1 week Ago By Patrick Hipes
Deadline’s Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament has returned, and as you’ll see from the most profitable films of 2024 that we’re about to disclose, a movie’s game doesn’t end at the box office. Rather, its downstream revenues and subsequent home windows must be taken into account. Streaming continues to be a wildcard: While traditional motion picture studios such as Disney, Warner Bros, Sony, Paramount and Universal rely on lucrative pay two and pay three streamer deals to catapult their slates into the black, those streamers who’ve embraced theatrical (specifically Amazon MGM Studios and Apple Original Films) have a clandestine metric as to how they evaluate a movie’s post-cinema success.
By traditional studio P&L standards, some of those releases would be considered flops. Given that, Apple and Amazon are excluded from this year’s survey. The Most Valuable Blockbuster series runs later rather than sooner as we gather the best data possible from seasoned and trusted sources on 2024’s event films, bombs, and low- to midsize-budget wins.
Related Stories 'Wicked' Casts Spell With $230M In Profit To Fly In As No. 5 Most Valuable Blockbuster Of 2024 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More The Film DESPICABLE ME 4 Universal/ Illumination Watch on Deadline When it comes to the dastardly minded Gru and the Minions going 15 years strong, there’s no such thing as ennui at the box office. The latest installment, the sixth in a series of Minions and Despicable Me titles, got the entire franchise past $5 billion worldwide, the first animated franchise to reach that milestone.
The plus factor this time was the addition of baby Gru Jr., who torments the older Gru. The Steve Carell-voiced Gru also has a girlfriend in Valentina (Sofía Vergara) and a new enemy in Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell).
It was the Mega Minions though that stole the show, thought, with the yellow little guys as parodies of superheroes. The fourthquel was conceived in 2017, with Illumination scribe Ken Daurio writing. He would receive final writing credit alongside White Lotus architect Mike White on the project, with Illumination veterans Chris Renaud and Patrick Delage directing a production that took about two years non-stop during Covid.
The Box Score The Bottom Line While the world knows full well what a Minion is and a Gru is, Universal didn’t pinch one penny in shelling out $170 million for a global campaign, which splashed from the Super Bowl to the Kentucky Derby to French Open co-branded spots. When it comes to the Minions and Gru touching a nerve, it’s how they’re integrated in and satirize pop culture: Nikola Jokić arriving for an NBA playoff game dressed as Gru went viral, with 66M-plus linear and 17M social views. Then there was that bit with the Olympic athletes dancing with the Minions to “Jump Around.
” During the Super Bowl a spot played out that the Minions were actually behind AI. Another big needle-mover were the Funko and BTS pop-up stores in Los Angeles, Seoul and Tokyo as Joey King’s character Poppy is a big BTS fan. The $210M includes what Uni pays itself to put it through Peacock, plus subsequent windows on Netflix.
The $100M production cost is pretty thrifty for a big animation title; Illumination always is known to manage its spends quite well, and as a result the studio always lands a spot in Deadline’s Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament. Net profit here after global revenues of $775M and total expenses of $405M is a great $370M..
