After enjoying the new Disney movie ‘Aladdin’, I decided to do a quick short research.
I wanted to find out how much money this movie is making; in order to test my hypothesis that the producers who invest in family movies are likely to earn higher profits.
For that, we need a sample of family movies, their budgets and their earnings. If we can collect and analyse this data, we will be able to understand if their producers really earned what they wanted.
But, first, a little bit of literature review.
How do we define ‘a family movie’? Typically, the ‘family’ genre of movies has its stories and themes oriented towards families.
Some people differentiate a children’s film from a family film, by saying that the former targets children alone, while the latter offers value for the whole family (Unshrinking the kids: Children's Cinema and the Family Film, a book by Cary Bazalgette, 1995, British Film Institute).
For the purpose of this essay, however, I wish to take G-rated family film and also PG-13 rated teen films into one single category. Since the under-18 kids with families can also watch PG-13 movies, my categorization, I assume, would be acceptable.
If you just type out ‘a family movie’ or ‘family movies’ into your Google search box on your computers, it will immediately return a list of movies it thinks you are looking for.
Among the top family movies, released in the last six years, I found are these, listed in the ascending order: Frozen (2013), Lego Movie (2014), Minions (2015), Moana (2016), Jungle Book (2016), Coco (2017), The Boss Baby (2017), Incredibles 2 (2018), and The Grinch (2018).
In 2019, so far, ‘Dumbo’, ‘How to Train Your Dragon’, ‘Toy Story 4’, and now ‘Aladdin’, have already made waves. And it has not even reached the half-year mark yet.
According to boxofficemojo.com, Aladdin has already made $727 mn, worldwide. And it is not even a month since it released on 24 May 2019. Its production budget was only $183 mn.
‘Frozen’ costed $150 mn to make, but earned a whopping $1.3 bn. ‘Incredibles 2’ was produced at $200 mn, but earned $1.2 bn.
And ‘Minions’ with a production budget of just $74 million earned $1.2 bn worldwide. That’s more than 16 times its cost of production.
Even when we look at PG-13-rated movies made for teens and twenties – especially, the ones with superheroes - the cash registers at cinemas are ringing in loads of dough for the producers.
Last month, in the middle of May 2019, I had stumbled on an interesting piece of news; that ‘Avengers: End Game’ – which had a rousing welcome from movie-goers around the world - has toppled ‘Titanic’ from its second place of the all-time highest grossing movies at the box office.
Now, among the worldwide top-grossing movies of all time, the top five are these: Avatar (2009) made $2.8 bn, Avengers: Endgame (2019), $2.7 bn, Titanic (1997), $2.2 bn, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), $2.1 bn, and Avengers: Infinity War (2018), $2.0 bn.
Quite clearly, the investment into children’s movies, family movies, and teen-adventure or teen fantasy movies will make the producers laugh all the way to their banks.
But, sadly, when you wish to treat your family to good movies, in cinema theatres or on Netflix, the choice is almost always limited.
Of course, a limitation of my research is that we did not consider family movies which may have lost money due to bad craftsmanship.
But one thing is clear. The hypothesis that producers who invest in family movies are likely to earn higher profits, can be said to be true.
I wanted to find out how much money this movie is making; in order to test my hypothesis that the producers who invest in family movies are likely to earn higher profits.
For that, we need a sample of family movies, their budgets and their earnings. If we can collect and analyse this data, we will be able to understand if their producers really earned what they wanted.
But, first, a little bit of literature review.
How do we define ‘a family movie’? Typically, the ‘family’ genre of movies has its stories and themes oriented towards families.
Some people differentiate a children’s film from a family film, by saying that the former targets children alone, while the latter offers value for the whole family (Unshrinking the kids: Children's Cinema and the Family Film, a book by Cary Bazalgette, 1995, British Film Institute).
For the purpose of this essay, however, I wish to take G-rated family film and also PG-13 rated teen films into one single category. Since the under-18 kids with families can also watch PG-13 movies, my categorization, I assume, would be acceptable.
If you just type out ‘a family movie’ or ‘family movies’ into your Google search box on your computers, it will immediately return a list of movies it thinks you are looking for.
Among the top family movies, released in the last six years, I found are these, listed in the ascending order: Frozen (2013), Lego Movie (2014), Minions (2015), Moana (2016), Jungle Book (2016), Coco (2017), The Boss Baby (2017), Incredibles 2 (2018), and The Grinch (2018).
In 2019, so far, ‘Dumbo’, ‘How to Train Your Dragon’, ‘Toy Story 4’, and now ‘Aladdin’, have already made waves. And it has not even reached the half-year mark yet.
According to boxofficemojo.com, Aladdin has already made $727 mn, worldwide. And it is not even a month since it released on 24 May 2019. Its production budget was only $183 mn.
‘Frozen’ costed $150 mn to make, but earned a whopping $1.3 bn. ‘Incredibles 2’ was produced at $200 mn, but earned $1.2 bn.
And ‘Minions’ with a production budget of just $74 million earned $1.2 bn worldwide. That’s more than 16 times its cost of production.
Even when we look at PG-13-rated movies made for teens and twenties – especially, the ones with superheroes - the cash registers at cinemas are ringing in loads of dough for the producers.
Last month, in the middle of May 2019, I had stumbled on an interesting piece of news; that ‘Avengers: End Game’ – which had a rousing welcome from movie-goers around the world - has toppled ‘Titanic’ from its second place of the all-time highest grossing movies at the box office.
Now, among the worldwide top-grossing movies of all time, the top five are these: Avatar (2009) made $2.8 bn, Avengers: Endgame (2019), $2.7 bn, Titanic (1997), $2.2 bn, Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), $2.1 bn, and Avengers: Infinity War (2018), $2.0 bn.
Quite clearly, the investment into children’s movies, family movies, and teen-adventure or teen fantasy movies will make the producers laugh all the way to their banks.
But, sadly, when you wish to treat your family to good movies, in cinema theatres or on Netflix, the choice is almost always limited.
Of course, a limitation of my research is that we did not consider family movies which may have lost money due to bad craftsmanship.
But one thing is clear. The hypothesis that producers who invest in family movies are likely to earn higher profits, can be said to be true.
