Opening to just $44 million worldwide, Martin Scorsese’s latest big-budget drama Killers of the Flower Moon will almost certainly fail to make back its enormous $200 million budget and millions more in marketing expenses at the box office, sadly becoming yet another 2023 big-budget flop. After its second weekend, the film now sits at roughly $87 million worldwide.
Killers of the Flower Moon’s opening was around 25% of the opening ticket sales for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which had half of the budget of Scorsese’s new film. Oppenheimer is ending its first blockbuster theatrical run with approximately $947 million global gross, but returns to IMAX for a limited run at four stateside locations to help boost its sales.
Even if the film manages miraculous holds every week and weekend from now on, at percentages on par with Oppenheimer’s historic and record-shattering performance for a biopic, Killers of the Flower Moon would still be on course for a roughly $200 million final cume at best.
Oh course, the film might get a rerelease across award season and into the New Year, and if it scores some wins at the Oscars then it might get released again and enjoy some extra business. But none of that is going to carry it high enough to make up for the shortfall.
And with other award season heavy hitters such as Napoleon (also from Apple Studios, and made for considerably less at $130 million yet looking every bit like a big-budget historical drama), The Killer, and The Color Purple on their way, I don’t see much space for Killers of the Flower Moon to find a path to box office success.
If we were talking about a big-budget genre movie (and you know which ones I’m talking about), then everyone would instead rightly say this is a disastrous outcome for a big-budget high profile release. They’d also say (as they usually do) that it’s awful to see so much money spent on overly-expensive filmmaking when the same money could’ve funded four or five mid-range films from new and diverse filmmakers (or even more indie films, but indie cinema is apparently held in contempt now).
Instead, the negative box office outcome is being treated as a strong performance relative to most of Scorsese’s other films. Entertainment press are even helpfully insisting box office failure doesn’t really matter so much after all, because “prestige” is more important than losing a few hundred million bucks.
Besides, Apple supposedly doesn’t care about box office performance. Because it’s not about money, it’s about art… Except when it is about money, which suddenly does matter a lot when the same voices are insisting who should or shouldn’t get those big budgets, and why modest or small budgets delegitimize films.
This all has nothing to do with the quality of Killers of the Flower Moon as a movie, which by all accounts (I’ve not seen the film yet because I’ve been ill for a few weeks, but plan to soon) is a fantastic piece of storytelling and one of Scrosese’s greatest films of the 21st Century.
Likewise, it would’ve been wonderful to see another big-budget drama of this sort — with an important true story to tell — do the same sort of blockbuster business as Oppenheimer (which I didn’t care for, but which I’ve been thrilled to see break records and earn such a large global audience). But that’s not realistically going to happen, and to be clear it never really was historically the case in any sort of broad or consistent sense.
It’s not clear whether Killers of the Flower Moon might’ve performed significantly better if it had a different release date — perhaps in the Thanksgiving to Christmas frames, or even waiting until early next year in January (still in time for award season contention) after this year’s Christmas season releases have had a few weeks (and this being 2023, probably a few will wind up suffering underperformances, as flu and Covid ramp up due to crowded holiday shopping combined with crowded indoor gatherings with friends and family).
I also think perhaps Oppenheimer took all of the oxygen out of the room, so to speak, for other big historical drama “event” releases. The audience enthusiasm for Oppenheimer was a lightning in a bottle situation, and I think a bit more distance from that film might’ve helped Killers of the Flower Moon. We’ll never know, of course, and there’s also an argument that it might’ve had the chance to ride the wave of audience good will and lots of earned media after Oppenheimer.
The bottom line is, Killers of the Flower Moon will be a big-budget financial disappointment at the box office, demonstrating why studios have historically put bigger budgets into films audiences show up for in larger numbers, which generates the profits necessary in a for-profit film industry to fund labors of love by visionary artists throughout their lifetimes.
If Apple doesn’t care about that, then that’s fine for them, but we can’t discuss cinema and theatrical seriously if we’re going to refuse to look objectively and factually at situations when personal biases and resentments taint our analysis. I’d argue that, in light of Scorsese’s public position regarding the future of cinema, the necessity of high-dollar spending on films, and the premium he puts on the necessity of theatrical distribution and audience support via ticket sales, it’s not really fair to put his film(s) outside of those precise considerations when looking at Apple’s investment in his film and the results of a high profile theatrical distribution worldwide.
Consider a final thought: If we pair Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon, then we get about $1.1 billion. Production budgets and marketing costs for both combined is around $430 million. The Studios get about 45% (being generous) of the global ticket sales, or in this scenario $550 million of the box office gross. Now subtract the $430 million in total costs from the studio’s $550 million share of box office (ignoring the fact a lot of participation will come out of the first-dollar grosses), and you get $120 million.
That’s a profit of approximately $60 million per film in this example, and again that’s without all of the first-dollar participation that the studio will have to pay out from the supposed profits. It took a couple of years to make both films, and then release them to generate box office.
My point is, in a scenario where studios gamble big budgets on three- and four-hour historical dramas — because supposedly the disappointments will be made up for by the successes, to put it simply — the recent examples suggest the payoff for studios will be far lower than with investments in popular genre franchise entertainment, resulting in less total profits and therefore far less money to invest in more movies.
Conversely, if we compare films in the $40-50 million budget range across a wider variety of non-blockbuster genres and productions, it’s pretty clear that diversification of releases with more moderate budgets helps achieve a lot more of the results Scorsese wants.
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