greatly oversimplifying the many channels, you'd likely get a little more than theatrical film rentals from video. Call it $25 million. Likely half of theatrical from Pay TV / Free TV. So about $55 million all in. It probably just barely eked an accounting profitability after marketing costs. Not a big loser, but were I a studio head, I wouldn't do a sequel either. That's unlike John Carter which was widely - and incorrectly - deemed a loser.
Alan wrote: "My bone to pick about Firefly wasn't its cancellation but Fox's reordering the show's air dates. Genre shows don't work when aired out-of-order. If I'd watched Firefly when it originally aired, I would have lemmed it after Fox's pilot. "I watched it during its initial run -- well, I watched half of it because they moved it and I didn't know when it was on after that -- and I nearly bagged on it after the first episode. If it hadn't been a Whedon joint, I might have.
As I said to my buddy at the time, "I can see kind of what they're going for but it wasn't what I expected." But it had much of Whedon's snarky dialogue and since I was already an Angel fan, I gave it a shot and liked it. But when I got to see the series on DVD with episodes in the order they were supposed to be shown, I fell in love with it.
In a just world, we'd be celebrating the epic conclusion of season 13 of Firefly and eagerly anticipating season 14, proclaiming it "better than ever", while Castle would have never made it to air.
John (Taloni) wrote: "Oooh, Yanni! A film finance discussion, how I love it so. Anyway, taking a quick hack at the figures, box office to film rental is about 55% in the US, lower elsewhere. Let's call it 50% for ease of rough calculation. So $20 million back to the studio from theatrical. Likely an overperform on video given the following. Greatly oversimplifying the many channels, you'd likely get a little more than theatrical film rentals from video. Call it $25 million. Likely half of theatrical from Pay TV / Free TV. So about $55 million all in. It probably just barely eked an accounting profitability after marketing costs."As much as it pains me to say it, the numbers don't lie: Serenity was a belly flop.
It earned $38.5 million on a $39 million budget. General rule of thumb is that you have to make at least 2.5 times your production cost back to cover marketing and thus earn a profit.
For a film that cost $38 million in 2005, marketing was (conservatively) another $25-30 million. That's a minimum of $65 million before anyone sees a dime.
Typical US box office breakdown is that the studio gets anywhere from 80-90% of opening weekend box office, while the theatres get the remaining 10-20%. Each weekend after that it skews toward the theatre chains. So it goes 80/20, 75/25, 70/30, 60/40, etc. (This is typical. Each movie deal is negotiated separately. If it has "Star Wars" in front of the name, the studio gets 100% of the profits and the theatres have to really push the popcorn to make any money at all those first two weeks. That's why theatres love movies like Titanic and Avatar which run for 5-6 months -- by the end of that run they are getting the lion's share of each ticket sold.)
Overseas it's worse, because there are more fingers in the pie. In China, the government takes a chunk right off the top, so studios are lucky to get a 15% return when all is said and done. That's why the American box office is still #1 and the most important. Americans go to the movies more and studios keep more of that money.
There's a joke in Hollywood: noobs want to be actors and directors. Experienced people want to be producers. And all their kids want to make REAL money: in distribution.
John (Taloni) wrote: "Not a big loser, but were I a studio head, I wouldn't do a sequel either. That's unlike John Carter which was widely - and incorrectly - deemed a loser. "
John Carter was a huge bomb, because the bulk of its money came from overseas. Not only did it fail to earn merely its production budget back, the money it did earn had so many slices taken out of it the original pie wasn't even a sliver by the time it got back to the studio. At least Serenity made most of its money in America; John Carter never even recouped a fraction of its advertising, guesstimated at more than $125 million.
And this on top of a production budget in excess of $300 million. That means in order to make a decent profit, John Carter would have had to earn more than $700 million worldwide, $350 of which needed to come from the US. It made $73 million here.
Whedon was able to recover, but that's only because Marvel studios made it a mission statement to make risky, quirky choices. I'm not sure anyone will let Andrew Stanton direct a non-Pixar movie on his own ever again.
Trike, you're missing the video and tv sales. That's where John Carter's eventual (small) profit came from. Also, you're right that there's a sliding scale ain't nobody giving 80% terms for Firefly. Bigger movies get better terms. Wikipedia gives the average as 55% in the domestic market and from my days in the film biz, that seems about right. As I recall overseas went more like 45%. But that's only Theatrical, and both John Carter and Firefly overperformed on video as compared to their theatrical releases.
John (Taloni) wrote: "Trike, you're missing the video and tv sales. That's where John Carter's eventual (small) profit came from. Also, you're right that there's a sliding scale ain't nobody giving 80% terms for Firefly..."Then you know that TV sales are a percentage based on a complicated formula of box office and critical reception, with drastically diminishing returns. John Carter stunk up both of those areas as badly as one can this side of Heaven's Gate. Also, while its DVD sales were better than the box office, that's not saying much. In order to make up for the loss of nearly $250 million, it would have to do Titanic or LotR numbers in disk sales. The last figures I saw put its sales around $35 million. Even when you add in cable, broadcast and rentals -- and generously triple those sales figures, just to give it a sporting chance -- John Carter will literally never turn a profit.
John Carter is one of the bigger bombs ever released, and there's no getting around that. When Disney was outed last year as taking yet another write-down on the film, it was revealed they took an even bigger loss than first suspected. That's how we know the production budget was actually more than $300 million, not the $250 million originally claimed.
It's more of a fantasy show and it started slow but I thought the Dresden Files was getting good just as it got cancelled.
Joe Informatico wrote: "Between the mid-80s (when they started) and the mid-00s (around the time Lost and Heroes got big and established a place for genre on network TV), Fox was really the only one of the Big Four American TV networks willing to even give hour-long genre dramas a chance..."But in the 80s and 90s Fox giving a show a chance meant a full season (24-26 episodes) with no renewal. During the height of cancellation, many shows didn't survive to the mid-season/winter break, sometimes with not all episodes being shown (Firefly, Wonderfalls).
"Sorry, I get a bit of defensive about fandom's slamming Fox's track record with genre shows, because for most of twenty years, they were practically the only major network even taking chances on them. No one ever beats up on CBS for not even taking a chance on a single original SF series for almost thirty years."
I agree that Fox has had many great shows, genre or otherwise. I disagree with their later change in policy that did not give some of those shows an actual chance to build an audience.
I have spoken poorly of CBS programming choices for many years. I have watched one CBS show since the turn of the millennium and not many before then.
Not too many shows on this list get as many song parodies as Firefly does. Actually, none of them get any, as far as I'm aware.Here's another: Bring Firefly Back
I liked Space: Above and Beyond even though I know there were some silly bits. I liked the premise of Earth2, the execution wasn't awesome.
I would add the UK show Misfits to the list, though, honestly, I don't know how under loved this series may have been. The first three seasons were a brilliant time travel story arc, in a show that looked pretty shallow on its surface. After the third season I lost interest. It must have been popular enough to go 5 seasons but only had that major arc planned for 3. They lost their best characters after season 3 too. It became a different show.I really enjoyed the UK version of Being Human also, but it had same problem of losing the best characters after a while. But then, that's what I like about UK shows; they're completely unafraid to kill off characters, if it's right for the plot. Kind of plays hell with continuing with the series, though. I wasn't thrilled with the SyFy channel version of Being Human and I doubt they would ever take the show in the direction the UK version did. You've got to keep those main characters alive in the U. S. (With the notable exception of The Walking Dead).
I thought the biggest deterrent to doing a Serenity sequel was the fact that they killed half the cast in the first one.
Mod
The least needed of the cast. The main cast number was a bit large for a movie franchise at 9. So killing off 2 of the 9 (which is a lot less than half ;-) ) would have been a smart move, if it had had sequels.
Pete wrote: "It's more of a fantasy show and it started slow but I thought the Dresden Files was getting good just as it got cancelled."Agreed, I wanted more of that, especially if they could have followed the books a bit more
Chad wrote: "Pete wrote: "It's more of a fantasy show and it started slow but I thought the Dresden Files was getting good just as it got cancelled."Agreed, I wanted more of that, especially if they could hav..."
I only read one of the books and didn't like it much, but I liked the show. So, if it wasn't following the books, that probably worked in my favor. It's too bad it got canceled.
John (Taloni) wrote: "Trike, you're missing the video and tv sales. That's where John Carter's eventual (small) profit came from. Also, you're right that there's a sliding scale ain't nobody giving 80% terms for Firefly..."TV and Video sales are fairly meaningless. The #1 DVD movie of 2015 to date is Big Hero Six and its current tally is $38.3 million in sales. From that you must subtract production costs and store cut. Not sure what that is but lets be extra generous to the movie company and say they get to keep 75% of the profit. That leaves Big Hero at about $30 million. All the movies at the top of the DVD charts are also movies that did very well at the box office. Most movies don't even make it to $15 million in sales before store and production cuts.
So likely something like Serenity (a movie I dearly love by the way) did less than $10 million in dollars from back then. It was a $40 million movie that made only about $39 million. Since a movie has to make 1.5 to 2.0 times its production costs to break even that means even with $10 million, if we are generous, in DVD sales that it still lost a lot of money. Which is why there will never be a Serenity 2 or sequel of any sort outside of comic books or written novels. You can love the show / movie all you want, like I do, but there is no denying it was an abysmal flop on TV and at the movie theater.
BTW, John Carter which you mention is currently at $37 million in DVD / Blue Ray sales which means somewhere south of $30 million in money to the studio which doesn't even come close to making up the hundreds of millions it lost at the box office. http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/John...
I was a bit befuddled by Farscape being on the list as I thought it got lots of love back in the day when it was one. Enough love to get it four seasons and a followup movie after it was abruptly cancelled on a cliffhanger. I'm not saying it doesn't deserve love as its my favorite show of all time but I don't recall it being ignored or unloved.
Rik, I suppose I should have said "revenue" rather than "sales." There's Netflix and other rentel options. Of course these do change over time, somewhat drastically in the case of video.I'm open to being schooled if you have recent experience, in fact I love these conversations more than is healthy :), but I tend to know what I'm talking about. I used to work in corporation finance for a major indie (Carolco) and after that, Fox Home Video. Haven't worked in the biz for a while so my proforma analysis could be stale, but not likely to be completely off. If you know better for sure, please do us up a proforma. I did one a while back on John Carter and came up with a small profit.
Hi John,do you mind sharing your pro forma for john carter? I'm curious to see what one looks like!
Actually, they've done several Firefly graphic novels including one (whose name escapes me) that dealt specifically with the Blue-Handed Men.