Straight Down the Middle

After I published the post on the blockbuster strategy, Scott Myers at GITS put in a request for a deeper dive into middle budget movies, so I thought I’d take a closer look at what successful mid (and low) budget movies have in common.

Why do we care about these mid-budget movies? Well, increasingly, studios have gravitated toward spending more money on fewer projects. These giant projects are largely, if not entirely, based on things like comic books, YA novels, or previous films. The mid/low budget space is pretty much the only place where original movies are being made. And this means that it’s the only space where original material is being bought.

Take a look at this graph that shows the breakdown of spend by different budget brackets over time:

As you can see, spend on $100 million plus movies has increased quite a bit over the last ten years. This has been particularly driven by $200 million plus movies, which has come to represent about 25% of total production spend.

It’s most noticeably the under $50 million space that has been declining over the past decade. This means that dollars are tighter and that there are fewer movies to split that cash. This also means to get a movie made in this space, it has to be a compelling proposition, even more so nowadays that a decade ago. A script needs to stand out in this space.

Success at Different Budget Levels

To start, I wanted to get a baseline look at successes at different budget levels, so I plotted the highest ROI film over each rolling $10m bracket (restricted to films released after 1/1/2000).

There’s a clear tapering off of ROI as budgets grow. To see which films succeeded in each category, here’s a list of the films at these various levels (I only listed the first instance of the film, basically when there’s a switch to the leader).



Budget Range ($mm)
ROI (multiple)
Title


0–10
432
Paranormal Activity


1–11
86
Saw


4–14
70
My Big Fat Greek Wedding


6–16
38
Annabelle


7–17
29
The King’s Speech


15–25
25
The Passion of the Christ


25–35
13
The Hangover


35–45
11
Lucy


40–50
14
The Twilight Saga: New Moon


50–60
12
Mamma Mia!


52–62
9
Meet the Fockers


58–68
10
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse


60–70
13
Shrek 2


70–80
13
Despicable Me 2


76–86
9
The Hunger Games


80–90
10
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs


84–94
12
LOTR: The Return of the King


94–104
9
Ice Age: Continental Drift


95–105
9
HP and the Chamber of Secrets


100–110
8
LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring


109–119
7
Star Wars Ep. III: Revenge of the Sith


115–125
11
HP and the Deathly Hallows: Part II


125–135
7
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire


130–140
6
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 2


137–147
6
Spider-Man


139–149
5
Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted


140–150
8
Frozen


150–160
5
Inception


160–170
5
Shrek Forever After


165–175
5
Guardians of the Galaxy


170–180
4
Up


175–185
5
The Dark Knight


185–195
6
Transformers: Dark of the Moon


190–200
6
Iron Man 3


200–210
5
Transformers: Age of Extinction


210–220
3
The Amazing Spider-Man


215–225
7
The Avengers


225–235
3
Quantum of Solace


230–240
2
Superman Returns


240–250
4
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides


250–260
3
Spider-Man 3


258–268
2
Tangled


265–275
4
The Dark Knight Rises


290–300
3
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End


415–425
7
Avatar

Middle Budget Successes

What are successful low/middle budget movies? Looking at the chart above, we’re talking about films like the below:



Budget ($mm)
ROI (multiple)
Title


1–11
86
Saw


4–14
70
My Big Fat Greek Wedding


6–16
38
Annabelle


7–17
29
The King’s Speech


15–25
25
The Passion of the Christ


25–35
13
The Hangover


35–45
11
Lucy


40–50
14
The Twilight Saga: New Moon

But more broadly speaking, what do successful mid budget films look like? I started by looking at one of the more common attributes: genre. In the graphs below, I plotted rolling shares of genres at different levels of Return on Investment (ROI) and added a trend line to give a sense of which genres tend to become proportionally more successful. A trend line up means that the genre tends to have a higher success rate than fail rate.

[slideshow_deploy id=’16348']

Unsurprisingly, horror sticks out as a genre which grabs a higher share of super profitable films and a lower share of unprofitable ones. Dramas show a downward trend while comedies generally do better. Thriller, romance, and fantasy also on the whole fail more and succeed less, while the opposite is true for action, adventure, and crime.

Attributes of Very Successful Mid-Budget Films

I culled the entire list down just to the most successful films, those with an ROI of 400% or greater. Looking at movies released after 1/1/2000 and budgeted between $1-$50m, I ended up with a list of 151 films.

So what do these films have in common? To start, IMDB lists plot keywords for each film. I wanted to compare what these successful movies are about versus all movies in this bucket and underperforming movies. I started by looking at the most common keywords in each of the categories.



All Movies
>400%
<150%


death
husband wife relationship
death


husband wife relationship
mother son relationship
husband wife relationship


flashback
blood
flashback


father son relationship
death
murder


murder
father daughter relationship
blood


mother son relationship
father son relationship
father son relationship


blood
title spoken by character
cigarette smoking


title spoken by character
friendship
mother son relationship


father daughter relationship
flashback
love


friendship
murder
kiss

There is obviously a lot of overlap among the categories, so I wanted to look at which keywords showed up in successful that didn’t show up in unsuccessful movies and which didn’t show up in all movies.

I did this by taking the top 100 keywords by frequency in each and finding which successful movie keywords weren’t in each of the other two categories.



Successful Movie Keywords


Not in All Movie List (A)
Not in Unsuccessful Movie List (B)


cult film
cult film


lie
pregnancy


character repeating someone else’s dialogue
suicide


arrest
lie


f word
character repeating someone else’s dialogue


female protagonist
teacher


sex scene
f word


african american
female protagonist


liar
sex scene


los angeles california
african american


no opening credits
liar


wedding
los angeles california


2000s
no opening credits


classroom
wedding


fear
2000s



classroom



fear

These lists give us an idea of which attributes successful movies have which

• (A) all movies don’t have and
• (B) unsuccessful movies don’t have.

We could actually reverse engineer the movies in the list by finding the films with the most number of these plot keywords. I did this for the latter list (B), keywords in successful movies but not in unsuccessful movies. And these are the top 15 films ranked by number of matching keywords.



Title
ROI
Count Terms


Beginners
447%
9


Persepolis
312%
8


Crazy, Stupid, Love
297%
8


Carrie
283%
8


Good Night, and Good Luck.
808%
7


The School of Rock
656%
7


Thank You For Smoking
534%
7


Thirteen
475%
7


Ray
312%
7


Drag Me To Hell
305%
7


Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
87%
7


Birth
73%
7


The Last Exorcism
3898%
6


Juno
3306%
6


Borat
1453%
6


Garden State
1441%
6


The Squid and the Whale
746%
6


Philomena
659%
6


Looper
588%
6


Die Welle (The Wave)
484%
6

And we find that there are, in fact, unsuccessful movies with many of these attributes, but compared to the larger set, there are more winners than losers. (For reference when you look at the entire set, about 40% make under 150% of production budget.)

Looking back at genre based on these success buckets, we can see which genres tend to be more successful by seeing which have higher allocations among the highest performing films.

Comedy, horror, family, romance, and sci-fi notably represent a larger portion of successful films than they do unsuccessful films. The opposite is true for drama, action, crime, thriller, and history.

Additionally, I looked at MPAA rating breakdown of successful movies versus all movies to get a sense of whether films appealing to different demographics had any influence on success.




>400%

All



R
72
49%
367
50%


PG-13
57
39%
274
37%


PG
16
11%
81
11%


G
3
2%
11
2%



148
100%
733
100%

What was interesting was that MPAA rating seems to have little influence on success as measured by ROI. The breakdowns were nearly identical.

Finally, I looked at breakdown by stars gender:

As I discovered earlier, having women in lead roles is very important in this space. You can see that there’s a higher portion of female led movies (1M / 2F) relative to unsuccessful movies.

Increasing the Likelihood of Success

So I’m not actually going to tell you to reverse engineer a successful low/mid-budget film, but there are some things we can take away that might steer us toward movies that are more likely to do well at the box office. These are scripts that are more likely to sell in this ultra-competitive space.

• Horror, comedy, romance, and sci-fi tend to do better
• Ignore MPAA rating. There’s little influence in return. And use of the F word is actually an attribute of successful movies.
• Women led movies will have a higher likelihood of financial return. Female protagonist is also a keyword that shows up in successful movies.