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 Film
DUNE: PART TWO
Warner Bros/Legendary
At $402 million, Warner Bros/Legendary’s Dune: Part One was one of the higher-grossing day-and-date movies during Covid and one of the few in the U.S. that surpassed $100M given its simultaneous stateside release on HBO Max in 2021. Still, Legendary needed to justify the sequel’s $190M production cost to investors. Legendary was covering 80% of the budget. So, execs found a country-by-country formula that allowed them to project what the global grosses might have been were they not impacted by the pandemic and streaming release.
Legendary wanted to remain faithful in the second go-round to keep multi-Oscar-nominated filmmaker Denis Villeneuve’s vision intact; it entailed shooting in live environments with Imax cameras in Jordan (where a majority of the pic’s production was shot at night due to the extreme daytime heat), Abu Dhabi and Hungary. Legendary’s Mary Parent has finesse when it comes to wrangling logistically complex productions and keeping them on track, for example Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant which shot in isolated, frozen locales.
The Box Score
The Bottom Line
With actors restricted during the SAG-AFTRA strike, Warners and Legendary made the mutual decision to postpone Dune: Part Two from a November 2023 release to the first weekend in March so cast members Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, Florence Pugh, Austin Butler, Josh Brolin, Rebecca Ferguson and Javier Bardem could promote the movie, particularly on social. Much like Warner Bros and Legendary brought back the box office this year with A Minecraft Movie, their shift on Part Two propelled moviegoers to return en bulk, with the sequel posting the first big domestic and global opening of 2024 with $82.5M and $182.5M, respectively. Forty-one percent of those moviegoers polled by Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak said they came for the cast, while 91% mentioned they were fans of Part One. While fans of the original Frank Herbert novel skew older, a new audience was found on Max with Part One in the 18-24 demo, that group wound up being the sequel’s biggest draw at close to a third, followed by the 25-34 set at 27%. It pays to shoot in Imax, with the large-format exhibitor’s auditoriums contributing some $145M to the $714M-plus global take here. Warners oversaw marketing on the sequel, spending more than $155M worldwide. Streaming revenues from Max worldwide, plus solid international TV output deals, contributed $220M. Participations for the starry ensemble and Villeneuve were lofty at $76.5M, with everyone getting extra cash at breakeven. There is a third film in the works, especially given the fact that 81% who watched Part Two wants one, according to PostTrak. Net profit on Dune: Part Two is $184.3M.