March 25, 2012

Best flop ever

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The Herald asks “Is John Carter the biggest flop of all time?”

While there isn’t an official definition of `flop’, it’s worth noting that John Carter has grossed $184 million in two weeks.  That’s quite a lot of money. For example, it’s more than the first Harry Potter movie managed.

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Tom Clare

    Just as “A Princess of Mars’ couldn’t ever be called high literature, ‘John Carter’ wasn’t the pinnacle of cinematic excellence.

    But gosh it was fun. Almost as much fun as the book.

    12 years ago

  • avatar
    Simon Moyes

    Production + marketing was about US$350 million, boxofficemojo.com has the worldwide gross as March 25th as $234,447,000 a difference of 116 million, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_biggest_box_office_bombs has “Mars needs Moms” from last year losing 136 million from a total cost of 175 million. The same site gives “Cutthroat Island” losses adjusted for inflation as $147 million. The figures on this site don’t take account how much of your ticket dollar is kept by the cinema ~45% but do show that John Carter’s losses are the highest ever because it is the latest big budget film to lose money.

    12 years ago

  • avatar
    Luis

    I guess that (Income – Cost) < 0 is a good proxy for 'flop' in a commercial venture.

    12 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      Well, possibly. But that’s not what the story is implying. The story implies that it has been unpopular, which is not at all true.

      It is (or may be — too early to tell) a commercial failure because it was very expensive to make — though the ‘costs’ include a lot of what would be called profits in other industries.

      12 years ago

  • avatar
    Ben Curran

    Costwise, yes, possibly going to be a flop. Cinematically speaking though – not a chance. Old school sci fi done very well I thought. Large amounts of fun.

    12 years ago