When Deadline started running a series on the most profitable movies of 2004, it was inevitable that they would turn their attention to the biggest losers as well, and so they did.
Now Dark Horizons has covered the articles’ dealings with this lower end of the scale. Overall, it seems as if the big loser was Warner Bros. They took an absolute bath on two movies that make up the top two.
What sets the article and the analysis apart is that the trade publication didn’t just use the simplistic and completely wrong budget vs. box office calculation. They baked in PR spend, distribution, points, residuals, interest payments, the whole deal. On the revenue side looked at theatrical take, how much was paid away to theaters, and how much they pulled in from streaming and eventually TV.
The picture is the most complete one presented for a while, but that still won’t make it any better reading for Warner Bros.
The biggest loser of 2024 was Joker: Folie a Deux, which resulted in a net loss of $144 million for the studio. In second place, proving that movie geeks aren’t always right, was George Miller’s Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga with a net loss of $120 million.
A $264 million bath for Warner Bros. Discovery on just two movies.
Just beneath them was beleaguered Lionsgate. Borderlands lost them $80 million, Megalopolis lost $75.5 million overall. This was third and fourth. Lionsgate was just the distributor for Megalopolis so their loss on that project was around $5 million of their distribution fee.
In fifth place was Kraven the Hunter, the movie that Sony forgot to market, which lost $71 million overall, and Sony took about half of those losses.