Revealed Emails/Court Documents regarding Pixar/Steve Jobs Wage Fixing

[Landguy]

mornelithe said:

Landguy said:

Dreamworks and Dreamworks animation are two different things, even though they are part of the same.  Dreamworks animation was rather small at the time.  The animation division was just starting to be successful.  Shrek's success was a surprise to everyone.  But, your calculations don't work that way for the film industry.  Production companies genrally only see 10-15 % of the revenues from outside of the US back then.  Today, they only see 20-30%.  So, the # wouldn't have grown much from the worldwide gross.  I do agree that the DVD and merchandising sales would have been good.   But, the first Shrek wasn't expected to do that well, so the share of the merchandising would have been much smaller than you think.  Shrek 2 would have been where most of the money was being made.  THat movie did almost twice the revenue and had huge merchandising tie-ins and even bigger DVD sales.

Between the time their first movie (Antz) released, and 2002, they had invested $455,000,000 in 6 movies, and grossed $1,298,611,099, those aren't small time numbers.  I guess we'll just have to disagree on this one :)

Dreamworks actually released 25 movies between that time. But that is mostly not relevent.

The 6 animation movies went like this:

YR/Movie	US	Foreign	Budget of production	Marketing     (50% of budget))
1998  Antz	$          90,000,000	$       81,000,000	$   105,000,000	$      52,500,000
1998 Prince of egypt	$       101,000,000	$    117,000,000	$     70,000,000	$      35,000,000
2000 Road to Eldorado	$          50,000,000	$       25,000,000	$     95,000,000	$      47,500,000
2000 Chicken Run	$       106,000,000	$    118,000,000	$     45,000,000	$      22,500,000
2001 Shrek	$       267,000,000	$    216,000,000	$     60,000,000	$      30,000,000
2002 Spirit	$          73,000,000	$       49,000,000	$     80,000,000	$      40,000,000
	$       687,000,000	$    606,000,000	$   455,000,000	$    227,500,000
	Theatre Revenue	1,293,000,000
	40% of Revenue	517,200,000	usual take home of Movie
	Cost of production +Marketing	682,500,000

The debate really is about what percentage of the revenue is actually profit.  As the theatres take a chunk of that.   Also, Dreamworks used other companies to do their distribution who also took a chunk. 

I agree with you that if you take just Revenue and basic budgets, it would seem to be much more profitable than you would expect.

But, that is not the total of costs or profits.