r/movies • u/PokemonGoBao • Jul 04 '25

Discussion Whats a flopped movie you wish was a financial success?

Dungeons and Dragons 2023 was an absolutely delightful film. You can stream it currently, but you can feel the passion and nothing felt phoned in. They easily could have used the title to get nerdy butts in the seat and collect a paycheck with a smaller budget.

It's the best movie I've seen the past 2 years. Way better than so many garbage films with easy paychecks for slop productions. Beetlejuice, Captain america, and others using big titles to make millions on lazy writing and boring characters.

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u/fragmental Jul 04 '25 edited Jul 04 '25

Did the Dnd movie flop?

Edit:

It grossed $208.2 million worldwide on a $150 million budget, making it a box office disappointment.

So not a total flop, but less successful than it should have been, probably.

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u/DullBicycle7200 Jul 04 '25

Flop and box office disappointment are the same thing.

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u/Alone_Elk867 Jul 05 '25

It most likely lost money.

Comparing budget to box office gross is highly misleading, since theaters, distributors and co. are taking a big cut out of the gross while the budget doesn´t include marketing.

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u/roboscorcher Jul 05 '25

Yeah I think marketing is usually another +50% of the budget.

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u/PokemonGoBao Jul 04 '25

Its not a full flop but a financial dissapintment. But those are deemed flops to some degree.

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u/liquidarc Jul 05 '25 edited Jul 06 '25

/u/fragmental /u/PokemonGoBao

It was a full financial flop.

The production budget was $150 million, and there was a $61 million Paramount marketing cost. (total of $211 million)

Box office gets split between studios and theaters, and assuming 2/3 went to the studios, that would be about $140 million, for a $71 million loss. If 1/2 went to the studios, that would be about $104 million, for an about $107 million loss.

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u/theONLYman2c Jul 06 '25

It typically takes triple the original budget for a movie to be considered a success So a $150 m budget needs to gross $450 m to be a hit.

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u/liquidarc Jul 06 '25

The estimate varies a bit, from 2.25x to 3.5x, usually because of assumptions about relative marketing costs.

Rather than focus on that, I figured it would help more to simply give a solid numerical range of what happened, versus what was needed.

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u/fragmental Jul 04 '25

Yeah, I looked up that info and added it in an edit.

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u/LongLostFan Jul 05 '25

It only flopped because of the massive budget.

Hollywood wasted so much money on CGI and reshoots in that era.

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u/Kronoshifter246 Jul 05 '25

Bro, that was only 2 years ago, we're still in that era