NightlyPoe said:
It actually made $139 million if you include the foreign box office, more than enough to get it past the 2x budget rule of thumb. It was also the #4 movie of 1979 (just a few million short of #2) and held the record for biggest weekend box office ever for 18 months. It performed comparably with Rocky 2 and Alien, two franchises that are still around to this day. The movie was not a bomb and Paramount was very pleased with its performance. What made Paramount not happy was that it was a nightmare production and its budget ballooned to almost triple its original $15 million. Going into the release date (they barely finished the film in time) they were indeed very much were afraid that they would never see their money back. If you'll click on the first link, you'll see that they were re-writing the script like crazy during production and the post-production had to be rushed after the original special effects studio pretty much wasted a year. It's a small miracle that this bad movie was a success and not a bomb. For their troubles, Paramount more or less took control away from Gene Roddenberry to make sure that it wouldn't happen again. But The Wrath of Khan's budget wasn't because Paramount didn't have faith in the project as the original poster stated. It was pretty much the usual for a big budget movie at the time and not all that big a drop from what The Motion Picture's original budget. |
I was using BOM, which strangely doesn't show any FBO data. I can't really find an original source for the $139M, either. Still, if that is accurate, it wasn't the greatest result. I'd imagine with advertising thrown in, the budget was ~$50M-$55M. They made ~$69.5M from the BO, which leaves them with ~$14.5M-$19.5M. Not enough to warrant calling it a hit, but I can see why they gave it another shot. WOK was far more profitable.
