....And disagree again. The interesting thing about Predator is that at least through the first two movies Predators have been coming here and hunting for a long time. That opens the whole franchise up to a lot of potential in terms of doing chronologically varied movies that tie to greater theme. Why? Is it just hunting humans, have they been fucking around in a larger way. Not to mention the obvious future tie-ins with Colonial Marines. This is a great franchise that had been mismanaged, not a bad idea. The Predators hunting humans is the fun stuff but it needs to sit on top of a good story.
I don't see how humans would have defeated Predators before Arnold's time especially before Vietnam War era. Weapons were more archaic and most humans weren't Arnold's size to deal with such an enemy.
Because what has always made humans strong is working as a team, it’s our super-power. The idea of an individual like Arnold beating the Predator was fun, in-keeping with Arnold, and very American 80’s individualism. But human’s strength has always come from working as a team. And a team of men can do anything, a team of men could kill a Predator.
The answer to "why?" is that they're trophy hunters for sport. That's the franchise mythology. That gets you one good story. Done. Your greater theme idea is interesting, but it requires either a revamp of the Predator mythology or, my preference, just a brand new franchise entirely. Predator as it stands doesn't have the legs that the studio wants it to have.
Yet it’s survived decades on bad movies. Also had a fuckload comics, toys etc. Most recently a shitty video-game. Reality doesn’t support your point, it happens sometimes.
The performance of the movies is what my point was based on. Every solo Predator movie after part 1 has more or less tanked. Predator was in the top 10 highest grossing movies of it's year. Yay! Well deserved. But Predator 2 (1990) made $57,120,318 box office gross, adjusted for inflation it's $113,798,357. It fell all the way down to 24th place. Killed the franchise for more than a decade. Predators (2010) - $127,233,108.00, or $151,933,331.46 adjusted - the 55th highest grossing movie of the year. Predators (2018) - $160,542,134 - the 47th highest grossing movie of the year. Even when you cross it over with Alien, the movies don't do much better. AvP was in the 30th spot for it's year, AvP Requiem was 48th place. That's what I meant when I say this isn't a real franchise. The general audience just doesn't show up for it, even though Hollywood keeps trying.
Those movies weren’t blockbusters but they made profits. The issue isn’t with the franchise itself, the issue is bad writing and stupid creative moves. I don’t know any Predator fans who think those movies are great. Now if you HAD a Predator movie that the fanbase embraced and yet was a financial failure then you’d have a point. Instead what you have is a couple badly written movies, badly reviewed movies, either begrudgingly accepted or hated by the fanbase. That also under-performed what studios hoped, yet still turned a profit all but guaranteeing more Predator movies. I don’t see your point.
Personally, I think they should stop making the aliens/predator movies, and start making an Aliens VS Predators TV show, using the Dark Horse comics as a guide. The Aliens franchise doesn't seem to be going anywhere new, the Predator franchise seems to be on constant reboot mode. (And, apparently, soon is Aliens.) I think it's time it takes a new form. So, take the Aliens VS Predator franchise, and make it a TV show.
Neither of us can know for certain, but the "2.5x budget" rule of thumb says they mostly didn't. It's a safe bet that whatever profit they made was on the thinnest of margins.
If you go by the 2.5x budget rule, Predators, on a 40 million dollar budget, would only have to make 100 million dollars to break even. It made 127 million. So, going based on that rule, it made 27 million dollars. But, these are R-Rated films. R-Rated films typically don't bring in large crowds. They're not exactly a film you take the kids to see. Not like the Avengers or Star Wars. They're films that the majority of it's audience will be built upon the eventual extended cuts, which is where/how the majority of people see these kinds of movies. Especially when they're ultra violent like the Predator, Aliens, Robocop, and Terminator franchise. When these franchises try to be something other than R-Rated, people don't go to see them. Like, Robocop's reboot tried to pull. That was the biggest gripe people had with the movie. They took an R-Rated violent franchise, and made it a family friendly PG-13 film. For an audience that it wasn't meant for. Some how I doubt the 2.5 rule applies to these films. As they keep not making it to the 2.5x rule, and they keep making them anyways. If they're not profiting off them, either these franchises are created by idiots, or they're mostly making their money back through other means.
That remaining $27 million would be split between the theater chains and the studio, so it's not a full 27 million. And the studio's portion is going to pay out any first run gross deals they have with directors/stars. It's a small chunk of change, all things considered. A good indicator that these movies aren't very profitable is that each time at bat they keep trying to reinvent the franchise. They don't know what the formula is, yet. They're looking for a way to turn it into something that works and they've never found it. They're convinced there's a brand awareness for this movie monster, but there's no franchise. They're trying to make one out of what was just a good idea for one movie, and it's probably cost them more than they've made overall.
To me you'd have 3 or 4 movies about different times a Predator hunting party has hit earth. Keep the first two as is then another in say the 3rd Crusade/Rome/Han China. And a 4th in India during the Raj. THEN and after earning it do you go to the future and have a group of humans try and track a hunting party back to where they came from. To give a light on why the Predators come here.
It’s amazing that you’re trying take movies that made money and twist into a loss with this bankrupt argument of yours. It’s delusional at this point.
There are a ton of interesting things you could do with a species that’s been hunting humans for generations.
Again, neither of us knows if they made a profit. We don't have the numbers. The numbers we do have aren't promising. You can't just assert that they did make a profit.
You have a budget, you have sales figures that show a profit. And that doesn’t include the revenue fees from the movies over decades of hard-copy and streaming sales. Neither does it include licensing fees on toys and merch, which have been around for decades. If you’re working on the assumption Predator as a franchise to quote you, “...probably cost them more than they’ve made overall.” You are delusional.
No, we actually don't. Studios usually don't make that info available. What we have is a reported movie budget, which doesn't include what the studio spent on publicity and marketing. So we know the studio spent more than the budget on the movie, but not how much more. Then we have the gross ticket sales reported, but we don't know how much of that the studio got. We know that amount is split between the studio, the theaters that exhibit the movie, and any cast/crew with gross dollar participation. So we know the studio got less than the gross ticket sales, but not how much less. That's where the 2.5x budget rule of thumb comes from. Usually it is assumed that a movie has to make 2.5 times its budget at the box office to break even. Or some people will say double the budget and half the box office and compare the two numbers. There are a couple of formulas. All of them point to the Predator movies generally being really poorly performing from a profit/loss standpoint.
Isn't that all included in the 2.5x budget, though? Isn't that why the 2.5x budget rule exists, beyond just marketing costs? To be fair, you could say the same about the Spider-man movies. Almost half of all Spider-man movies are reboots, after all. Perhaps the key to profit is that re-ignition of the same basic story, because all the sequels were varying levels of unsuccessful?
