Looking for costs and gross numbers of indie films

[Jay Rodriguez]

Anyone know of any good sites with this information?

Looking for something like a chart showing how much a film cost to make and the total gross.

[insanityfw]

Hey Jay. Check out www.boxofficemojo.com . I'm not sure how many indie films show up here, but it's worth a look. Also, sometimes imdb has something.

Also, I think Filmmaker magazine has a yearly chart with purely indie films. Contact them to see what issue and if they have a back-issue.

Good luck,

J.

[Beat Takeshi]

There are a ton of producing books that break down how a movie should be budgeted. The costs will be different for every movie and the only way you will get close to a decent budget is to break your script down to the smallest prop.

[Jay Rodriguez]

lol, thanks aram but that's not what I'm looking for. I'm just trying to find some type of column that shows data something like this for indie movies that were already made:


Film
THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

Production Budget
$60,000

Gross
$248,639,099

[Beat Takeshi]

ah ok. I don't know any for that.

[ugafan]

here is some info. look for the section on movies made with the lowest budget that grossed over $1 million.

http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/budgets.php

[c.g._eads]

I use box office mojo because it's free. But the absolute definitive source on the web right now with that info is IMDB Pro. Unfortunately it costs money (I believe $15/mo.). But it has the most in-depth detailed information about movie grosses that I've found. What I've realized through doing some of my own research is that while bigger movies have more a more public budget, these independent films come out of nowhere, before any money people are paying attention. For that reason their figures aren't the most reliable and usually a result of some marketing decision ("Let's try to make this look like it was made for nothing so the director looks like a genius") or desire to sell the film for the highest price ("Let's say our 10,000 dolllar film costs 1 million dollars so we'll get higher offers.") It's a real sketchy area as far as facts. But that's where you should look.

[kyle.presley]

The budgets that are advertised are not true budgets, but grossly inflated ones on the bigger films, probably deflated on the independent ones. Notice I said advertised budgets. The only people who know the actual negative cost to make a film are the producers and their accountants. For example, the cut of El Mariachi that Rodriguez took to Sundance only cost $7,000, but that is not the cut we see. The company that acquired it paid over $100,000 to touch it up, namely the sound and getting it dubbed in English. According to Dov Simens, all the big budget movies are made for way, way less than they advertise. They literally make up the numbers. And people flock in droves to theaters to see what $200,000,000 looks like. Don't trust the numbers that you read. It's all a sham and an advertisement.

[milksac]

Don't trust the numbers that you read.
Spot on. Unless you know the producers I would say it's impossible to get any meaningful numbers on budgets. Good call on El Mariachi - it deserves hall of fame status for mythical over hyped low ball numbers.

[Nik Manning]

Man it looks like Zodiac flopped. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2007/ZODIC.php

[kyle.presley]

No movie ever "flops". Sure, in the box office, maybe. But there are so many other venues that movies make money. Foreign sales, pay cable TV sales, Pay-Per-View, video rentals, network TV (after several years, but hey), merchandising and the list goes on and on. Movies never lose money.

[milksac]

Movies never lose money.
It's been 26 years since the release of Heavens Gate and I'm fairly certain they're still in the red.

[kyle.presley]

I'm talking modern movies, released by major studios into modern venues (ie. theatrical, DVD, rental, pay cable - HBO, Cinemax...etc, Pay-Per-View, foreign sales, foreign theatrical, merchandising, on and on and on...). The point was, you cannot compare box office gross to the "budget" of a motion picture to determine if the movie flopped.

[spidey]

like i said about zodiac great film that no one is watching...

[Nik Manning]

No movie ever "flops". Sure, in the box office, maybe. But there are so many other venues that movies make money. Foreign sales, pay cable TV sales, Pay-Per-View, video rentals, network TV (after several years, but hey), merchandising and the list goes on and on. Movies never lose money.

Well Zodiac flopped at the box office.:violin:

[GaryinCalifornia]

A friend's boss did a movie called Zyzzy Road (or whatever that road is called on the way to Vegas).

It suppose to have the worst box office take of all time... like less than a grand... maybe even way less...

Well the write up about that in newspapers, etc... is helping it in the DVD sales...

[McLeish]

movies definately can, and do flop. Even if it makes money, its a flop if it doesnt make as much as they expected it too. Other venues like reps hardly rake in any money for even themselves. DVD is a massive market, but with a movie like zodiac if people arent willing to watch it in theatres, they probably wont be willing to watch it on dvd (I've seen it more than my fair share, so i'm doing my part to help haha)

[kyle.presley]

What do you mean by flop? The way I define "flop" is studios don't recoup their investment in the production and marketing of a film.

[McLeish]

Thats definately a flop, but the studio execs will consider a movie a flop if they expect it to hit 100 mill and it only gets 60. even if the movie cost say 20 million, if the film did significantly worse than predicted, the big shots say it's a flop. If i made a movie and i made $1 more than it cost i'd be happy but these guys are used to mega-grossing movies, and lately a lot of them have needed a massive hit in order to keep their companies alive.

[kyle.presley]

Oh, well I definately agree with you on that. Definately true. What's worse is these guys spend up to 4x as much marketing the film as they do making the film. People call it the film making industry, but really, in mainstream Hollywood, it's the film marketing industry. Every once in a while they have to come up with something to market and make a movie that appeals to the widest demographic they can. I'm getting angrier at Hollywood as I type...