3 days 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, the latter of which we present here.
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6 million Watch on Deadline When it came to mid-sized and low-budget films churning big profit margins, horror movies were the most reliable in 2024. The first up in our honor roll is Paramount’s prequel A Quiet Place: Day One. It was Paramount’s plan to build out a universe on this John Krasinski-hatched franchise.
He couldn’t helm the prequel this time around due to scheduling issues with Jack Ryan . First, Jeff Nichols was up for the job before Michael Sarnoski stepped in. Krasinski was a fan of the filmmaker’s culinary noir feature The Pig , and became involved in conceiving a story with Sarnoski that brought the alien action to an apocalyptic New York.
It’s very rare for a third movie in a horror franchise to post the biggest opening, but that’s what happened here with A Quiet Place: Day One arriving to $52.2M. That’s an accomplishment considering the original cast didn’t star here, instead featuring newcomers Lupita Nyong’o and Joseph Quinn.
Essentially that speaks to the overall strength of the franchise Paramount has built here. The Box Score The Film NOSFERATU Focus Features Net Profit: $70 million Nobody saw this period horror movie coming at Christmas. Let’s start with the fact that period horror is usually rather hard to pull off, delivering mixed audience reactions: hardcore fans are typically not appeased, and either are audiences.
However, this was a high-gloss version of Dracula, the last we’ve seen in the hands of an auteur in 32 years (Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version). Robert Eggers in the home market was building up cineaste cred with his gritty Viking epic The Northman. The marketing campaign brilliantly appealed to those craving both award-worthy titles at Christmas and horror too.
Evidence that Focus Feature had a hit on their hands came from the first trailer , which clocked 65 million global views, a record for the Universal specialty label. The hook in the campaign from Focus vice chairman Jason Cassidy was the trailer’s tagline — “He is coming!” — not to mention that images of Bill Skarsgård as the monster weren’t revealed in materials. The result is Focus Features’ second highest-grossing movie ever at the domestic box office behind Downton Abbey.
The Box Score The Film SMILE 2 Paramount Net Profit: $55.4 million It stands to reason there would be a sequel to a horror movie that pivoted from streaming release to a $217 million-plus grossing theatrical one. Paramount did the sequel justice by keeping the original creator, Parker Finn, intact on part two as writer and director.
He sought an exciting new means to explore the backstory of the franchise’s uncanny entity: this time around, a pop star (played by Naomi Scott) is haunted. The sequel also doubled as an exploration of the singer’s neurotic behavior. Promotion for Smile 2 included an in-world campaign for Scott’s Skye Riley including billboards, chalk stencil art, and wild postings across Los Angeles teasing that her new single was being released.
The day the trailer launched, the art updated to reveal the campaign for Smile 2. The single, “Grieved You,” was also dropped, along with a lyric video and later a music video. Similar to the original 2022 movie’s marketing stunt, Paramount sent crazed smiling people to camera bomb at sporting events.
The sequel opened to $23M stateside, just a tad higher than the first film at $22.6M. Net profit after ancillaries and a targeted $65M P&A spend is $55.
4M. The Film SPEAK NO EVIL Universal Net Profit: $50 million Quite often we don’t see such a result for a movie that opens in the low double digits at the box office, after this Blumhouse remake of the 2022 Danish-Dutch film of the same name debuted to $11.2 million stateside and legged out to $36.
9M. But this is the genius of the Blumhouse model, which keeps upfront costs low and rewards participants in the backend. Jason Blum was a fan of the original movie but wanted to remake it with a happier ending (in the original Christian Tafdrup movie, the bad guys win, and murdering continues).
Blum approached the film’s original producers and got them to agree. The net production cost was $15M, with four days of filming in Croatia and the remaining 37 in England (Gloucestershire, Malvern Hills, Forest of Dean, Devon and London) with a 25% tax credit. Just like Blumhouse previously tapped in to the dark side of James McAvoy, so it did again here in a story about a family who is invited to stay at another family’s cottage in the countryside.
As the weekend progresses, they realize their hosts are pretty messed up. Universal chose a prime release date, September 13, giving the fall genre audience some edgy horror by essentially counterprogramming Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ s goofy spooks. The Box Score The Film LONGLEGS Neon Net Profit: $48 million Neon surprised everyone with this dark serial killer pic, hooking audiences with an avant-garde teaser digital and outdoor campaign that literally teased.
The P&A spend in the U.S. alone was in the high single digits and zeroed in on horror aficionados.
The result? The company’s biggest opening ever at the domestic box office with $22.4 million. It’s a feat that others including major studios have tried to emulate but few have succeeded (Cineverse’s Terrifier 3 did with a single digit P&A spend and an $18.
9M opening). The other trick up Neon’s sleeve is that it hid Nicolas Cage’s killer throughout the entire campaign. Streaming of $30M includes Neon’s output deal with Hulu stateside.
C2 financed the film for under $10M. Black Bear closed a raft of offshore deals. Neon snapped up North American in a multimillion-dollar deal at the 2023 European Film Market, launching the distributor’s working relationship with Osgood Perkins.
Neon is releasing the director’s The Monkey and Keeper both out this fall. The net profit here from the global play of Longlegs is $48M. The Box Score.
