Taking a sample of 15 major releases of the last year, you can see the results are somewhat mixed:
The two horror movies on the list--Halloween (2018) and A Quiet Place--had the highest percentage of domestic earnings with Halloween's at 62%. Solo, which was a flop for Star Wars movies, had 54% of its paltry earnings come from the USA.
When it comes to superheroes, note the two movies featuring black heroes as the lead characters had just over half their earnings come from the USA while Aquaman and Venom had only about 30% and 25% respectively come from the domestic market. It's interesting that Black Panther and Aquaman had almost the same overall take and yet the distribution of that money was widely different.
Since I'm not an expert like Scott Mendelson I can't really draw a lot of conclusions about this. There are of course some factors that come into play like some movies don't get into as many international markets. That might explain why a smaller movie like A Quiet Place had most of its money come from the USA. And that like Halloween and Deadpool 2 was rated R in the USA, which can also affect how many people here and around the world will be able to see it in theaters.
But I think you can see just how important the international market is becoming, to the point some movies are making 3/4 of their money from it. If you track the numbers like Box Office Mojo there's probably been a growing share of the box office coming from international markets as the rest of the world catches up to the USA in terms of disposable income and access to big Hollywood movies. That can be good but also it can be a bad thing as typically if you want a movie to do well overseas it means you can't take many risks for it in terms of casting minorities in lead roles or deal with LGBTQ material for instance. So not everyone will be sharing the wealth.
3 comments:
Worldwide box office is a significant factor for action, superhero, and some kids movies; horror and comedy tend to rely more upon U.S. domestic take. I figure the difference is that humor and what's "scary" are far more subjective in other countries whereas action is action; I'm sure there's also some "restrictions" in certain countries with the nature of horror and comedy as well.
Sadly, too many people still think U.S. numbers are the key factor and will proudly proclaim certain films a failure because they don't realize (or care) that the worldwide numbers will tell the tale. Of course U.S. numbers are still important, since the worldwide distribution costs are higher than domestic, but the days of a film earning the majority of its money solely from the U.S. domestic box office are largely over (unless it's a comedy or horror film)
I think I'm kind of shocked that Halloween made so much money. I guess I shouldn't be, but there it is.
I think it'll remain true that Hollywood won't be happy if the majority of a worldwide box office performance plays out mostly in other countries. That's why the biggest hits play well in the States, no matter how well they also do internationally, and have a better chance at scoring sequels. I guarantee Disney isn't anymore interested in a third Ant-Man movie based on the results in your chart than they were before its release. (I don't expect there to be a third one.)
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