Sony considering selling off TV and Movie business

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Lawlight said:

binary solo said:
Well if they stop greenlighting crappy movie ideas they might actually have a profitable movie division. They pretty much rely on Spider man and Bond to get them through. It's great that they invest in indie projects, but when Angry Birds is one of your more profitable wide release movies for the year you have a problem at the big budget end.

In 2016 Sony had 26 movies (some carry overs from 2015). Only 2 managed to get over $100 million at the US box office, and none got over $150 million. Ghostbusters came close to breaking even but was ultimately a financial flop. Angry Birds was quite profitable because it had a modest budget and a big international box office. Sausage Party, also a very modest budget was handily profitable. Magnificent 7 was an big budget failure and I don;t know how they sunk $144 million into making it when it was always a risky proposition for the box office. Inferno managed to make a buck, because thankfully someone kept a lid on the budget. But if it had Magnificent 67 levels of money poured into it it would have been a financial flop too.

If Spider Man Homecoming captures some of the MCU magic I think Sony might try to keep hold of its movie division, at least for a few more years.

Mate, they lost massive amounts of money on Ghostbusters - that movie needed around $500M to break even. So not even close.

Other flops:

Magnificient Seven - another unneeded reboot. Massive losses.

Passengers.

Concussion - Will Smith's movies have been flops for years now.

Pride and Prejudice Zombies

The Brothers Grimsby

And this year started with another flop: Underworld.

Passengers will probably be OK, it's still in its box office run and international recepts are doing OK. Critically it's a flop though. Most importantly the production budget was pretty reasonable for a space Sci-fi movie so the pressure on box office gross was not too bad.

Underworld will pay for itself, but that's all. Relatively a flop, but with a cheap budget it doesn't need to break records to break even.

I'll certainly give you Brother's Grimsby. Unless they made that for $5 million it was a major financial failure.

I don't understand why Ghostbusters needed to make $500 million to break even. They must have horribly over spent on marketing, because production budget was high, but not outrageous.

Concussion was a bat bet, not because of Will Smith, but because the subject matter strikes at the heart of a national sport that is only really well known in North America, so the audience of greatest interest won't go see it because they don't want NFL seen in a bad light, and the rest of the world doesn't care enough to pay to see it. Should have been a TV movie, not a cinematic release. If there was a football movie that exposed a major health issue in players that was swept under the rug there might be a big enough international audience to make a $35 million budget viable. The movie could and should have been made for $10 million, and if Will Smith's salary was responsible for the budget being $35 million then he sure wasn't worth it.

When you crunch the numbers for all of Sony's 2016 releases, it's not that bad. Of the movies where production budget is known the total product budgets ad up to $675 million and the gross revenues total to $2.009Bn. That gives a revenue ratio of 2.98:1, without factoring in disc and digital sales. And then Sony make another $600 million from movies where the production budget isn't known (thanks to a big Chinese language hit that brought in $526 million from China). Most of those movies appear not to have large budgets, but they also have dismal revenues. But they had some movies with huge ROI's like Don't Breathe with $10 million production budget and $155 million global revenue.

I don't think Sony Pictures is gasping a dying breath, but more intelligent risk taking and better creative execution is needed to make it feel like a solid and long term sustainable unit.

Just please, I hope there is some kind of clause that if Sony Pictures is sold or otherwise goes out of business that Spider Man rights revert to Marvel and cannot be sold as part of Sony's going concern. Otherwise it's almost mandatory for Disney to be the ultimate buyer of Sony/Columbia. Problem is, SOny Pictures probably isn't worth a whole lot unless they can include the Spider Man rights in the deal.