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
IT ENDS WITH US
Sony Pictures
Despite the brutal headlines and legal clash between It Ends With Us star and producer Blake Lively and its filmmaker and financier Justin Baldoni, and all the on-set gritty details that have been exposed in court documents, if there’s one thing to be said about the success of this movie, it’s not that one star got paid more than the other. Had that been the case, we’d probably have heard that by now. From a business standpoint, there’s a positive takeaway here in Wayfarer’s wisdom in recognizing the popularity of and nabbing the rights to the 2016 Colleen Hoover novel and its 2022 sequel It Starts With Us. At the aorta of this movie’s success is Hoover’s fevered fan following on BookTok, with more than 2 billion views on her hashtag. The first novel was published by Atria Books in August 2016, and by 2019 had sold more than 1 million copies around the globe. Thanks to TikTok, It Ends With Us experienced a huge boom during the pandemic, and by 2022 was the top-selling print book, with a 135-week run on the New York Times Bestseller List by the end of 2023. Hoover served as EP and worked closely with the production on the big-screen adaptation.
The movie was made for a thrifty $25M, 50% co-financed by Sony Pictures, and dealt with a production pause due to the strikes. Despite the behind-the-scenes drama around the film, it clearly didn’t drive business off the road: women showed up at 84% for the big-screen take of a florist (Lively) who deals with an abusive spouse (Baldoni). Tracking had the movie opening to $15M, but heading into its August 9 theatrical release, it boomed to $50M stateside. Sony has been here before in regards to dynamiting female moviegoers (Hollywood could make more movies for them), with previous hits like Little Women and Where the Crawdads Sing. Sony prides itself on yielding great studio margins, and the $60M P&A spend was a targeted sell to women with a big digital boost. Sony, Lively and the It Ends With Us team were keen about moving the romance drama from February to June to two weeks after Deadpool & Wolverine. They capitalized off that heat, not just because Lively had a cameo in the MCU title but also husband Ryan Reynolds, his mom and Hugh Jackman ultimately and hysterically junket-bombed the It Ends With Us presser, a stunt that took off on social. Lively rolled up her sleeves and became a lynchpin in the marketing campaign, involved with the first trailer’s edit and obtaining use from her BFF Taylor Swift the song “My Tears Ricochet.”
The Box Score
The Bottom Line
Sony also receives a healthy worldwide distribution fee after its co-finance of the movie here. Its pay-one deal is with Netflix, and monies from that are seen in the $120M global streaming and TV line item. Participations are figured at $50M, our sources contending that Baldoni and Lively were paid at cash breakeven. The net profit here after $153M in worldwide expenses is a robust $207M.