NYU DC VIOLETS I Nonfiction | More money, more profit? A statistical analysis of the top and bottom 5 of the 50 most invested movies ever

By Michael Lee

On a Friday night, just when you can finally relax, there is no better way to spend it than going to the theater and watching a movie you’ve been dying to see. However, we seem to forget how much money goes into making these movies. Most of them cost millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions, to produce. Sometimes these movies don’t get the return of money they expect them to earn.
That also begs us to ask the question, does putting a lot of money into a movie guarantee a high return? Absolutely not.
On the contrary, we can analyze the returns of the highest budgeted movies, specifically the top and bottom five movies on USA Today’s list of the top fifty most invested movies.
The top five most invested movies are in the chart below (values represented in dollars).

This chart show us that the most invested movie Avatar yielded the highest return in revenue of over three billion dollars. And for all of these movies, revenue was at least double their production budget and over a billion dollars. Further, four out of five of these movies gained back at least triple their production budget. This case shows a positive trend between budget and profit.
The bottom five most invested movies are in the chart below (values represented in dollars).
The trend of success seems to be the same narrative for the bottom five movies on the list. All five movies have gained back at least two and a half times their original production budget costs. However, only three of the five movies have recouped at least triple their production cost, opposed to the four out of five from the five most invested movies. Also, only two of the bottom most movies have grossed over a billion dollars as opposed to the top five movies grossing at least a billion dollars in revenue. While there is a successful gain in profit amongst the bottom five movies, it is certainly less than the profit from the top five movies.
If anyone has at least three hundred million dollars lying around and wants to spend it on producing and releasing a movie, statistics will tell you that you are almost guaranteed to gain back a billion dollars (warning: do not try this at home).